And speaking of trying to slash budgets for everything that’s not weapons or presidential travel while also pissing it away on graft and trumpian whims – Donnie’s Excellent Parade will cost between 10 and 30 million.

Trump’s military parade would cost between $10 million and $30 million, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Wednesday.

Mulvaney offered the estimate during questioning at the House Budget Committee. He said the White House hasn’t yet budgeted for the parade and would either rely on Congress to appropriate funds, or use money that already has been approved.

“The estimates I’ve seen, they’re very preliminary, is between 10 [million dollars] and 30 [million dollars] depending upon the length,” Mulvaney said. “Obviously an

Trump’s proposed budget (which mercifully won’t get through Congress) slashes science and the arts and humanities, while in another part of the forest his hires steal public money in every creative way they can think of. The latest example:

Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored an email and made false statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover expenses for the secretary’s wife on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general has found.

Vivieca Wright Simpson, VA’s third-most senior official, altered language in an email from an aide coordinating the trip to make it appear that Shulkin was receiving an award from the Danish government — then used the award

Oh gee, poor White House, they’re all in a mess again because of Porter and Wray and why won’t it just stop? All they want is to be left in peace to take away Medicare and Medicaid and subsidies for health insurance and the EPA and food stamps and a few other tiny things.

The White House struggled Tuesday to contain a widening crisis over its handling of domestic violence allegations against a senior official, as it reeled from sworn testimony by the FBI chief that directly contradicted what President Trump’s aides had presented as the official version of events.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the bureau had completed a background report on then-staff

One of Trump’s new besties is a decidedly overt racist. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:

A Republican challenger to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan drew international criticism over the weekend for tweeting an image that replaced the mixed-race fiancée of Prince Harry with a dark-skinned prehistoric Briton known as “Cheddar Man.”

As of Sunday afternoon, Paul Nehlen’s Twitter account had been suspended.

The provocation is only the latest for Nehlen, an outrage artist who has used this technique to help his campaign raise funds and in turn pay his wife a salary. Last month, Nehlen drew criticism for making anti-Semitic tweets and then posting the contact information of ordinary citizens who called and emailed to berate him.

In a tweet

The awfulness of Sarah Sanders.

She dripped disdain.

She oozed contempt.

“If you were paying attention to what I just read to you . . .” she huffed, like an exasperated teacher reprimanding a classroom troublemaker.

No, worse than that, really. More like an angry prison guard. That horrible scowl of hers goes way beyond exasperated.

Watching the press secretary at Monday’s briefing, the words that came to mind were these: A new low.

Yes, a new rock-bottom from the podium at the Trump White House press briefing.

And that is really saying something, given the lying-from-day-one reign of Sean Spicer, along with Sanders’s own fulsome history of dissembling, and the 10-day flameout of Anthony Scaramucci last summer.

Not … Read the rest

https://twitter.com/dodo/status/963186469526413312… Read the rest

NBC News offers some explanation of why Rachel Brand has quit her job.

The Justice Department’s No. 3 attorney had been unhappy with her job for months before the department announced her departure on Friday, according to multiple sources close to Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand.

Brand grew frustrated by vacancies at the department and feared she would be asked to oversee the Russia investigation, the sources said.

The sources say the WalMart job had been in the works for some time.

As far back as last fall, Brand had expressed to friends that she felt overwhelmed and unsupported in her job, especially as many key positions under her jurisdiction had still not been filled with permanent,

Scott Pruitt, destroyer of the EPA, is not stinting himself on luxury accommodations on the taxpayer’s dime.

Just days after helping orchestrate the United States’ exit from a global climate accord last June, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt embarked on a whirlwind tour aimed at championing President Trump’s agenda at home and abroad.

On Monday, June 5, accompanied by his personal security detail, Pruitt settled into his $1,641.43 first-class seat for a short flight from the District to New York City. His ticket cost more than six times that of the two media aides who came along and sat in coach, according to agency travel vouchers; the records do not show whether his security detail accompanied him at

Julie Bindel on charity organizations and prostitution:

Just when I thought my opinion of pro-prostitution lobbyists could not get any lower, I see a tweet by one about the Oxfam scandal: “Buying sex from professionals is not sexual misconduct and women in Haiti may well have been glad to get the sex work. I hate prissy Establishment fiddle-faddle implying ‘development’ workers are ethical puritans or saints.”

There you have it. The idea that the women involved in prostitution in Haiti are somehow benefiting from being bought and sold by the very men that are supposed to be helping them cope with their hellish existence.

Let us consider what this person is defending. Oxfam’s country director in Haiti, Roland van