Aug 19th, 2017 3:00 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
It took him three tries to spell “heal” correctly.
Also, this “our great country has been divided for decade” thing – what does he think he means? This is a guy who makes a huge point of playing only to his “base” while treating the rest of us, the large majority, as if we were … Read the rest
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13 comments
Tags: Trump
Aug 19th, 2017 11:22 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in Foreign Policy that there is now evidence demonstrating that Trump lied when he said the FBI rank and file had lost confidence in Comey.
The day after Comey’s dismissal, then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said:
The president, over the last several months, lost confidence in Director Comey. The [Justice Department] lost confidence in Director Comey. Bipartisan members of Congress made it clear that they had lost confidence in Director Comey. And most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.
At the time, a reporter challenged Sanders’s claim, reading her a quote from a special agent in the FBI who asserted, “The vast majority
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Tags: Comey, Trump
Aug 19th, 2017 9:40 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Don is a no-show for the Kennedy Center awards this year, and he’s not throwing the usual White House party to celebrate it, either.
Past presidents and first ladies have hosted a reception for those given awards at the White House before the gala at the nearby Kennedy Center and sat with them at the televised event.
Two of the five stars due to receive the awards in art, music, dance, film, television and culture on 2 December, TV producer Norman Lear and dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, had already indicated they would boycott the reception the next day at the White House.
De Lavallade said: “In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our
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Tags: Trump
Aug 18th, 2017 4:14 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I guess Neil Gorsuch doesn’t have a very fine-tuned sense of ethics.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, is scheduled to address a conservative group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington next month, less than two weeks before the court is set to hear arguments on Mr. Trump’s travel ban.
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University, questioned the justice’s decision to speak at the hotel, which is at issue in lower-court cases challenging the constitutionality of payments to Mr. Trump’s companies.
“At this highly divisive political moment, especially as many Trump decisions are likely soon to reach the court’s docket, one just days later, a healthy respect for
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Aug 18th, 2017 3:35 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Charities are ditching Mar-a-Lago.
The Cleveland Clinic, the American Cancer Society, and the American Friends of Magen David Adom all said on Thursday that they wouldn’t hold their 2018 galas at the resort. The organizations have held their annual events at Mar-a-Lago for several years.
On Friday, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army said they would not host their events at Mar-a-Lago either. The Red Cross said in a statement that “it has increasingly become a source of controversy and pain for many of our volunteers, employees, and supporters.”
Susan G. Komen, the breast-cancer organization, also on Friday said it would not host its gala at the resort, according to The Washington Post.
It’s only pocket … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Trump
Aug 18th, 2017 11:19 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump said at that scarifying q and a on Tuesday that the counter-protesters didn’t have a permit. He was lying.
“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. . . . You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
— President Trump, remarks during a news conference on infrastructure, Aug. 15, 2017
In blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville that left one person dead, President Trump twice asserted that
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Tags: Trump
Aug 18th, 2017 11:03 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The arts and humanities commission.
The remaining members of a presidential arts and humanities panel resigned on Friday in yet another sign of growing national protest of President Trump’s recent comments on the violence in Charlottesville.
Members of the President’s Committee are drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the broader arts and entertainment community and said in a letter to Trump that “Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.”
“Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville,” the commissioners wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Friday morning. “The false
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Aug 18th, 2017 10:19 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times reports that Trump has decided to “remove” Bannon…but also that it may take him some time. (Should we start a pool on whether he can get Bannon out before he himself is “removed”?)
President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.
The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.
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Tags: Steve Bannon, Trump
Aug 17th, 2017 4:09 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Speaking of beautiful statues that are causing Donald Trump to mourn and pine when they are moved from one spot to another, a couple of Facebook friends have been reminding us of some that were demolished altogether decades ago. They adorned what was then Bonwit Teller at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in Manhattan.
At the very top of the facade were limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing. The architects were Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, super-traditional Beaux-Arts designers of mansions and clubs — a puzzling choice for a such an outré building. In time the reliefs would become a Bonwit Teller signature.
Beginning in the 1960s, a series of corporate
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4 comments
Tags: Trump
Aug 17th, 2017 3:07 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Ok, here’s a new low. Trump has tweeted that we should commit a war crime to stop terrorism. (Joke’s on him: war crimes are terrorism.)
President Donald Trump appeared to cite an apocryphal story about an American general executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines and defiling their bodies with pig blood in the wake of a deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday.
After first condemning the attack and offering the United States’ support, the president said to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” an apparent reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era General John J. Pershing that Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail.
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5 comments
Tags: Trump
Aug 17th, 2017 2:38 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Freemage on An early Confederate rallying cry.
If you go to Gettysburg, they have a driving trail that you go along, through the fields. Dotted throughout are the usual monuments describing key battles, but there’s also a host of monuments built declaring when individual units first arrived (typically on the spot of their original location), the unit’s composition and then listing the casualties suffered by the unit.
These monuments appear to have been individually funded by different organizations dedicated to the memory of the units–which means that the Daughters of the Confederacy have been able to inscribe the Confederate memorials with phrases like, “The brave souls from Alabama.” My father-in-law lives in Baltimore, after growing … Read the rest
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