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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Times reported on the bleak mood among Trump’s people yesterday. (Sometimes urls are oddly…striking. “trump-charlottesville-military-jews-ceos.html” hmmmm yeah.) There’s a good deal of interesting information.

President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on Wednesday, abandoned by the nation’s top business executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va.

The breach with the business community was the most striking. Titans of American industry and finance revolted against a man they had seen as one of their own, concluding Wednesday morning they could no longer serve on two of Mr. Trump’s advisory panels.

They’re good with the wholly “business can do no … Read the rest

Eileen Sullivan at the Times analyzes Trump’s latest white supremacist rant.

Officials in several states have called for the removal of public monuments that have become symbols of the Confederacy.

The Twitter posts were the latest in his escalating remarks that critics contend validate white supremacist groups who led a bloody rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va. The proposed removal of a statute of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park in Charlottesville spurred the demonstrations.

Mr. Trump’s tweets came the morning after his personal lawyer forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that painted Lee in glowing terms and echoed secessionist sentiment from the Civil War era.

WHAT??

Oh, god, … Read the rest

Trump has been outdoing himself this morning.

Join me at 7:00 P.M. on Tuesday, August 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona at the Phoenix Convention Center! Tickets at: https://t.co/2kUQfKqbsx pic.twitter.com/5ua74dlVtq

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

Yet another fascist rally, because we haven’t had enough fascist rallies yet. Yet another opportunity to worship the dear führer, because he can never have enough worship because he is so revoltingly narcissistic and needy.

Publicity seeking Lindsey Graham falsely stated that I said there is moral equivalency between the KKK, neo-Nazis & white supremacists……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

…and people like Ms. Heyer. Such a disgusting lie. He just can't forget his election trouncing.The people of South Carolina will

CNBC tells the story of how the CEOs decided to say bye-bye to Trump.

After President Donald Trump’s incendiary comments last weekend about the violence in Charlottesville, the three female CEOs on his Strategic and Policy Forum helped get the ball rolling about appropriate responses.

The question, as they saw it, was whether it was better to remain on the Trump forum, with the ability to influence the White House? Or did it make more sense to back away to show disdain for the president’s seeming support of white nationalists?

It would be several days before the full forum ultimately made a decision. But by Monday the CEOs of Pepsi, IBM and GM – Indra Nooyi, Ginni Rometty