Originally a comment poem by Lady Mondegreen on Brothas from anotha motha.
The world has held great heroes
As history books have showed
But never a name to go down in fame
Compared with that of Toad Trump.
The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed
But they none of them know one half so much
As intelligent Mr. Toad Trump.… Read the rest
House Republican leaders abruptly pulled a rewrite of the nation’s health-care system from consideration on Friday, a dramatic acknowledgment that they were unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We just pulled it,” President Trump told The Washington Post in a telephone interview.
The decision came a day after Trump delivered an ultimatum to lawmakers — and represented multiple failures for the new president and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
Good.
… Read the restIn the interview, Trump deflected any responsibility for the setback and blamed Democrats instead.
“We couldn’t get one Democratic vote and we were a little bit shy, very little, but it was still a little bit shy so we pulled it,” he said.
You suspended my account when I was campaigning against the stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in Iran; now you have suspended A Gilani’s account for campaigning against blasphemy laws in Pakistan. Doing the dirty work for Islamist states and organisations? Whilst freethinkers are being killed. Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.
Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.… Read the rest
Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman have another State of Trump article, about how he’s encountering self-doubt for perhaps the first time in his life, thanks to discovering that he can’t just ram through the repeal of Obamacare as if he were raping it.
A president who prefers unilateral executive action and takes intense pride in his ability to cut deals finds himself in a humbling negotiation unlike any other in his career, pinned between moderates who believe the health care measure is too harsh, and a larger group of fiscal conservatives adept at using their leverage to scuttle big deals cut by other Republican leaders.
Just imagine: government is not identical to running a bizness. Who could possibly have … Read the rest
A journalist has been shot dead in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the third to be killed in the country this month.
Miroslava Breach was shot eight times in her car outside her home in the state capital, Chihuahua.
One of her children was in the vehicle but was not hurt.
Not physically hurt.
Mrs Breach had reported on organised crime, drug-trafficking and corruption for a national newspaper, La Jornada, and a regional newspaper, Norte de Juarez.
The gunmen left a note saying: “For being a loud-mouth.”
Thanks for the explanation.
There’s a lot of buzz about an interview Trump did for Time, in which he told a whole bunch of whoppers. That’s ironic, because the interview is about his testy relationship to the truth. David Graham at the Atlantic
… Read the restTime and again, Scherer asks Trump about statements that he has made without evidence, and time and again, Trump insists that something that happened later retroactively justifies the claims he has made, effectively arguing that lies have been alchemically transformed into truths after the fact. Time’s cover, the president was surely sad to discover, is not his face but the words, “Is Truth Dead?” over a somber black background.
The problem is that later events don’t make things any
… Read the restHouse Intelligence Committee Democrats said Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized to them Thursday during a closed-door meeting for his handling of revelations about surveillance that potentially could have been collected about President Trump and his associates during the transition period.
Nunes’s apology was “generic,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CNN, adding that it was “not clear” precisely which actions his apology covered.
Nunes came under heavy fire from Democrats on Wednesday after going first to the press, then to the White House, and then to the press again before consulting with committee colleagues about what he said was fresh intelligence about the president and his campaign aides.
A great American, Kurt Cochran, was killed in the London terror attack. My prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2017
Two other people were killed – but they weren’t American, so Donald “the Boor” Trump ignores them.
One was Keith Palmer.
… Read the restPC Keith Palmer, 48, was stabbed as he tried to stop the attacker in a courtyard outside the Houses of Parliament.
He was an unarmed member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Squad who had served for 15 years.
…
“Keith was a genuinely nice person; nobody had a bad word to say about him. When I heard what had happened I
And today the FBI is telling us some of what it has.
… Read the restThe FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.
This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.
The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may
Congress and national intelligence are investigating ties between Trump and his campaign and Russia, and today we get another unsubtle bumping off:
… Read the restA former Russian parliamentarian named Denis Voronenkov, who fled Russia last October and has criticized President Vladimir Putin’s government, was killed in Kiev on Thursday, in an apparent assassination that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is reportedly calling “state terrorism.”
Voronenkov, 45, had just left the Premier Palace hotel when he was shot twice in the head on a sidewalk along a busy street in Ukraine’s capital, according to the Kyiv Post. Citing police, the newspaper adds that both Voronenkov’s bodyguard and the attacker were wounded and in the hospital.
The killing has the “handwriting” of the
Donnie Junior must make Daddy proud.
… Read the restIt has become something of an online custom in the social media age to react to tragic news stories — like Wednesday’s attack in London — with well-meaning if sometimes rote messages like “thoughts and prayers.” But that does not appear to be Donald Trump Jr.’s style.
“You have to be kidding me?!” Mr. Trump said Wednesday afternoon on Twitter, as details of the episode — which left at least five dead, including the assailant, and 40 injured — continued to unfold. The message continued, “Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan.”
Mr. Trump, the oldest son of President Trump, was calling attention to an article
The police have identified the marauding attacker:
The man believed to have carried out the attack in Westminster has been named by police as Khalid Masood.
Kent-born Masood, who was shot dead in the attack, was not the subject of any current police investigations, but had a range of previous convictions.
The 52-year-old was believed to have been living in the West Midlands.
The so-called Islamic State group has said it was behind the attack, in which PC Keith Palmer, Aysha Frade and US tourist Kurt Cochran were killed.
Whether or not IS gave any planning or logistical help, of course it’s “behind” the attack in the larger sense: it models violence and brutality in the name of religion, … Read the rest
Now Devin Nunes is using the intelligence investigation to try to bail out Trump. It’s my understanding that that’s a no-no.
… Read the restRepresentative Devin Nunes said Wednesday that the intelligence community collected multiple conversations involving members of Trump’s transition team during legal surveillance of foreign targets after he won election last year. After Nunes went to the White House to brief Trump, the president told reporters “I somewhat do” feel vindicated by the latest development.
The committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said Nunes’s decision to go to Trump before informing other members of the panel “casts quite a profound cloud” over whether the committee can conduct a proper investigation.
…
The Intelligence Committee chairman is taking a risk
Eiffel Tower in Paris turns off its lights in mark of respect to #Westminster terror attack https://t.co/86W3BGGHr0 pic.twitter.com/KPI72eq4wM
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) March 22, 2017
PC Keith Palmer was killed doing his duty – protecting our city and our democracy from those who want to destroy our way of life. pic.twitter.com/p6igkEJoGY
— Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) March 22, 2017
I've known Keith for 25 years. We served together in the Royal Artillery before he became a copper. A lovely man, a friend. I'm heartbroken. https://t.co/LgF4rQ7Vmg
— James Cleverly MP (@JamesCleverly) March 22, 2017
It’s a gorgeous blowy spring-like afternoon here. I went for a walk in the cemetery about a mile from where I live, and in wandering about I saw a surprising inscription:
Elisabeth Utke Jorgensen
Scholar, Pioneer, Artist, Adventurer
1867-1939
I looked her up and found a brief biography by Seattle historian Paul Dorpat:
… Read the restOne of the first women to graduate from the University of Copenhagen, Elizabeth Utke immigrated in the early 1890s to the United States, where she found her degrees in logic and mathematics useless. Pursuing two of the few occupations open to her, she attended secretary school while earning her way as a seamstress with a knack for “fancy work.” She married Carl Jorgensen, a Norwegian sea
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not apologizing.
… Read the restChimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist and feminist, has condemned a “language orthodoxy” on the political left after she endured a vitriolic backlash over comments about transgender women.
The author of Half of a Yellow Sun plunged into a row about identity politics when she suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticised for implying that trans women are not “real women”.
But Adichie defended her comments during a public appearance in Washington on Monday night. “This is fundamentally about language orthodoxy,” she told a
The Independent reports that the perp has been identified.
Abu Izzadeen, who was born Trevor Brooks, has been named in reports as the man who drove a car into the Houses of Parliament and attempted to attack police officers.
His views were far from secret: videos of him can be seen across YouTube, in which he rants about how important it is to kill the police and how everyone in Parliament are kufar, or infidels.
Not quite: he says those raised as unbelievers are kufar, but those born and raised Muslim are apostates. He helpfully names Sadiq Khan and Baroness Warsi. (Khan was an MP before he became Mayor.)
In other words he was a loathsome man who … Read the rest
Manafort laundered money for Yanukovych, we’re told.
… Read the restA Russian billionaire paid former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort millions of dollars to boost the interests of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Associated Press reports. The new allegations arise months after Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign amid concerns over his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
“According to documents that we’ve reviewed, Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian oligarch who wanted him to promote Russian interests,” the AP’s Chad Day tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “And in particular, he wrote a memo that outlined this kind of vast plan for him to promote Russian interests in the former Soviet republics — and also to specifically benefit the Putin
… Read the restFour people, including an armed police officer and a man believed to be the attacker, have died in a terrorist incident near the UK’s Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard has said.
A woman was among several pedestrians struck by a car on Westminster bridge, before it crashed into railings.
The officer was stabbed in the Houses of Parliament by an attacker, who was shot by police.
At least 20 people were injured, including three other officers.
…
The French Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said three French school pupils were among the injured and offered “solidarity with our British friends, and full support” for the wounded students and their families.
The Port of London Authority
