Flight records show the rich asshole lied to Comey about not spending the night in Moscow during Miss Universe pageant
some rich asshole poses with Miss Universe contestants in 2013. Image via AFP/Darren Decker.
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Flight records obtained by Bloomberg suggest that President some rich asshole wasn’t entirely truthful when he twice told then-FBI Director James Comey that he never spent the night in Moscow during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
In their analysis, reporters for Bloomberg Politics found that despite the president’s insistence that he never spent a night in Moscow during the time period in which he allegedly paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that Barack Obama once slept on, he does appear to have stayed two nights over the weekend of the pageant.
Per records Bloomberg purchased from data aviation company FlightAware, a plane likely carrying the rich asshole left Asheville, North Carolina (where he’d been attending a birthday celebration for the late Rev. Billy Graham) on November 7, 2013.
The jet, which is owned by the president’s business partner Phil Ruffin, touched down in Moscow’s Vnukovo airport early the morning of Friday, November 8 — and did not take off until 3:58 AM local time on Sunday, November 10. It landed at Newark Liberty International Airport at 4:11 AM New York time on the 10th.
The report’s analysis also includes the rich asshole’s social media posts from the pageant, which indicated that he attended a birthday party on Friday night, stayed at the Ritz Moscow and attended the pageant on Saturday, and went to an after-party for the event whose listed start time was 1 AM Sunday morning.
Sarah Sanders stumbles as April Ryan demands she explain the rich asshole’s ‘breeding concept’ tweet
Sarah Sanders appears in the White House Briefing Room (screen grab)
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced questions Monday about some rich asshole’s reference to “breeding” in a recent tweet.
“There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW!” the rich asshole tweeted last week.
“What did he mean by breeding?” April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks asked during a White House press briefing on Monday.
Sanders said that the rich asshole recognized sanctuary cities as a major problem.
“What does breeding mean to this president?” Ryan pressed. “Because when you think of breeding, you think of animals.”
“I’m not going to begin to think what you think,” Sanders said. “Certainly I think that it could mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But the president is talking about a growing problem."
Sanders said earlier in the briefing that the rich asshole was “talking about the problem itself growing and getting bigger.”
Sarah Sanders doubles down on possible pardon as she’s grilled over Michael Cohen scandal
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Screenshot)
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday refused to rule out a possible pardon for some rich asshole’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen.
During a press briefing, Sanders was asked about an earlier statement in which she said she wasn’t “going to talk about hypotheticals that don’t exist right now” in regards to the issue.
CNN’s Jim Acosta note that she “didn’t close the door one way or another.”
“It’s hard to close the door on something that hasn’t taken place,” Sanders replied. “I don’t like to discuss or comment on hypothetical situations that may or may not ever happen.”
Sanders also remarked on the rich asshole tweets in which he said he he doesn’t think Cohen will “flip” on him. Cohen is under criminal investigation by the FBI.
“The president has been clear that he hasn’t done anything wrong. We’ve said that about a thousand times,” Sanders said. “Beyond that, I don’t have anything to add.”
The end of the rich asshole presidency now looms — here’s why
President some rich asshole (AFP/File / Olivier Douliery)
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The scandals surrounding President some rich asshole are metastasizing rapidly, much more than anyone would have thought just a few months ago.
The investigation by Robert Mueller, now 11 months in duration, has been accumulating evidence of possible Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and the corruption surrounding many members of the rich asshole circle, including his own children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
But then the Stormy Daniels scandal, and other related shameful episodes involving other women became part of the equation, and the business dealings of some rich asshole in New York State were added to the complicated situation. And now, the seizure of materials and records of the rich asshole personal lawyer Michael Cohen raises the ante on the troubles and turmoil surrounding some rich asshole. At the same time, the rich asshole is without stable advice from his cabinet or others, due to the chaotic nature of a constantly changing set of advisers, and his tendency to “shoot from the hip” not only in tweets, but in constantly evolving views on domestic and foreign policy challenges.
With the midterm congressional elections now less than seven months away, and with the Republicans running scared about potential massive losses, and with more criticism emerging from not only respectable conservatives, but also from some of his own loyalists, some rich asshole’s time in the Presidency seems rapidly coming toward a sudden end.
While Republican members of Congress look unlikely to abandon him before the midterm elections, it could still happen if some rich asshole fires Robert Muller, Rod Rosenstein, Jeff Sessions, and others, a constant threat. New indictments by Mueller, and the possibility of such action by the New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman could be in the offing very soon. And if the rich asshole family members were to be indicted, it could put the rich asshole under such pressure that possible resignation, through some form of arranged “deal,” is not beyond imagination. If the Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in November, impeachment action seems highly likely in 2019, although conviction in the US Senate would be nearly impossible.
However, there is a scheduled meeting of right-wing Evangelical leaders with President the rich asshole on June 19, to consider strategy for the midterm elections, as this group is alarmed at the thought that the rich asshole scandals could cost them the advancement of their religious agenda. It could be, two months from now, that gloom and doom will set in, and cause these pastors and ministers and their allies to consider the rich asshole’s resignation as preferable, as it would bring a “true believer,” Vice President Mike Pence, to the Presidency.
One would think behind the scenes that many congressional Republicans and conservatives would clearly prefer Pence, who is religiously devout, and does not have the drama and controversy that some rich asshole constantly presents. With Pence, the right-wing would not lose, but instead gain a great deal of comfort. This makes it conceivable that we’ll see a repeat of history. When Richard Nixon proved toxic in July 1974 a delegation of congressional Republicans marched to the White House to let him know his base of support on Capitol Hill had collapsed.
No matter what the future scenario, America is in a constitutional crisis of greater proportions than Watergate, and with the attendant danger of a Great Recession or a third World War, caused by a mentally unstable and highly stressed President. So while it now seems likely that the rich asshole will outlast the 492 days of President Zachary Taylor, to be reached on May 27, 2018, once thought by this scholar to be the end point of the rich asshole Presidency, it seems evident that the rich asshole will leave office before the 4th shortest Presidency, that of Warren G. Harding from 1921-1923, a total of 881 days. This would be Thursday, June 20, 2019.
So with 15 months down in the rich asshole Presidency, the chance of his leaving in the next 14 months at the most is on the horizon.
This article was originally published at History News Network
Mike Flynn Jr insists his ‘patriot’ dad did not lie to Mike Pence about talking to Russians
Michael Flynn Jr., left, with his father Michael Flynn (Screen cap).
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Mike Flynn Jr. defended his father, President some rich asshole’s disgraced first national security adviser, in a pair of tweets.
The younger Flynn denied that his father lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period overseen by the rich asshole’s running mate
“American Patriot @GenFlynn did not lie to Pence (or anyone else in the admin) about his perfectly legal and appropriate conversations w Russian AMB Kislyak in Dec 2016,” Flynn tweeted. “Why would a highly decorated military intel officer lie about something legal? Been a MSM lie from day 1.”
American Patriot @GenFlynn did not lie to Pence (or anyone else in the admin) about his perfectly legal and appropriate conversations w Russian AMB Kislyak in Dec 2016.
Why would a highly decorated military intel officer lie about something legal?
Been a MSM lie from day 1
MFLYNNJR
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Dec. 1 to one count of making false statements to the FBI regarding his contacts with Kislyak and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel probe into the rich asshole campaign ties to Russia.
Pence said Dec. 22 that he knew Flynn had lied to him at the time of his February 2017 firing when he denied discussing U.S. sanctions with Kislyak before the rich asshole took office.
The vice president told CBS News on Jan. 15, 2017, that he discussed Flynn’s contact with the ambassador, which Pence described at the time as brief text exchange Christmas Day 2016 to offer condolences over a fatal plane crash in Russia.
“It was strictly coincidental that they had a conversation,” Pence said. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”
The White House said Flynn was fired for misleading the vice president, and it’s not clear when the rich asshole administration officials learned the former national security adviser had lied to FBI agents during a Jan. 24, 2017, interview.
The younger Flynn, who served as a his father’s chief of staff during the transition period, denied that his father agreed to plead guilty to protect him.
“Here’s another MSM lie,” Flynn tweeted. “There was never anything my father had 2 protect me from bcause I was nvr involved in or did anything illegal. Any1 who knows me, knows I operate w incredble integrity.”
“This narrative that @GenFlynn had 2 ‘plea 2 protect his son’ has been false from day 1,” he added.
Pressure grows on the rich asshole to keep Iran nuclear deal alive
President of the United States some rich asshole speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Western allies stepped up pressure on U.S. President some rich asshole on Monday to keep alive an international nuclear deal with Iran, with French President Emmanuel Macron due to urge him in person not to tear up the 2015 agreement.
the rich asshole has said that unless European allies fix what he has called its “terrible flaws” by May 12, he will restore U.S. economic sanctions on Tehran, which would be a severe blow to the pact
Macron, arriving in Washington for a state visit later on Monday, said on Sunday there was no “Plan B” for keeping a lid on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The agreement between Iran, the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany was born of longstanding concern among major powers that Iran was seeking to develop an atomic weapon and imposed curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief for Tehran. Critics of the pact, including the rich asshole, have said it does not adequately contain Iran.
the rich asshole sees three defects: a failure to address Iran’s ballistic missile program; the terms under which international inspectors can visit suspect Iranian nuclear sites; and “sunset” clauses under which limits on the Iranian nuclear program start to expire after 10 years.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said both Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is due to meet the rich asshole in Washington on Friday, would urge the U.S. president to stay in the deal.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said both Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is due to meet the rich asshole in Washington on Friday, would urge the U.S. president to stay in the deal.
“We believe it is extremely important to uphold this agreement. Were it to fail or the U.S. to drop out, we would not have anything comparable to it and we fear that the situation would significantly deteriorate with everything that goes with it,” Maas told reporters
He was speaking at a meeting in Toronto of foreign ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations.
Britain’s foreign minister, Boris Johnson, echoed this. Also speaking to reporters in Toronto, he told reporters, “There is a strong view around the (G7) table that we need to make the case for the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.)”
“We accept that Iranian behavior has been disruptive in the region, we accept the president (the rich asshole) has some valid points that need to be addressed but we believe they are capable of being addressed (inside the deal),” Johnson said.
‘ENCOURAGE’ RICH ASSHOLE TO STAY
Iran has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other parties respect it, but will “shred” the deal if Washington pulls out. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on European leaders on Monday to support it.
Iran has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other parties respect it, but will “shred” the deal if Washington pulls out. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called on European leaders on Monday to support it.
“It is either all or nothing. European leaders should encourage the rich asshole not just to stay in the nuclear deal, but more important to begin implementing his part of the bargain in good faith,” Zarif wrote on his Twitter account.
At a nuclear non-proliferation conference in Geneva on Monday there were repeated calls for parties to the deal to ensure its implementation and preservation.
U.N. High representative for Disarmament Affairs Izumi Nakamitsu said it “continues to be the best way to ensure the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program and to realize the promised tangible economic benefits for the Iranian people.”
On a visit to Beijing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he had agreed with his Chinese counterpart to block any U.S. attempt to sabotage the deal.
the rich asshole’s threat to restore U.S economic sanctions on oil-producing Iran have been one factor helping drive up global oil prices this month to their highest since late 2014.
Reporting by Steve Holland and David Ljunggren in Toronto; Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Washington, Tom Miles in Geneva, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, Michel Rose and Richard Lough in Paris, Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, Sabine Siebold and; Writing by Frances Kerry; Editing by Alistair Bell
Reporting by Steve Holland and David Ljunggren in Toronto; Additional reporting by Yara Bayoumy in Washington, Tom Miles in Geneva, Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, Michel Rose and Richard Lough in Paris, Parisa Hafezi in Ankara, Sabine Siebold and; Writing by Frances Kerry; Editing by Alistair Bell
‘Act innocent’: Karl Rove destroys White House claim Mueller has exceeded scope of Russia investigation
Karl Rove speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
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Former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove on Monday disputed a White House assertion that special counsel Robert Mueller has exceeded the original scope of the investigation into possible the rich asshole campaign collusion with Russia.
During a Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, White House adviser Marc Short insisted that Mueller should quickly end his probe of the rich asshole campaign because “the scope has gone well beyond what was intended to be investigations into meddling in the election.”
Rove, who was subject of Bush-era investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer’s name, on Monday told Fox News host Sandra Smith that President some rich asshole and White House staffers were making a mistake by venting about the investigation.
“The investigation is going to go as long as the investigation is going to go,” he explained. “And so, working the refs, saying, ‘You ought to wrap it up,’ doesn’t strike me as a particularly productive strategy. Robert Mueller is not going to wrap this thing up prematurely. He’s going to wrap it up when he thinks he’s ready to wrap it up.”
Smith asked Rove if he agreed with Short’s assessment that the investigated had “exceeded” its original scope.
“You know what? I don’t,” Rove replied. “Because we don’t know. There is a scope that is contained in the original document authorizing Mueller’s investigation. Mueller has gone back to the deputy attorney general in order to — when he has stumbled across evidence of some wrongdoing — the allegation is that [former the rich asshole campaign chair] Paul Manafort and [campaign staffer] Rick Gates were trying to bring $30 million in their consulting on behalf pro-Putin and pro-Russian oligarchs back to the United States without paying tax on it. So he had to go back to the deputy attorney general and said, we have evidence of this and we need authority to pursue it.
In the case of allegations against the rich asshole lawyer Michael Cohen, Rove noted, Mueller turned the prosecution over to federal investigators instead of expanding the special counsel investigation.
“Mueller is by the book, he is a Boy Scout,” he continued. “He doesn’t leak, they stay focused on the mission.”
Rove, however, predicted that Mueller would find that — with the exception of Manafort and Gates — the rich asshole campaign did not collude with Russia.
“Imagine that,” Smith reacted. “If they actually let the investigation run its course and at the conclusion of it, Mueller says absolutely no collusion. Imagine the world having to deal with that fact.”
Rove recalled a point recently made by retiring Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC): “If you’re client is innocent, act innocent.”
“I don’t think it helps the president when his people go on the Sunday morning talks and say, ‘Oh God, you’ve got to wrap this thing up.’ You know, blah blah blah blah blah. Show confidence,” Rove said. “I find it very hard to believe that after all this time if there was evidence, we wouldn’t have heard about it. So, give the confidence the American people like to see in their chief executive.”
Fox legal analyst has bad news for the rich asshole: Comey’s memos probably didn’t break the law — but do ‘indict’ the president
Andrew Napolitano (Fox News)
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Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano said President some rich asshole was wrong about James Comey’s memos — which he said provided potentially damning evidence against the president.
Napolitano disagreed Monday morning that the former FBI director’s personal memos were classified, as the rich asshole claims, and were not illegally leaked to a law professor friend who then shared the documents with reporters.
“It’s going to depend upon which four of the seven memos were leaked to the professor, whether anything in there was classified at the time, whether it was properly classified and whether the professor exposed classified materials,” Napolitano said.
Napolitano said Comey’s friend, Daniel Richman, had served in the Department of Justice, although in fact he was a consultant to the Cabinet agency and a former chief appellate attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
“I don’t think the professor did this,” Napolitano said. “This law school professor is a former ranking official of the DOJ who once had a security clearance and knows what it is like to deal with these things.”
He said several questions about the memos needed to be answered before determining whether any laws were broken when Comey shared his notes.
“When Jim Comey handed over the four memos had anything been classified or was it retroactive?” Napolitano said. “Question two, was the classification, if retroactive, a proper classification or was it classified for some other purpose? Question three, was anybody harmed by Jim Comey passing those memos on to the professor? That’s what the government is interested in.”
The former New Jersey Superior Court judge said he does not believe anything Comey shared was classified at the time, but he said the memos present bad news for the president.
“I don’t think there was anything in there that was classified, I really don’t,” Napolitano said. “I think those were his own recollections, maybe self-serving, maybe truthful.”
Napolitano said the memos appeared to confirm troubling accounts by Comey about the president’s behavior, which could be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller.
“I think it’s an indictment — lower-case I, not an indictment from a grand jury — it’s an indictment of the president if those are accurate,” Napolitano said. “The memos are what Jim Comey told whatever committee he testified before — I don’t remember which one, it was shortly after he was fired — that the president attempted to interfere in the investigation of Mike Flynn. That doesn’t mean the president did. it means in Jim Comey’s view there is evidence of it. So the memos back up the testimony that he gave.”
the rich asshole’s con of voters will implode like his casinos — but now there are ‘global consequences’: biographer
President some rich asshole arrives at the Memorial Amphitheater during the 149th annual Department of Defense (DoD) National Memorial Day Observance. (DoD Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. James K. McCann)
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the rich asshole biographer Timothy O’Brien has written a new column forBloomberg outlining how President some rich asshole’s time in the Oval Office is playing out much like his business career — but he warns that shouldn’t be seen as a positive.
O’Brien notes that the rich asshole has succeeded in his life largely by using hyperbole and flat-out fabrications to fool others into seeing him as more wealthy and powerful than he really is. However, O’Brien warns that this sort of con eventually catches up with him, as it did when he bankrupted some of his own casinos
“the rich asshole’s love of the con — borrowing billions he couldn’t repay so he could invest in splashy properties and projects he didn’t understand — drew national attention and blanket media coverage just before the game unraveled in serial bankruptcies in the early 1990s,” he writes. “After that debacle, the rich asshole refashioned himself as a ubiquitous media curiosity, one who held center stage in part by being the one famous guy who could reliably be called upon to chat about sex, women and even his own genitals.”
The trouble, however, is that the rich asshole is no longer merely in charge of hotels and casinos — rather, he’s in charge of the most powerful military on the planet. This, fears O’Brien, could make the unraveling of his con of American voters far more dangerous than anything that’s happened in the past.
“That con now has global consequences,” he writes. “the rich asshole doesn’t fulminate about North Korea or building a wall on the Mexican border because he’s a policy maven with deeply held principles. It’s because he knows that toying around with sensitive and sometimes dangerous subjects gets the media’s attention and keeps certain blocs of voters interested in him.”
Stunning shutdown of Texas schools investigation reveals the rich asshole administration’s pullback on civil rights
After an incident at Arthur L. Davila Middle School last October, Trah’Vaeziah Jackson, 13, was arrested and sent to juvenile detention for three days. (Ilana Panich-Linsman for ProPublica)
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Beside a highway in Bryan, Texas, tucked between a motorcycle bar and the county jail, stands a low-slung, sprawling complex with tinted windows, sandstone walls and barbed wire lining parts of its roof. A roadside sign identifies it as the Brazos County Juvenile Justice Center.
One Friday afternoon last October, after an incident at nearby Arthur L. Davila Middle School, a police officer arrested 13-year-old Trah’Vaeziah Jackson and brought her to the juvenile detention facility. She cried as employees patted her down, cut off her hair extensions, and took her photo and fingerprints. She was served dinner — chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes and an apple in a styrofoam box with a carton of milk — but had no appetite.
In the shower room, guards applied thick anti-lice shampoo to Trah’Vaeziah’s hair. As she washed and combed it, clumps fell out. Afterwards, she reluctantly changed from her school clothes, a T-shirt and jeans, into the detention uniform, an orange shirt with matching shorts. Then she was locked in her cell, which contained a sink, a toilet, and, instead of a bed, a stuffed blue mat atop a brick base. High on the wall was a sliver of a window, but she wasn’t tall enough to see outside.
Only after 8 p.m. was she permitted a phone call. She called her mother and sobbed into the receiver. How could this accident have turned into a jail sentence?
Three decades ago, schools across the country began bolstering discipline to deter juvenile crime. Zero-tolerance policies were introduced, school law enforcement budgets swelled and suspensions, expulsions and student arrests multiplied.
These punishments, though, are applied unequally. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of students of color, like Trah’Vaeziah, bear the brunt. Black students are almost four times as likely to receive an out-of-school suspension and twice as likely to be arrested as their white peers, according to federal data. The pattern starts early: Even black preschool students are more than three times as likely as their white peers to be suspended from school
Harsh discipline can backfire, especially when meted out arbitrarily. It may reinforce bad behavior, or encourage students to drop out, creating what sociologists call the “school-to-prison-pipeline.” A suspension increases the likelihood of dropping out by 77 percent, and the incarceration rate of high school dropouts is 63 times higher than that of college graduates, studies show.
“There’s no doubt that as we’ve escalated security and punishment strategies within schools over the past 25 years that this has had a disparate impact on youth of color,” said Aaron Kupchik, a sociology and criminal justice professor at the University of Delaware. “They are more likely to be seen as problematic, and to be policed and disciplined in schools even when they show similar behaviors as white students.”
Flooded with about 1,500 complaints related to racial discrimination in school discipline between 2011 and 2017, the Obama administration made the issue a priority. Relying on the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which emerged in the 1970s and holds that differential treatment by race amounts to discrimination whether or not there is overt or intentional bias, the Department of Education opened sweeping investigations into disciplinary disparities, from large school districts such as Minneapolis and Oakland to smaller ones like Bryan, Texas, where Trah’Vaeziah goes to school. It pushed investigators in its regional offices to broaden probes of individual incidents to look for systemic discrimination.
But under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the rich asshole administration is taking a more hands-off approach. DeVos has indicated that she may soon reverse Obama-era guidelines on disparate impact and school discipline, and her hires have signaled this policy shift. Kenneth Marcus, tapped to lead the civil rights office, has argued that disparate impact analysis has significant legal limitations. And Hans Bader, an attorney advisor at the department, has accused the Obama administration of using disparate impact to create “racial quotas.” DeVos is also decentralizing decision-making, giving regional offices more control over investigations.
Quietly, the pullback is already happening. In a June 2017 internal memo leaked to ProPublica, one of DeVos’ top officials ordered investigators to limit proactive civil rights probes rather than expanding them to identify systemic patterns, as the Obama administration had often done in school discipline cases.
Since then, the Education Department has closed at least 65 school discipline investigations opened under Obama, including the Bryan probe, without any mandated reforms, according to an analysis of federal data received by ProPublica through a records request. In at least 50 cases, the department attributed the shutdowns to “moot” allegations or insufficient evidence or details. That was its explanation for letting Bryan off the hook, even though federal investigators there had uncovered numerous examples of black students being punished more harshly than whites for the same offenses.
While the Education Department didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions about the Bryan case and disparities in school discipline, it has said that the goal of narrowing civil rights investigations is to speed them up.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Hill said last month. “OCR seeks to investigate and resolve complaints in a more timely and efficient manner so that OCR enforcement of civil rights laws remains meaningful and relevant to students, advocates, and schools.”
Christie Whitbeck, Bryan’s superintendent of schools, said that the district “fully complied” with the civil rights investigation, which was “closed with no findings of discrimination on the district’s part.”
She said that the district plans to address the racial gap in school discipline in the next school year, and is hiring additional support staff. “As with school districts across the country, we face various challenges regarding student discipline,” Whitbeck said. “Going forward, we will continue to proactively monitor our discipline data, implement positive discipline interventions and character education programs.”
In the mid-19th century, the town of Bryan emerged from a railroad stop serving a community of small farms and a few cotton plantations in the fertile Brazos Valley, 100 miles northwest of Houston. Its agricultural economy originally depended on slavery, and racial segregation and discrimination have characterized the town’s history.
After the Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate in 1954, integration in Bryan floundered, prompting a black parent to file a federal lawsuit. Despite initial objections from Bryan’s school board, a court sided with the family in 1963, and ordered Bryan to desegregate one grade per year. In 1965, however, the Department of Justice reviewedBryan’s fledgling integration plan and found that it did not meet national standards.
The DOJ ordered the district to immediately implement a “freedom of choice” plan, allowing all students —regardless of grade and race — to go to whichever school they wanted. By 1970, hundreds of black students had opted into schools where most students were white, but few white students had chosen to attend schools where most students were black. It wasn’t until the following year, when a new high school opened, that integration truly occurred.
Almost half a century later, discrimination in Bryan takes a different form. Black students are almost four times as likely to be suspended or referred to a disciplinary school as their white peers, according to district data. And black students were also four times more likely to receive tickets in school for minor offenses, such as disrupting class or profanity, according to an analysis of data from 2011. Between 2011 and 2014, black students, who account for about 20 percent of total enrollment, accounted for more than 60 percent of arrests in school.
“For the kids who are being ticketed, arrested, suspended or expelled — who are predominantly black — it tells them that they don’t belong in our public schools, which is a travesty,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of Texas Appleseed, a social justice advocacy group that spent years examining disciplinary data in Bryan and statewide. “For the students that remain in the classroom and see their peers treated this way, they internalize unhealthy and harmful messages about what that means. That’s the way that implicit bias is formed and gets reinforced.”
Over-represented in punishments, Bryan’s students of color are under-represented in pathways to academic honors and higher education. As of the 2015-2016 school year, black students represented fewer than 10 percent of students in the gifted and talented program, whereas their white peers, who comprised less than a quarter of the district’s total enrollment, accounted for almost 50 percent of students in the gifted program. Only 9 percent of the students taking eighth-grade algebra were black, while 41 percent were white, according to district data obtained by Texas Appleseed.
In 2010, an African-American newcomer to Bryan challenged the disciplinary divide. Marjorie Holmon, who had just moved her family to Texas from Maryland a few weeks before, was dumbfounded when her 12-year-old son, De’Angelo, came home from school with a misdemeanor ticket.
Holmon had encouraged De’Angelo, who was being bullied by a classmate, to tell his teacher about it. But when he did, the teacher rebuked him, saying, “Here in middle school, we don’t tattle,” according to Holmon.
Without the teacher’s support, De’Angelo defended himself when his classmate struck him. Under the school’s zero-tolerance approach, both boys received Class C misdemeanor tickets from the school’s police officer. To resolve the ticket, De’Angelo would have to appear in adult criminal court, which could result in fines of up to $500, community service hours and behavior-management courses.
When Holmon arrived at the courthouse and looked around, she recalled, “It was only black and Hispanic students. You only saw one or two Caucasian students. That shined a light for me.”
Holmon reached out to Texas Appleseed and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which helped her file a complaint with the Department of Education in February 2013.
“This thing was bigger than De’Angelo, and we were going to fight for every kid,” Holmon said.
In 2014, 19 months after Holmon’s complaint, another black family — also destined to confront the school district’s uneven justice — showed up in Bryan. With her four children, including Trah’Vaeziah, Yvola Polk moved from Midland, 400 miles away, into a trailer down the street from her sister, who had breast cancer.
“Going through the radiation and chemo, I knew she was going to need me here,” Polk said in a February interview in the kitchen of her trailer, which was illuminated by a dim winter light that filtered through a small window. Two inspirational plaques adorned the otherwise bare walls. She had learned to remove all the light bulbs in her home during the day; otherwise, her 18-year-old son James, who has autism and epilepsy, would attempt to pull them out of their sockets.
For Polk, taking care of James is a full-time job. She administers his medications three times a day and has to watch him constantly. “He just likes to throw stuff, mess with stuff and his hands — he has octopus hands,” said Polk, who blockades her fridge with duct tape or a table to deter James from eating the family’s sandwich meats and cheese.
Trah’Vaeziah required a different kind of support. As a sixth-grader at Davila Middle School, a sandstone building that resembles the detention center five miles away, Trah’Vaeziah was repeatedly victimized, she and her mother said.
After each incident, Polk visited the school, leaving James with another adult. Every time, administrators assured her that the bullying would stop, but they didn’t follow through, she said. Finally, she gave them a tongue lashing, threatening to sit outside the school every day if there was no other way to assure her daughter’s safety.
Later that day, school police officer Bryan Ruebush showed up at her house. Even though he hadn’t been present at her outburst, he wrote her a warning citation for trespassing on school property. According to Kelley McKethan, a spokeswoman for the Bryan Police Department, the school requested that Polk receive a warning for a “veiled threat she made against other students to school staff.”
The bullying subsided as Trah’Vaeziah reached seventh grade, in which she took a course called “Texas Success.” Her class competed with other classes to see which one could do the best job painting popsicle sticks and decorating its hallway door with them. Trah’Vaeziah and other students covered their sticks with glue from a hot-glue gun plugged into a classroom wall, she said.
With the teacher in the classroom, out of sight of the students in the hallway, horseplay ensued. As one of Trah’Vaeziah’s classmates headed to the bathroom, she recalled, she playfully gestured that she might touch him with the gluey stick. He dodged her. But on his way back, she again jokingly waved the stick toward him and accidentally grazed his arm, leaving him with a two-inch burn, she said. She immediately apologized — she had only meant to tease him. The school nurse bandaged his arm.
According to a school disciplinary report, Trah’Vaeziah “took a hot glue gun and burned another student severely on the arm with it.” But Polk, who has watched the hallway surveillance video, said it only showed Trah’Vaeziah with a popsicle stick. It also showed that the teacher, a 2012 college graduate with four-and-a-half years of teaching experience, wasn’t supervising the children, Polk said. “If the teacher would have been watching her, this would’ve never happened in the first place.” The district did not respond to ProPublica’s request to view the surveillance video, and would not respond to questions on the incident, citing confidentiality of personnel matters and discipline of individual students.
The family of the boy declined to press charges against Trah’Vaeziah, according to one of the boy’s relatives, who requested not to be named. Contradicting the school’s report, the relative agreed with Polk that Trah’Vaeziah had touched the boy’s skin with a popsicle stick, not a glue gun. She added that the youth, who is a student of color, was himself unfairly pegged at the school as a troublemaker.
Trah’Vaeziah had rarely been in trouble at school, though the day before she had been isolated in a separate room from her classmates as an in-school suspension for mouthing off to a teacher in the cafeteria during breakfast. Now she was summoned to the assistant principal’s office, where she was met by Ruebush, the same school police officer who had cited her mother. Glancing anxiously at the clock, she wondered aloud whether she would miss the school bus home.
“You’re not going home,” she said Ruebush told her. “You’re going to juvy.”
The stark disparities revealed in Holmon’s complaint attracted national media attention. Under pressure from local advocates, Texas passed legislation in late 2013 that weakened school police officers’ ability to ticket students.
While the new law reduced ticketing, the Bryan district compensated by stepping up other forms of discipline. As of 2016, in-school suspensions were up nearly 22 percent from 2013, amounting to two punishments for every five students in the district, according to district data. And referrals to the district’s alternative school for misbehaving students were on the rise as well.
“It’s not as though the discrimination disappears once the practice of ticketing is ultimately eliminated,” said Fowler of Texas Appleseed. “There’s something systemic happening that needs to be addressed regardless of whether or not students are still being ticketed.”
Following the ticketing reform, in March 2014, the federal Education Department sought more information from the district on all forms of school discipline. The decision to conduct a broad investigation came from headquarters, where the Bryan case was a top priority. Local advocates were concerned, however, that the regional civil rights office wasn’t as enthused about widening the scope of the probe.
“Bryan is one of the cases where the headquarters and the region had different visions about what the case was supposed to be,” said Seth Galanter, a former senior official in the Education Department’s civil rights office under Obama. He currently works for the National Center for Youth Law, which joined in the federal complaint against the Bryan School District.
Over the course of the investigation, federal investigators dug up at least 10 incidents where black students received harsher punishment than their white peers for similar conduct, according to documents obtained by ProPublica through a records request. For example, during the 2012-2013 school year, a black student at Davila, the school Trah’Vaeziah would later attend, received one day of in-school suspension for “failure to follow directives.” Earlier that year, a white student received just one hour of detention for the same offense.
For teachers, cooperating with the federal probe may have carried a risk. One African-American teacher, Evelyn Wallace, filed a complaint with the Education Department in 2015, alleging that the district decided not to renew her contract because she had given information to investigators the previous year. She told them that the district had a history of passing over her and other black teachers for promotions. She also provided names of black students whom she felt had been wrongly punished, and the dates of the incidents. The investigation into her retaliation complaint is ongoing.
“Most of the black students weren’t treated fairly,” said Wallace, who now is an adjunct English teacher at a community college in Houston. “There were some incidents with Caucasian students who were on the hook but walked away scot free,” whereas, “African-American students were sent to the juvenile detention.”
The wider mandate had one drawback; it extended the probe’s timeline. Even though federal investigations are supposed to close within the department’s stated goal of 180 days, the Bryan case lingered for years. In the meantime, Holmon and her family left Bryan. De’Angelo graduated from high school. And some rich asshole was elected president.
Perhaps recognizing that time was running short, federal investigators tried to negotiate a settlement with the school district. A February 2017 working draft of the proposed settlement, obtained by ProPublica through a records request, shows that the district would have agreed to take more than a dozen actions to reform its disciplinary system, including reviewing and revising its disciplinary policies, creating additional support services for punished students like mentoring, designating campus behavior coordinators, and educating parents on how to file complaints related to discipline and conducting annual school reviews.
If those reforms had been adopted, Trah’Vaeziah likely would not have been exiled to the detention center later that year. But the federal government and the district were unable to finalize the agreement.
Within months after the rich asshole came into office, the tide changed. In June 2017, Candice Jackson, an attorney whom DeVos had named as interim assistant secretary for civil rights, drafted an internal memo that sharply reversed the Obama administration’s course. Federal investigators were no longer encouraged to look at complaints through a systemic lens.
Jackson, who had little experience in civil rights law and is best known for ushering Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct accusers into the audience of the second presidential debate in October 2016, also gave regional offices greater autonomy. Under the Obama administration, regional bureaus often needed clearance from Washington to settle or close a case, especially those relating to school discipline. Jackson allowed regional offices to determine how to settle cases.
Some regional offices have been able to resolve disparate impact cases in favor of student complainants. This past February, a complaint filed in 2013 alleging discriminatory school discipline practices in Durham, North Carolina, was settled, requiring the district to develop a new disciplinary approach, hire a discipline supervisor and bolster data collection.
The Texas office took a different tack. Following the Jackson memo, it backpedaled on the Bryan investigation. Page Baird, a senior equal opportunity specialist in the Texas office, wrote to the Bryan complainants in late July 2017, informing them that the investigation no longer encompassed all forms of school discipline.
“OCR has revised the scope of its investigation of this complaint,” she wrote, adding that the probe would now be limited to police ticketing in Bryan’s schools.
Since ticketing in Bryan had subsided, the decision to disregard other forms of discipline was tantamount to ending the investigation. Taylor D. August, the director of Texas’s regional civil rights office, and chief civil rights attorney Angela Hights made it official in September 2017, notifying the complainants that there was “insufficient evidence to support a conclusion of noncompliance.”
As Ruebush and Trah’Vaeziah left the middle school and headed to the detention facility on that Friday afternoon last October, she asked if she could call her mother, who would be worried when she didn’t come home on a bus. He said no, and told her to turn off her cellphone and put it, along with her identification card and pencils, in a brown bag. Instead, the assistant principal called Polk and informed her that her daughter had been arrested and transferred to the detention center.
Kelley McKethan, a spokeswoman for the Bryan Police Department, said she could not discuss the case because it involved a juvenile. Generally, assaults in which someone “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” causes an injury are handled by police “and the school has no say in whether a student is arrested or not,” she said. “Remember there are multiple sides to a story as well as evidence that is taken into consideration.”
McKethan added that “our agency and our officers are held to an extremely high standard. Any indication of racial bias is handled immediately and is not tolerated at any level.”
The next day, Polk made her way to the detention facility. She sat before a thick slab of glass in the visiting room, which was cramped and smelled of disinfectant. When her daughter appeared on the other side, she noticed that Trah’Vaeziah’s gregarious buoyancy had deflated, her eyes were inflamed from hours of crying and her thick, foot-long braids were gone. The detention center did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.
Polk tried to comfort her. “I’m going to try to do everything I can to get you out,” she told her daughter through a small speaker embedded inside the glass pane.
The center is supposed to hold hearings within 48 hours. But because the center’s courtroom is closed on weekends, Trah’Vaeziah’s hearing took place on Monday, three days after her arrest. The proceedings went swiftly. Judge Misty Swan, who was presiding over the juvenile court that morning, released Trah’Vaeziah from the detention facility on condition that she do 20 hours of community service and write an apology letter. She also stipulated that Trah’Vaeziah would have to keep a clean record until the next court date and couldn’t access social media, cellphones or cash. Any violation of the agreement would result in further detention.
“They want to give this harsh punishment for something that we could’ve easily resolved at the schoolhouse,” said Polk. “They’re taking it too far for a kid.”
Trah’Vaeziah faced further consequences. Days after her release, at a due process hearing at the school, she was sentenced to five weeks in the district’s disciplinary alternative school. When her mother appealed, the stint was reduced to about two weeks.
The disciplinary school epitomizes the district’s racial disparities. About 44 percent of students referred to the school are black, more than twice the district-wide proportion, according to 2016-17 district data.
For Trah’Vaeziah, the disciplinary school felt as institutional as the juvenile detention facility, except that she was able to start and end her days at home. Each morning, she put on the alternative school’s uniform: a cotton polo shirt tucked into khaki pants with an elastic waist.
As research has shown, juvenile arrests can increase student misconduct, perpetuating a disciplinary cycle as children begin to internalize a “criminal” label. Trah’Vaeziah was no exception. In January 2018, after a classmate pulled Trah’Vaeziah’s hair, provoking a scuffle, she was sent back to the disciplinary school, which she currently attends. The school emphasizes computer-based instruction, so Trah’Vaeziah and the other students receive minimal personal instruction from teachers. They mainly watch video lectures and complete lessons online.
Since entering the disciplinary school, Trah’Vaeziah’s grades have suffered. An official from the school informed Polk that if her daughter’s grades do not improve, she may have to repeat seventh grade. For black students in Texas, repeating a grade multiplies the chance of dropping out of school nearly six-fold, according to a recent study.
In late March, Polk filed complaints with the school district and with the civil rights office in Dallas. Soon afterwards, a truancy officer served Polk with a court summons. The officer informed her she was being cited for keeping her daughter out of school during the appeal of Trah’Vaeziah’s first disciplinary school referral —almost six months earlier.
Polk is fed up. “My child might grow up to be a doctor and save one of your kid’s lives, but the school system don’t see it like that,” she said. “It’s just a pattern, like, this one is in trouble, and this one going to be in trouble, and this one is going to be just like this one.”
‘You don’t impress us much’: Shania Twain mocked online after trying to take back the rich asshole endorsement
Shania Twain, a the rich asshole supporter/Screenshot
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Singer Shania Twain over the weekend said that she likely would have backed some rich asshole’s presidential campaign had she been eligible to vote in 2016 — a statement that she quickly regretted after sparking a backlash from her own fans.
The Canadian Twain originally told the Guardian that the rich asshole “seemed honest” compared to rival candidate Hillary Clinton, even though she admitted that he was “offensive.”
However, on Sunday evening Twain took to Twitter to take back her the rich asshole endorsement and apologized to fans whom she may have offended.
“I would like to apologise to anybody I have offended in a recent interview with the Guardian relating to the American President,” she wrote. “The question caught me off guard. As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context. “I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President.”
However, many of Twain’s followers weren’t buying her retraction — and many of them even quoted lyrics from her own songs to mock her.
Check out some of the best reactions below
Boy when you dig a hole for yourself you REALLY dig a hole for yourself.
You don’t impress us much !
.
Not "Feeling like a woman" now Shania? Was planning on going to see her in Texas, sorry not feeling it now.
Too late, Shania. I love you, but you go stand over there with Ted Nugent and Kid Rock.
It’s too late. You said he seemed honest —- wow, he is a racist, misogynistic bully. There— that’s the truth!!!!!
It is those with limited understanding who voted for Trump. #Metoo movement clearly doesn’t matter to you. Trump is a serial predator and liar. What kind of woman supports that?
First off, you used the word "honest" to describe him. As has been proven over and over, he's not honest but a habitual liar. Secondly, the only people who can relate to him are bullies. He is out of touch with the rest of America but the bigoted bullies love him.
Trump was relatable to a "portion" of Americans, yet he shares "no common values" with you.
What "portion" of Americans do you believe he was relating to? And you say you don't like bullshit...
He was talking to —and continues to talk to— the portion of America that's populated by racist, frightened, ignorant a$$hole$.
If you can relate to crass unintelligible remarks, racism, misogyny, isolationism, and gas lighting then @realDonaldTrump is your guy. I appreciate you for making an apologetic statement because you’re an iconic person. However your apology and reasoning misses all the notes.
Sanders refuses to knock down Michael Cohen pardon: ‘We aren’t going to talk about hypotheticals that don’t exist’
Sarah Sanders appears on Fox News (screen grab)
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders on Monday declined to say President some rich asshole will not pardon his attorney, Michael Cohen, who is reportedly being investigated by federal prosecutors in New York.
During a Monday morning press gaggle, Sanders was asked about a potential pardon for Cohen, who has been called president’s “fixer” for authoring non-disclosure agreements with women who allegedly had affairs with the rich asshole.
“I don’t think that we are going to talk about hypotheticals that don’t exist right now,” Sanders said, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
Sanders also downplayed reports that Cohen could “flip” on the rich asshole.
“I don’t think the president has anything to hide. He’s been quite clear on that,” Sanders said.
"I don't think the president has anything to hide. He's been quite clear on that," replies @PressSec to question about @realDonaldTrump tweet suggesting @MichaelCohen212 could flip.
Sanders has scheduled an on-camera briefing at the White House for 2 p.m. ET on Monday.
MSNBC panel mocks ‘welfare queen’ Sean Hannity for using Obama’s housing aid programs to build real estate empire
MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle
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Fox News Sean Hannity was outed Sunday for having vast real estate holdings, including properties that take government money for HUD approved housing. It was those $90 million in holdings that were outed by the investigation into Michael Cohen.
According to the report broken by The Guardian, Hannity has several shell companies set up to navigate 470 different homes in 7 states
“First, I want to apologize to Sean,” New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens began. “I once called him Fox News’s dumbest anchor. He’s clearly the shrewdest real estate developer. I think it’s funny Sean Hannity turns out to be a welfare queen for HUD, having taken advantage of guarantees that were put forward by none other than the [Barack] Obama administration.”
Stephens noted that Hannity has said over and over he isn’t a journalist, though his determination seems to shift back and forth depending on what is the most expedient at the time.
“He proves it every single day,” Stephens continued of Hannity’s lack of journalist chops. “The question for Fox News is whether they want to consider themselves a journalistic institution and continue to employ as an anchor a guy who clearly is better at real estate than he is, at reporting.”
After spending most of her career in banking, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle noted that when bank employees have a conflict of interest, regulators and the FCC get involved.
“We’re sitting here going, ‘well, what’s Fox News going to do?'” she asked. “It’s a judgment call about making money and advertisers. In banking, it doesn’t matter if a trader is making $1 zillion for the bank, if it’s bad ethical practice, they’ve got to go.”
“What we find here, to echo your point, is norm erosion, right?” said Princeton University Professor Eddie Glaude. “Basic norms are just being tossed out the window. And the currency of our political moment is hypocrisy. It is the most valuable currency of our political moment. So, I can trade on — I can say anything. I can do anything. I can be in conflict, right? As long as I’m pursuing my own self-interest and being narcissistic and whatever. As long as I’m doing that, I don’t have to worry about the consequences. So, norms are being cast aside from the top all the way down to the bottom and people who claim to be the moral arbiters of our politics.”
Watch the full clip below:
Kellyanne Conway says Melania the rich asshole is ‘superior’ to Michelle Obama
Kellyanne Conway appears on Fox News (screen grab)
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Kellyanne Conway says that Melania the rich asshole is a “superior” first lady compared to Michelle Obama.
TMZ caught up with the senior White House counselor on Monday and asked her about President some rich asshole’s wife. Conway was asked about reports that magazines have shunned Melania, while Michelle was featured on dozens of magazine covers.
“Melania the rich asshole is such a superior and excellent First Lady,” Kellyanne told TMZ. “This country is so lucky to have her.”
Watch video below:
CNN panel pounds Kellyanne Conway’s ‘bizarre’ overreaction to questions about her husband’s tweets
Kirsten Powers, Alisyn Camerota and Margaret Hoover (Photo: Screen capture)
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Two political women with partners who have different perspectives than theirs appeared on CNN to discuss the “bizarre” interview between Dana Bash and senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.
Over the weekend, Bash asked what was meant to be a light-hearted question about Conway’s husband, who has become known for tweeting out anti-some rich assholetweets. Conway went off in a full-on attack against Bash for asking the question.
“It’s fascinating to me that CNN would go there, but it’s very good for the whole world to have just witnessed that it’s now fair game… how people’s spouses and significant others may differ with them,” Conway said to Bash Sunday. “That should really be fun.”
“I don’t know, I feel like the question about Kellyanne’s husband struck a nerve,” host Alisyn Camerota quipped after playing a clip of the interview. “What happened there!?”
Republican Margaret Hoover said that she can understand why it struck a nerve, because she too has a significant other, who has different political beliefs than she. When people ask her about her husband, she replies simply that they don’t share the same beliefs and people should ask him if they have questions.
“She was saying this only happens to me,” Camerota said. “Acting as though we would never ask anybody else. I like to play the game: ‘What if this were President Obama.’ If David Aexelrod’s wife, when President Obama was in the White House was tweeting that President Obama’s policies were ‘absurd and flabbergasting,’ wouldn’t we have asked David Axelrod about that?”
Hoover said that she wishes the question was poised “does it put you in a difficult position,” rather than Bash’s question about Conway’s husband.
“I think that is what Dana is saying,” Camerota noted.
“I feel like the question was, ‘What’s up with your husband’s tweets,'” Hoover said.
Democrat Kirsten Powers noted that it’s odd Conway would be playing the victim when 2016 was spent with the rich asshole attacking Hillary Clinton for her husband. Most notably, the rich asshole brought her husband’s accusers to their final debate.
“I think your example is a good one of David Axlerod, but it’s not even the same thing because Kellyanne Conway’s husband is a major player in Republican politics,” Powers continued. “So, it’s not just some spouse that has some opinions, it’s somebody who’s very influential. So, it is interesting to people. To me, it looked like Dana was being very lighthearted. It was very lighthearted. The idea that whatever — I think anybody who’s ever met her, I think viewers can tell by watching her, she’s literally the nicest person you would meet. She is not nasty or would not try and harass someone and Kellyanne knows that.”
Hoover wholeheartedly agreed.
“Even if she didn’t ask the question perfectly, you know, there’s a mature adult way to respond to that, and that’s not what Kellyanne did,” Powers said.
Camerota noted that the rich asshole has a long history of doing exactly the same thing with his attacks on Andrew McCabe’s wife as well as Ted Cruz’s wife during the Republican primary.
“So, Kellyanne Conway saying, ‘You never go after the spouse,’ tell your boss,” said Camerota.
Hoover agreed that it shouldn’t be on the wife to explain her husband’s positions, however, she noted that Conway didn’t “fight fair” in her comments to Bash.
“It was a little ugly the way she responded to Dana,” Hoover continued. “She was trying three different lines of attack. The better response would be, ‘my husband and I have different perspectives at politics and we’re going to leave it at that.'”
She and Powers both noted that Conway went a different route by trying to attack CNN, playing the victim of some sort of vicious, sexist attack, when it was nothing more than a fluffy question to close out an interview.
“What’s the big deal? I don’t understand,” Powers wondered. “What’s so offensive about this? You know, that she immediately goes to that she’s under attack and starts making these weird threats. How bizarre –”
Hoover cut in to say that it was a “counter attack.”
“So you think Dana attacked her?” Powers asked Hoover.
“No, I was agreeing with you, Kirsten. I think Kellyanne almost counter-attacked Dana,” Hoover said.
“I don’t think there was an attack,” Powers retorted. “I think it was clearly done in a lighthearted way and she could have said, ‘Yeah, we have different opinions, let’s move on.’ Instead they used it as an opportunities at this to go on a vicious attack sort of saying — I couldn’t really follow but somehow suggesting that she’s going to start talking about spouses of people at CNN. It was completely out of control and just — it just didn’t make any sense except for the fact that it touched a nerve and/or she’s using it as an opportunity to impress her boss because she can be really nasty to CNN.”
Defense secretary James Mattis thinks of himself as the rich asshole’s ‘babysitter’: report
some rich asshole speaks to Jim Mattis (Pentagon)
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Defense Secretary James Mattis, one of the few members of the original the rich asshole foreign policy team who still has a job, would reportedly frequently clash with former national security adviser H.R. McMaster because he thought it was too dangerous to give President some rich asshole options for taking military action against North Korea.
The New Yorker reports that Mattis stalled on offering the rich asshole a wide range of options for military strikes against Pyongyang because he feared such strikes would result in a humanitarian catastrophe that would lead to a massive counterattack on the South Korean capital of Seoul.
“To McMaster and his colleagues, Mattis’s apparent attempts to limit the rich asshole’s options verged on insubordination,” the New Yorker explains. “One senior N.S.C. official told me that Mattis perceives his role as playing ‘babysitter’ to the President.”
Erin Simpson, a defense analyst who once worked with McMaster, tells the New Yorker that one problem for the rich asshole’s national security team is that he always seems to favor taking the most belligerent and drastic action available to him — which may explain why Mattis sought to limit his range of available strategies. Simpson described this as a “Goldilocks problem,” in that if the rich asshole is given a range of options that range from “too cold” to “just right” to “too hot,” he will always pass over the “just right” option in favor of the hottest one on the table.
Investigative reporter who has covered the rich asshole for 30 years says the evidence shows ‘he is a traitor’
President some rich asshole (Shutterstock)
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The saga of President some rich asshole consists of several parallel and intersecting stories.
This article was originally published at Salon.
There is the structural dimension. the rich asshole’s victory over Hillary Clinton was not entirely unpredictable or shocking. America’s crisis in civic literacy, political polarization, rampant anti-intellectualism, deeply embedded sexism and racism, greed, broken schools and weakened democratic institutions, as well as a hollowed-out public sphere where people confuse celebrity with human worth made the election someone like the rich asshole nearly inevitable.
There is some rich asshole the man, who seems to revel in the very worst human values. His closest family members — including his father and grandfather — taught him the “value” of unrepentant greed and ambition. He also displays the symptoms of malignant narcissism, as well as sociopathy. In all, the rich asshole is a master of manipulation who leads a political cult.
How do these factors combine in some rich asshole’s presidency and the type of society that he and the Republican Party want to create? Are matters actually worse than they appear, in terms of how we assess the political and social crisis of the rich asshole’s presidency? What strategy should Democrats use to stop the rich asshole and the Republican Party? If the rich asshole is removed from office because of his increasingly obvious efforts to obstruct justice, how will his public respond? Will there be violence?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. For 30 years, Johnston has covered the rich asshole’s life and career, of some rich asshole as detailed in the bestselling book “The Making of some rich asshole.” His new book is “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the rich asshole Administration is Doing to America.”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.
How was some rich asshole able to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House?
Well, a series of events came together. First of all, Hillary Clinton had a lot of baggage and as Donna Brazile’s book “Hacks” shows, she ran a poor campaign and did not listen to the advice of people who told her she needed to pay attention to what the rich asshole was doing.
Secondly, the Republican challengers were a clown car of utterly unqualified people, which meant his lack of qualifications was not so noticeable. The one qualified candidate in that field was John Kasich.
Next, Donald ran on an economic platform that on the surface spoke to inequality and frustration. For example, in 2012, the bottom 90 percent of the Americans reported a smaller income than in 1967. Donald tapped into that problem, but he’s a con artist who promised to drain the swamp and then stocked it with swamp monsters.
Another factor was the utter failure of journalists to vet some rich asshole. You can read about Barack Obama’s kindergarten playmates in Indonesia by name, the boys he smoked dope with in high school by name and some of the women he dated in college by name. But the New York Times, in the 16 months from the rich asshole’s [campaign] announcement to Election Day, had exactly four references that had “the rich asshole” and “Mafia” in the same story and they were all in passing and inconsequential.
They also didn’t report on the two income tax fraud trials that the rich asshole lost. There was just a lot of stuff about the rich asshole that was never reported because his campaign was like looking at a car crash on the other side of the highway but it had dancing girls and a marching band and so you couldn’t turn away from it.
For 40 years the Republicans have done serious work preparing for the day when, as a minority party, they wanted to still be in control. So they have reduced the franchise. They’ve passed laws like this horrible law in Michigan that lets you throw out ballots on the most bogus grounds, entire precincts. All that combined to help the rich asshole win the Electoral College.
Why were so many journalists and pundits unable to understand the true power of the rich asshole’s campaign? So much of what he did and continues to do is political performance art drawn from professional wrestling and reality TV. It isn’t complicated.
Remember that campaign reporters cover the horse race. They focus on the sizzle and not the steak. Everybody was so taken by his unusual campaign that they just forgot about the basics.
You have studied and written about some rich asshole for three decades. What does the public need to know about his background to understand his behavior as president?
Here are the key things people should know about some rich asshole. He comes from a family of criminals: His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred, had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. the rich asshole’s father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today’s money. Donald got his showmanship from his dad as well as his comfort with organized criminals.
I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that some rich asshole says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek — which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount — a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. the rich asshole is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him.
I’ve followed Donald for 30 years, I don’t see any evidence that he has changed and he certainly hasn’t repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation.
He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment.
It’s important to understand that the rich asshole is aggressively anti-Christian despite claiming to be one. He is bluntly a racist. Most importantly, he is literally ignorant about almost everything.
the rich asshole’s voters will not abandon him under any circumstances. He leads the Republican Party and thus has its news media and other resources at his disposal. Some folks believe that there will be a “blue wave” of Democratic votes that will wash him and the Republican Party out to sea in 2018 and 2020. I don’t see that happening. I think the rich asshole wins in 2020. Am I being too cynical?
Well, he may win again in 2020. The November elections are the most important American elections since the Civil War, and I’m including 1932.
Based just on normal historic averages, the Republicans should lose control of the House by about four seats. They should lose control of the Senate as well, although the map is pretty awful for the Democrats. If Republicans retain control then I believe what will happen over time is that someone who shares the rich asshole’s dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies but doesn’t have his baggage — someone who is a competent manager and just as charismatic — will eventually arise and you can kiss your individual liberties goodbye. That will take time but it’s the trend we are heading towards.
On the other hand, if enough people go to the polls — remember, roughly 100 million people did not vote in 2016 — if the Democrats get organized, if they can persuade the public they have an agenda that goes beyond just getting just get rid of the rich asshole and they get control of Congress, they will move to impeach him. They need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him but they will certainly move to have public hearings.
Is the rich asshole an ideologue?
No. That’s the whole point of the first chapter of my book, “President Like No Other.” The 44 previous presidents were all over the map. There were smart people and dumb people, there were people of impeccable integrity such as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, there were absolute scoundrels like Warren G. Harding. We had a murderous racist in the White House whose painting hangs in the Oval Office now looking down on the rich asshole. What distinguishes all those presidents, particularly Chester B. Arthur, the one closest to the rich asshole, is that they tried in the context of their times to make America better.
some rich asshole is a man with this desperate need for adoration. He is an empty vessel, the exact opposite of Henry David Thoreau — a “life unexamined.” His only philosophy is the glorification of Donald.
If you were going to consult with the Democratic Party about how to defeat the rich asshole and the Republican Party, what would you suggest?
I think most of what Hillary said came across as “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” What I would say to the Democrats is, “Your first and fundamental mission is to tell people what you are for.” Not that you’re against the rich asshole. Being against the rich asshole doesn’t get you very far. It will get you some people who hate the rich asshole. But what are you for? What you want to say is: We will get the incredible burden of health care off the back of small businesses. We will make it so you don’t have to stick with an employer because you have health care and you don’t want to run the risk of switching or losing it. We want to relieve business of the burden of health care like every other modern country, and it will save everyone money.
We want to invest in the future of America. So we will put more money into education and basic science. Did you know that half the economic growth in this country since the end of World War II can be traced to taxpayer investments in science?
We want to invest in the future of America. So we will put more money into education and basic science. Did you know that half the economic growth in this country since the end of World War II can be traced to taxpayer investments in science?
We want investments at home that will create jobs. Our country is falling apart in front of our eyes. That will create an enormous number of jobs but it will also make the economy more efficient. We want to invest in that future, which will make us all much better off. We’re about building a prosperous future. We’re not about looking back, as some rich asshole is, to the past.
This is a crucial point. People who’ve been had by con artists are ashamed and the world is full of cases, I’ve written about some of them, you see see it in movies and TV shows. They just can’t face the fact that they were tricked. It makes them feel stupid and foolish.
Well, people who got conned by the rich asshole — it’s painful for many of them and they will do anything to avoid it. You don’t want to confront them, you don’t want to make them feel stupid.
What do you think will happen with the Mueller investigation? the rich asshole is not acting like an innocent person.
Well, Mueller has assembled an extraordinarily talented team. Here is what Mueller is going to find. Mueller has the rich asshole tax returns. A competent prosecutor would have them by now. The rich asshole tax returns are the beginning point. You have to get the books and records–Donald has a long history of hiding books and records when they’re sought by auditors. As for the Russians, it is beyond dispute at this point that the rich asshole campaign was actively involved in a conspiracy.
He’s not exactly what Putin wanted, but most importantly the rich asshole’s not Hillary Clinton, who would have gone up to the edge of war to make Putin give up Crimea. She made that very clear in a campaign. He would be in severe pain if he didn’t give up the Crimean peninsula in eastern Ukraine. So he didn’t want her under any circumstances. Mueller is going to report on tax fraud, he’s going to report on the Russians and he is going to show that the rich asshole campaign was knowingly being helped by the Russians. Remember that the Australian, Dutch and British intelligence agencies, and maybe others, went to the FBI, State Department and other contacts and said, “You folks have a problem. ”
Where exactly Mueller will go beyond that, I don’t know. His mission is the Russians and the Russians are tied in with the tax returns. But remember this: The job of a prosecutor is not to bring the perfect case, it’s not to bring the case that should be brought for political reasons. It’s to bring the easiest, most solid case that wins. Mueller will do that. There is nothing that prevents indicting a sitting president, but it is an untested issue. Mueller is going to have to decide whether to indict him or to go to Congress.
If the overwhelming conclusion of the Mueller report is that the Russians put the rich asshole in the White House, then you face a second terrible problem: What do you do about Mike Pence who is also the beneficiary of Russian interference?
If the Congress impeaches and removes the rich asshole and Pence, it will only be because the Democrats control Congress. So unless something else changes, we get President Nancy Pelosi. You can just imagine the people who will be in the streets screaming coup d’état if she’s president. I think the only way to address that is for her, or whoever is speaker, to announce they will be a caretaker president who is not going to do anything extreme.
There is no good ending to the story. America will survive this, we’ll get past it, but whenever the rich asshole leaves, there’s no good ending. If the rich asshole is removed by impeachment or by the voters, whether in a Republican primary or a general election, I know what he will do. He’s already told us what he will do by his actions. the rich asshole will spend the rest of his days fomenting violence and revolution in this country.
He’s be careful not to directly say “revolution,” but he will call the government illegitimate. He might even call it criminal, since he called Democrats who didn’t stand up during his State of the Union speech treasonous. If they’re going to impeach the rich asshole, I believe they have to have a plan to indict, try, convict and imprison him. But the rich asshole will be a role model for some people and there may well be violence over it.
As Malcolm Nance and others have warned, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and likely infiltration of the rich asshole’s inner circle could be one of the worst intelligence disasters in American history, a failure of Benedict Arnold or Rosenberg proportions.
Let me be very clear and quotable about this. At an absolute minimum, some rich asshole has divided loyalties, and the evidence we already have suggests that some rich asshole is a traitor. In fact, I would say that the evidence we already have, the public materials such as emails for example, strongly indicate that some rich asshole is a traitor. However, I don’t even think he understands what he’s done.
Ex-federal prosecutor explains why Michael Cohen has every reason to flip — and only one reason to protect the rich asshole
Mimi Rocah (MSNBC)
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A former federal prosecutor said it was too soon to tell whether Michael Cohen would turn against President some rich asshole in the ongoing probe of his campaign ties to Russia, but she explained the attorney would have a strong incentive to do so.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough marveled at the president basically admitting that Cohen had information that could interest prosecutors about their business together, and former assistant U.S. Attorney Mimi Rocah described what might happen next.
“In my experience, first of all, people who say they’re not going to flip at this stage of the game, it’s too early to tell,” Rocah told “Morning Joe.” “They change their mind quite often, and I’m talking about people who have every incentive not to cooperate — like organized crime members, members of violent gangs — so when the pull is very strong, as it must be here for Michael Cohen and must be a very pull strong pull to some rich asshole they still cooperate quite often.”
Rocah served 16 years as an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and she left about six months before her former colleagues obtained a search warrant for Cohen’s home and office.
Rocah said the case against the rich asshole’s longtime lawyer could put him in significant legal jeopardy, and that could outweigh any loyalty he has toward the president.
“It’s too early to tell,” Rocah said. “He hasn’t seen the strength of the case against him, which my impression is it’s going to be strong or they would haven’t gotten that search warrant."
“The second thing that’s important to know is that if he does cooperate, I think he’s going to be a very valuable cooperator because people who are that — those are the people you do need to cooperate are the people on the inside,” she added.
Ultimately, she said there’s only one reason Cohen might risk a lengthy prison term to protect his longtime boss.
“If he doesn’t cooperate it’s going to be probably out of loyalty because, and/or because he decides to take the case to trial, which is his right to do,” Rocah said.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo calls the rich asshole’s bluff — and dares him to pardon Michael Cohen today
CNN's Chris Cuomo (Screen cap).
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CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Monday called President some rich asshole’s bluff and dared him to pardon his longtime attorney, Michael Cohen.
During a discussion about the rich asshole’s recent Twitter rants about the purported “witch hunt” being conducted against him, Cuomo pointed out that the rich asshole could fix Cohen’s problems with the flick of a pen by pardoning him of any wrongdoing.
“Hey, Mr. President, if you care so much about Michael Cohen and this is so unfair, pardon him today,” he said. “Pardon him today. if it’s so unfair, if it’s so clear to you, pardon him today.”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said that, while the rich asshole is certainly within his rights to pardon Cohen, such an action would likely generate fierce backlash, as no president has ever pardoned their own lawyer who’s been accused of wrongdoing.
“It is an unprecedented act in American history to pardon a crony, one might say,” he said.
“This is all unprecedented!” Cuomo responded.
Toobin then said that if the rich asshole pardoned Cohen, “he would get an enormous amount of criticism including from Republicans” — although he then reflected that “maybe he doesn’t care” and would pardon him anyway.
“Will you get criticism? Sure,” Cuomo acknowledged. “But since when does he care about that?”
Watch the video below.
MSNBC’s Joe and Mika mock the rich asshole’s skimpy schedule: No wonder he went bankrupt in business
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski mocked President some rich asshole’s lightweight workload a year after he complained the job was harder than he expected.
the rich asshole admitted April 28, 2017, after his first 100 days in the White House, that he thought being president would be easier — and the “Morning Joe” hosts made fun of the amount of time he spends watching television and playing golf.
“Mika, he’s talking about more work?” Scarborough said. “He golfs like every other day. He’s always golfing.”
The pair spoke in an exaggerated tone that seemed to suggest they expected the rich asshole to watch their mockery and get mad at his former friends.
“He does a lot of golfing,” Brezezinski agreed. “He used to make fun of Obama for golfing. He used to say, ‘I would never leave the White House.’ He was like, ‘If I was in the White House I would never leave.’ Remember when he used to say that?”
Scarborough did remember, and paraphrased the rich asshole’s campaign promises.
“‘I would be working so hard, how can he golf that much?'” Scarborough said, and then twisted the knife again. “some rich asshole golfs all the time. You know, they give him executive time.”
“Well, that’s special time for him to be alone and watch TV,” Brzezinski explained.
“Yeah, he doesn’t have to start working until 11, he can finish until around 2 or 3,” Scarborough said. “So if he’s doing more work now than he did in private business, you do kind of understand why he had trouble financially for a while.”
“That makes sense, the bankruptcy thing, yeah,” Brzezinski agreed.
the rich asshole’s tweets ‘created a stir’ at Barbara Bush’s funeral: NYT reporter
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman (Photo: Screen capture)
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During a Monday morning discussion, CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo noted that President some rich asshole’s week will consist mostly of diplomatic guests and visits. But when it comes to the rich asshole’s presidency and the rich asshole the president, the morning panel noted there is a big difference.
The weekend was filled with political leaders expressing their sadness and respect for the late first lady Barbara Bush, whose funeral was Saturday. Meanwhile, the rich asshole was railing against political issues and playing golf.
Camerota showed the photo of the former presidents with their spouses at the Bush funeral.
(Photo: Paul Morse / Office of President George H.W. Bush)
“I think we should study this next photograph for all that it says because it speaks a thousand words,” she explained. “This is the funeral of Barbara Bush and you her husband there in the front, and then in the back there’s all sorts of interesting alliances here. Melania and, obviously, Michelle Obama right next to each other and then Hillary — you know, George W. Bush’s arm around Hillary. Bill Clinton trying to make sure he’s in the picture behind them. And then, you know, the person who is absent, of course, is some rich asshole and it has been pointed out that he was busy sending out 24 tweets while the rest of the, you know, living presidents — well most of them, were here at the funeral.”
The commentators also noted that it isn’t unprecedented for a president to sit out a funeral because it requires increased security. Haberman noted that it poses an interesting question about when George H.W. Bush passes away.
“I don’t think the Bush family is eager to have President the rich asshole there,” she said. “How you deal with that will be sticky.”
When speaking about the first lady, however, Haberman said that she sees Mrs. the rich asshole “looking extremely happy and smiling broadly. Which we often don’t see her doing in public.”
Mrs. the rich asshole went the extra mile for the funeral, bringing with her former White House staffers who were close to Mrs. Bush.
“She was trying to show something genuine about Barbara Bush — and in that moment President the rich asshole was tweeting and turning everything into something about himself,” Haberman said. “As I understand it from people who attended the funeral, his tweets were talked about at the funeral. They created a stir among people. If you are President the rich asshole, as we know, he likes to watch TV a lot and I don’t think this Saturday was an exception. Saturday, a day that the rest of the political world came together and this club of former presidents, which is a pretty small club, who know what that is like, had a common bond and there he was isolated.”
She noted that when thinking about the difference between the president and the presidency, Haberman explained that there is no greater difference than the rich asshole’s tweets and the week of upcoming state visits.
“What you will see in terms of the state dinner, in terms of Angela Merkel’s visit, that is the presidency,” she said. “What you saw on Saturday with the tweets that is the president.”
Watch the clip below:
the rich asshole, Macron to face differences on Iran, trade, as French visit begins
U.S. President some rich asshole looks at French President Emmanuel Macron before a family photo. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
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U.S. President some rich asshole welcomes French President Emmanuel Macron to the White House on Monday to kick off a three-day state visit expected to be dominated by U.S.-European differences on the Iran nuclear deal and trade.
It will be the rich asshole’s first hosting of a state visit since he took power in January 2017. The pair will get a sense of their two countries’ shared history during an evening meal on Monday night at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, the first U.S. president and Revolutionary War commander whose alliance with France was critical to victory over the British.
The major work between them will be done on Tuesday during White House meetings and a joint news conference.
On Wednesday, President Macron will address a Joint Session of Congress, making the anniversary of the day that French General Charles de Gaulle addressed the Joint Session of Congress, April 25, 1960.
the rich asshole and Macron began their improbable friendship a year ago in Belgium with a jaw-clenching handshake. While other European leaders have kept a certain distance from the rich asshole, Macron has worked hard to remain close to the U.S. president and the two leaders speak frequently by phone.
Macron is on something of a rescue mission for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which the rich asshole has vowed to scrap unless European allies strengthen it by mid-May.
The deal reached between Iran, the United States and five other world powers put curbs on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Macron said on Fox News Sunday that it would be better to protect the Iran deal instead of get rid of it, saying there is no “Plan B” to take its place.
“Is this agreement perfect and this JCPOA a perfect thing for our relationship with Iran? No. But for nuclear — what do you have? As a better option? I don’t see it,” he said.
Macron also wants to persuade the rich asshole to exempt European nations from steel tariffs that are part of the U.S. president’s plan to reduce chronic trade deficits with countries around the world, chiefly China.
The two leaders are also expected to discuss Syria, less than two weeks after the United States, France and Britain launched airstrikes in Syria in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack that killed dozens in Douma, Syria.
Macron said last week that he believed he had persuaded the rich asshole to keep U.S. troops in Syria, but the rich asshole has been insistent on bringing them home, although he has not publicly provided a definite timetable.
Whether substantive progress will be made on these and other issues was unclear.
“Whether we will actually solve, or come to closure, or a full detailed agreement on some of the issues that we’ve touched on is difficult to say at this remove,” a senior administration official told reporters on Friday.
Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Daniel Wallis
Conservative writer maps out how Republicans will inevitably split with the rich asshole
Photo: some rich asshole gives an interview (Photo: Screenshot)
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According to writer and commentator Matt Lewis, the GOP might not turn out without President some rich asshole on the ticket. To make matters worse, Lewis doesn’t think the rich asshole has any ability to bring voters out for down-ballot GOP candidates in the mid-term elections.
In a Monday Daily Beast column, Lewis explained that the rich asshole might be doing well among Republican voters, to the tune of 85 percent, according to Gallup polls. Even with President George W. Bush’s party loyalty, 2006 was a disaster for the GOP. While the president might be paranoid about a primary challenge from inside his White House, with Mike Pence or Nikki Haley, *Lewis warned a fallout* with the GOP is the more likely scenario.
“Republican politicians will eventually discover that they can stand up to a Republican president without fear of reprisal,” Lewis said. “Since fealty to the rich asshole has always been premised on a transactional calculation (as opposed to personal affection, shared goals, or mutual respect), the only thing binding them to the rich asshole is the perception that their political base demands it. When that changes—and history suggests that this happens to even the most popular presidents—the levee breaks.”
Lewis explained that in some cases, all it takes is a single disaster. He cited President George H.W. Bush’s high job approval in March 1991. Yet, Bush became a one-term president. The voters who ultimately showed up to the polls, however, were furious at Bush for breaking his “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge.
He cited anti-tax Grover Norquist said the decision to break his promise “’depressed the hell out of the [Republican] base’ because it was a fundamental breach of faith.’” Similarly, the rich asshole’s broken promises are stacking up.
Thus far, the only thing he has been able to deliver is a tax cut to the wealthy that Americans see for what it was. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that the tax cuts have gotten less popular over time. A mere 27 percent of Americans think that the cuts was a good idea. In January it was 30 percent. A full 36 percent call it outright a “bad idea.” Republicans are now looking to pass part two of their tax cuts, but their own leaders are fearful it would give more ammunition to Democrats
Lewis explained that the rich asshole isn’t as noble as George H.W. Bush, “who believed he was doing the right thing” regardless of the politics of his tax increases. “Still, the defeat of ’41’ should serve as a cautionary tale for any politician who wants to take solace in their approval ratings,” Lewis wrote.
It could give Democrats an edge, but worse, it might spell a major hit for the GOP. Despite the rich asshole’s approval climbing, Lewis wonders if perhaps those who don’t support the new far-right GOP are simply leaving the party. So, his approval is going up because the party is shrinking.
Finally, Lewis argued, “that there isn’t a huge correlation between the sophomore numbers and political resilience.” Both Bushes had high approval numbers, yet when it came to their mid-term elections, they lost big.
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