Mar 20th, 2018 4:31 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
People expect so much of Trump – he can’t even make a damn personal phone call without kibitzers turning up to list all the things he didn’t talk about.
President Trump on Tuesday congratulated President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his recent re-election victory, but failed to ask him about either the fairness of the Russian vote, which Mr. Putin won with a lopsided margin, or about allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Trump also did not raise Russia’s apparent role in a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil — an act that prompted the United States to join with Britain, France and Germany in denouncing
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Tags: Trump
Mar 20th, 2018 11:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The New York Post reports an exclusive:
President Trump must face a defamation suit filed by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos after a Manhattan Supreme Court judge denied him immunity through his job as the nation’s commander-in-chief.
“In Clinton v Jones the United States Supreme Court held that a sitting president is not immune from being sued in federal court for unofficial acts,” Justice Jennifer Schecter wrote in a ruling released Tuesday, citing the sexual harassment suit that led to the 1998 impeachment of President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
This means that Zervos can pursue her defamation case against Trump for saying she made up the story that … Read the rest
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Tags: Trump
Mar 20th, 2018 11:15 am |
By Ophelia Benson
While Prince Jared is wondering if he’s really in deep doo-doo over those falsified building permits, Princess Ivanka is off pretending to be A Scientist.
She’s a fashion marketer, so what she has to offer anyone on subjects like infrastructure or wtf is in this tube-thing, god only knows. #Nepotism baby!… Read the rest
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14 comments
Tags: Princess Ivanka
Mar 20th, 2018 10:29 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Kushner Company is in the spotlight.
The New York City Council and a local tenants rights group announced on Monday that they would launch a joint investigation into the real estate company formerly headed by Jared Kushner, a top aide to President Donald Trump, over alleged falsification of building permits.
The group and a city councilman said at a press conference that they had uncovered evidence that Kushner Companies, the developer headed by Kushner until early last year, had falsified more than 80 work permits involving 34 buildings in New York.
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Aaron Carr, executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, said the company failed to disclose the existence of rent-stabilized units in buildings, a move that allowed it
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Tags: Prince Jared
Mar 20th, 2018 9:43 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump has called Putin to congratulate him on stealing another election.
President Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his reelection victory in a phone call on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.
At the White House, Trump confirmed the call and said he congratulated Putin “on the victory.” Trump said they would get together “in the not too distant future.”
Yes, the “victory” which he “won” by imprisoning or otherwise hobbling all the other candidates.
Some world leaders have hesitated to congratulate Putin, since his reelection occurred in an environment of state control of much of the news media and his most prominent opponent was barred from the ballot.
Picky picky picky.
Putin won a fourth presidential term in Sunday’s Russian
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Tags: Putin, Trump
Mar 19th, 2018 5:31 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on They can’t see what they can’t see.
I get frustrated with the way this debate gets framed. It’s not that the “ideas” that Damore and his ilk promote are “off limits,” as Coyne would have it. It’s that they are such inferior ideas when it comes to explaining our present reality.
I have no quarrel with the abstract notion that women and men may differ, whether biologically or for culture-driven reasons that we don’t wish to change, in ways that mean that not every profession will end up with a 50/50 split of men and women even when we have achieved complete and utter Gender Equality Utopia. Call this the Gender Differences … Read the rest
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Mar 19th, 2018 4:17 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
I wrote a post on Facebook a bit ago:
You know what I’m sick of? I’ll tell you what I’m sick of. I’m sick of men writing think pieces explaining why women should be perfectly happy to see men writing think pieces about how women just happen not to be suited to all those careers in which they’re a minority, because it’s their temperament to be too nurturing and cuddly to be suited for [desirable job X].
I’m sick of seeing those men never pause for one second to take into account the fact that being seen as unsuited for [desirable job X] IS ITSELF AN OBSTACLE and that they themselves are adding to the obstacle by lecturing us on
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Mar 19th, 2018 2:32 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
About Cambridge Analytica…
Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
If law enforcement … Read the rest
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Mar 19th, 2018 10:59 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump decides to hire another wack job for his legal team, because things aren’t weird enough yet.
President Trump has decided to hire the longtime Washington lawyer Joseph E. diGenova, who has pushed the theory on television that Mr. Trump was framed by F.B.I. and Justice Department officials, to bolster his legal team, according to three people told of the decision.
Good idea; that’s what Don needs: more wack jobs on his “legal team.”
Mr. diGenova is not expected to take a lead role but will instead serve as a more aggressive player on the president’s legal team. Mr. Trump broke over the weekend from the longstanding advice of some of his lawyers that he refrain from directly attacking the
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Tags: Trump
Mar 18th, 2018 5:21 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump plans to kill more people.
President Donald Trump will roll out new plans to tackle the country’s opioid epidemic on Monday in New Hampshire, the White House said Sunday. The plan will include stiffer penalties for high-intensity drug traffickers, including the death penalty for some dealers, Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, told reporters Sunday.
The concept of the death penalty for certain drug traffickers is something Trump has been outspoken about, but this will be the first time it will be part of an official administration plan.
“The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty against drug traffickers when it’s appropriate under current law,” Bremberg told reporters during a phone call Sunday
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Tags: Trump
Mar 18th, 2018 3:56 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Ruth Marcus on Trump’s efforts to control what people say about him:
[Robert] Costa [in April 2016]: “One thing I always wondered, are you going to make employees of the federal government sign nondisclosure agreements?”
Trump: “I think they should. . . . And I don’t know, there could be some kind of a law that you can’t do this. But when people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that. I mean, I’ll be honest. And people would say, oh, that’s terrible, you’re taking away
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Mar 18th, 2018 11:12 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Post sums up the state of play:
McCabe’s firing — coupled with the comments from Trump and his personal attorney, John Dowd on Saturday — marked an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between the president and the special counsel, whose probe Trump has long dismissed as a politically motivated witch hunt.
Or to put it another way, an extraordinary acceleration of the battle between Trump and the rule of law.
[Trump’s personal lawyer John] Dowd said in a Saturday morning statement, “I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s
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Mar 18th, 2018 9:44 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Kushner sleaze unveiled:
When the Kushner Cos. bought three apartment buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood of Queens in 2015, most of the tenants were protected by special rules that prevent developers from pushing them out, raising rents and turning a tidy profit.
But that’s exactly what the company then run by Jared Kushner did, and with remarkable speed. Two years later, it sold all three buildings for $60 million, nearly 50 percent more than it paid.
Now a clue has emerged as to how President Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s firm was able to move so fast: The Kushner Cos. routinely filed false paperwork with the city declaring it had zero rent-regulated tenants in dozens of buildings it owned across the
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Tags: Prince Jared
Mar 18th, 2018 9:03 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump is trying hard to lay the groundwork for firing Mueller.
Fox and Friends…a show on a network that’s notorious for Just Plain Making Shit Up and for being ardent, immovable fans of President Pussygrabber.
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