I have a guess - there's only one "L" person I routinely annoyed. :-)
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There's a lot of new music this month that I'm liking:
And live albums (what do you do when you can't tour? Release a live album):
]]>Not even faking it anymore
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George H.W. Bush was the last president to serve with adult children. I don’t remember any discussions about the cost of protecting his kids.
]]>My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017
David Brooks:
“...it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty. The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.”
(a slight correction to Mr. Brooks - the 8 year old was an American citizen.)
]]>Fascinating, well sourced, paranoia. Of course, it’s not paranoia if they really are after you.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5#.e6hencxu9
]]>Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach resort owned by the Trump Organization, doubled its initiation fee to $200,000 following the election of Donald Trump as president.
"In a letter sent today to President-elect Trump, a bipartisan group of organizations and individuals with expertise in governance issues called on Trump to divest his business enterprises or face serious conflicts of interest and Emoluments Clause problems as president.”
"The 29 signers to the letter included Republicans and Democrats, liberal and conservative groups."
]]>http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/mar-a-lago-donald-trump-new-years-eve-party-233070
]]>Of course.
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Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016
Put aside that every single word of that state is false. (It was George W. Bush’s White House that claimed to be convinced that Iraq had WMDs, not CIA intelligence officers. The election was only a month ago — we’re still closer to election day than we are to Trump’s first day in office. Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes and his Electoral College win ranks 46th out of 58 in history.)
Glenn Waller, the head of ExxonMobil operations in Russia, said on Tuesday that the company will return to its joint oil project with Rosneft in the Russian Arctic once sanctions against Moscow are lifted.In an article from today:
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name the chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) as the country's top diplomat, NBC News reported Saturday.From McClatchy:
]]>Putin’s association with Tillerson goes back to the 1990s, when Tillerson ran Exxon’s Russian operations. In 2013 the Russian president awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship, one of Russia’s highest honors for foreigners.
These people do not think the normal rules apply to them and so far there’s no reason to believe that any of the Trump family or the Kushner family plan to sacrifice anything in order to serve the public. In fact, all the evidence shows they plan to take full advantage of their connections. Just this past weekend, it was revealed that when Ivanka met with the Japanese prime minister her company was in intense negotiations with a major Japanese retailer — which is partially owned by the Japanese government. They’re just going for it.]]>
It’s hard to pick out one quote. You’ll have to read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/04/us/politics/trump-family-ivanka-donald-jr.html
]]>]]>Remember when Sean Hannity called Obama elitist for getting Dijon mustard on a hamburger? https://t.co/YVzVL4g7Jh
— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) December 1, 2016
Mr. Trump has acknowledged a conflict of interest in Turkey. “I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” he said during a radio interview last year with Stephen K. Bannon, the Breitbart News executive who has since been designated his chief White House strategist. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one. Not the usual one. It’s two.”
These tangled ties already have some members of Congress — including at least one Republican representative — calling on Mr. Trump to provide more information on his international operations, or perhaps for a congressional inquiry into them.
“You rightly criticized Hillary for Clinton Foundation,” Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, said in a Twitter message on Monday. “If you have contracts w/foreign govts, it’s certainly a big deal, too. #DrainTheSwamp”]]>
As the clock ticks down towards President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, the window is rapidly closing on the General Services Administration’s opportunity to extricate itself from the Trump Organization’s lease of the historic Post Office Pavilion. The lease—in which Donald Trump would, in effect, be both landlord and tenant—now presents unprecedented and intolerable conflicts of interest.
http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2016/11/gsas-trump-hotel-lease-debacle/133424/?oref=ge-iphone-interstitial-continue&oref=ge-iphone-interstitial-continue
Remember all the news reports suggesting, without evidence, that the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising created conflicts of interest? Well, now the man who benefited from all that innuendo is on his way to the White House. And he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire.
My favorites:
"Trump acknowledges the DC hotel he owns is "probably a more valuable asset than it was before." Says the brand is "hotter.””
"Trump on his businesses/conflict q's: "The law's totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of interest.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/live/trump-at-the-new-york-times-the-tweets/
]]>President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.via The Washington Post.
One of Dan Quayle’s old staffers is keeping a list of the ways Trump could offend the constitution.
http://time.com/4578431/donald-trump-conflicts-of-interest-list/
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