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Tuesday Reads: Trump Being Trump Is Going To Kill Us All

Posted: March 27, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , |35 Comments

Good Morning!!

I’ve been feeling almost catatonic with shock for the past few days, ever since Trump appointed John Bolton as National Security Adviser. And that was on top of his nomination of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State.

It just feels as if we’re inching closer and closer to a real world-wide disaster. With those two in charge, it seems likely Trump will pull us out of the Iran agreement and maybe even get us into wars in Iran and North Korea. The joke’s over, folks. This is getting way too real.

The photos of baby elephants in this post are an attempt to keep me from going completely around the bend.

At The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky writes: Trump Does Trump, and Things Get Worse. Tomasky notes that Trump appears to have concluded that he doesn’t need advisers who tell him he can’t do what he wants to do. He’s decided to run the country the way he the business that he repeatedly drove into bankruptcy.

The hiring of John Bolton highlights Donald Trump’s instability, his total lack of any coherent worldview, and most of all—and most dangerously of all—his need to feel that no limits are being imposed on him. Here’s what I mean. When talking foreign policy, sometimes Trump sounds like Bolton, with all that overheated rhetoric he’s thrown at Kim Jong Un. But at other times, he’s an isolationist. At still other times, like when he’s agreeing to meet with Kim with no preconditions, he’s a Neville Chamberlain in the making. (By the way, is Lloyd’s of London taking odds yet on whether that summit will actually happen?)

So if he wasn’t happy with H.R. McMaster and wanted new blood, he could have gone in any number of ways. That he chose the guy who will reinforce his worst instincts tells us, I think, that what he values most (aside from unquestioning loyalty) is someone who won’t hem him in; in other words, Trump may decide to launch a first strike against North Korea, or he may not. But if he does, by God, he doesn’t want some globalist ninny telling him not to. So the principle at work here is not hawkishness per se. It’s having someone who won’t tell him no.

Tomasky discusses Trump’s ludicrous handling of economic issues, and his total lack of knowledge and understanding of how legislation is crafted. Now Trump is facing the Stormy Daniels problem, and it may get him into real trouble:

The Stormy Daniels story was kind of non-newsy on certain levels. That Trump slept with a porn star and behaved crudely toward her is about the least shocking thing in the world. But the threats made against her are the real story here. That’s going to be the new iteration of this story, and depending on how it plays out it stands the chance of reminding the country of something that many have forgotten, or never knew: The president of the United States has mob ties.

Here’s David Cay Johnston cataloguing a few of them, like how Trump went out of his way to use Mafia-controlled companies to pour the concrete for Trump Tower. The great Wayne Barrett was the master chronicler of all this, going back to the 1990s. All you need to know for now is that back in the day, the government of Australia denied him a permit to open a casino in Sydney because the government deemed him to be too mobbed up. Trump will say of this failure that he lost interest in Australia, but Australia also lost interest in him.

How can anyone who is paying attention not be frightened to have this idiot running our government?

At Vox, Zach Beauchamp writes about one serious problem with Trump’s two recent appointments: How John Bolton and Mike Pompeo mainstreamed Islamophobia.

John Bolton, President Trump’s pick for his next national security adviser, and Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick to be the next secretary of state, are well-known hawks. Less well known are their deep and extensive ties to an organized group of anti-Muslim writers and activists.

The members of the so-called “counter-jihad” movement aren’t exactly household names. But its leading lights — people like Reagan Defense Department official Frank Gaffney, activist Brigitte Gabriel, and blogger Pamela Geller — are surprisingly well-financed and influential. Their major arguments include the idea that Islam is an intrinsically violent religion and that most mainstream American Muslim organizations are involved in a secret plot to replace American law with Islamic law. One “study” published by Gaffney’s organization, the Center for Security Policy, argued that 80 percent of mosques in America “are incubators of, at best, subversion and, at worst, violence and should be treated accordingly.”

Neither Bolton nor Pompeo has endorsed views this radical, though both have come relatively close. In February 2015, Pompeo appeared on Gaffney’s radio show and warned darkly of an Islamic conspiracy against America.

“There are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways,” Pompeo said in a February 2015 interview on Gaffney’s radio program. “They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”

Bolton, for his part, has defended the Islamophobic attacks against Huma Abedin, a Muslim American who spent years as a top aide to Hillary Clinton. Some Republican members of Congress accused Abedin being a secret Islamist operative (which, it goes without saying, is wholly unfounded) in 2012; that July, Bolton went on Gaffney’s show and said there was nothing wrong with that line of attack. “What is wrong with raising the question?” Bolton asked.

Read all the scary details at Vox.

The Economist on Pompeo’s religious views:

Even among broadly conservative watchers of American foreign policy, there is worry that Mr Pompeo’s apparent sectarian sentiment might be a problem. In the words of Robert D. Kaplan, a veteran global-affairs writer, Mr Pompeo “emblemises an increasingly theological bent in American politics, and in particular in a strand of American conservatism.” This contrasted with earlier eras when “American leaders were often churchgoers but their governing spirit was refreshingly secular.”

As is noted by Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution think-tank, Mr Pompeo comes across as an educated person whose negative ideas about Islam are more thought-through, and hence perhaps more worrisome, than the “visceral, almost incoherent” suspicion of that faith which Mr Trump exuded as a candidate. “It is not a good thing when the public face of American diplomacy holds views which demean an entire religion,” says Mr Hamid.

Several things have earned Mr Pompeo the reputation of being a kind of latter-day Crusader. One is a video clip in which he argues vigorously that at least some individuals are motivated by their Muslim beliefs, and by things they read in the Koran, to commit terrible violence. Watched closely, the video does not show him to believe that all Muslims think that way. What is more striking is the remedy of Christian solidarity he proposes: Islam-inspired terrorists “will continue to press against us until we make sure…we know that Jesus Christ is the only solution for our world.”

There is also concern about Mr Pompeo’s reaction to the bomb attack on the Boston marathon in 2013. As a Congressman, he said Muslim leaders who failed to condemn the outrage, and to call it incompatible with Muhammad’s teaching, were “potentially complicit”. Arsalan Iftikhar, a writer and lawyer who helps run an anti-Islamophobia programme at Georgetown University, was one of many Muslim-Americans who found those comments insulting to leaders of Islam in America, who used all their authority to excoriate the bombing.

Read the rest at link.

Could Trump’s behavior with women finally be causing serious problems for the GOP? The New York Times: After Stormy Daniels, Republicans Face a Referendum on Trump’s Conduct.

When Representative Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania announced on Sunday that he would join more than 40 other congressional Republicans not seeking re-election in November, he left no doubt about the reason: President Trump’s conduct made it impossible to talk about anything else.

Were he running, Mr. Costello said in an interview, he would be inundated with questions about Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels, who has said she had an affair with Mr. Trump and was threatened to stay silent about it.

“If I had a town hall this week, it would be question after question,” Mr. Costello said. “‘Do you believe him or do you believe her? Why don’t you believe her?’”

While Republicans have been bracing for months for a punishing election in November, they are increasingly alarmed that their losses may be even worse than feared because the midterm campaign appears destined to turn more on the behavior of the man in the White House than any other in decades.

As much as gun control, immigration, the sweeping tax overhaul and other issues are mobilizing voters on the left and the right, the seamy sex allegations and Mr. Trump’s erratic style could end up alienating crucial blocs of suburban voters and politically moderate women who might be drawn to some Republican policies but find the president’s purported sex antics to be reprehensible.

Some funny quotes from the article:

“Trump is way more than the proverbial elephant in the room — he’s the elephant in the room with political bad breath, B.O. and a foul mouth,” said Ace Smith, a veteran Democratic consultant, who argued that the last time a president’s conduct loomed so large in congressional midterms was in the post-Watergate election of 1974….

“I don’t see headlines with: ‘Porn star sues Nancy Pelosi,’” said Representative Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat, when asked about his party’s polarizing House leader.

Trump’s new “trust his gut” approach has talking about bringing back fired staffer Rob Porter. I’ll bet that would be a big hit with women voters. Wonkette reacts: Sad And Lonely Trump Misses His Old Wife-Beaty Friend Rob 😦

A few days/years back, the White House unceremoniously fired a guy whose main fault seems to be that he loves Donald Trump for some reason. His name was Johnny Feelgood, Johnny Right On, Johnny Miss You, Johnny Light On, Johnny Makes Me Feel Strangely Good About Myself, AKA Johnny McEntee. He was Donald Trump’s body man, and he is very pretty, and UH OH seems to have gotten himself into some fraudy financial trouble of some sort, for which he is being investigated by the Secret Service.

We only bring up Johnny McEntee to point out that that he would be a completely reasonable person for Donald Trump to be pining for, wandering the halls of the West Wing with a Big Mac stuffed down the front of his pants and a lost look in his eyes. Instead, Donald Trump is reportedly broken-hearted and lost without Rob Porter, the guy who got fired from the White House because he couldn’t stop beating his wives all the time, which meant he couldn’t get a permanent security clearance. Yeah, THAT guy.

Maggie Haberman reports, because of course it is Maggie Haberman:

President Trump has stayed in touch with Rob Porter, the former White House staff secretary who stepped down after allegations that he had abused his two former wives came to light, according to three people familiar with the conversations, and has told some advisers he hopes Mr. Porter returns to work in the West Wing.

Oh for Christ’s sake. Without a security clearance? Because remember how Rob Porter can’t get a security clearance because he’s a rage douche who couldn’t stop beating his wives all the time?

Haberman reports that Trump ‘n’ Rob are always on the phone talking about clothes and boys and tariffs because, big sadface, Trump has fired everybody else, or else they have quit. Hope-y Hicks is gone, McMaster has cleared out his office to make room for John Bolton’s mustache grooming table, and of course Johnny Feelgood is off being hot in greener pastures, and though many of the people who have left the White House were fired in petulant fits of rage by the historically stupid man known as President Poop Waffle, that doesn’t mean the president doesn’t hate to see them go. This is because the president of the United States is a pathetic and lonely person who doesn’t have real friends.

Now look, don’t assume Trump is going to let his head get ahead of his heart and sneak Rob into the White House or anything:

The president has told the advisers he has talked with that he knows he probably cannot bring Mr. Porter back.

Because of the whole wife-beater thing. 😦

This is our reality now. This moron is the “president.” What stories are you following?

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35 Comments on “Tuesday Reads: Trump Being Trump Is Going To Kill Us All”

  1. bostonboomer says:
    March 27, 2018 at 11:16 am

    More links to check out:

    WaPo: The story behind 11-year-old Naomi Wadler and her March for Our Lives speech.

    NYT: John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment.

    WaPo: ‘Not in a punch-back mode’: Why Trump has been largely silent on Stormy Daniels.

    The Daily Beast: The Allegedly Murderous Oligarch, the Duped CIA Chief, and the Trumpkin.

    Politico: How Trump favored Texas over Puerto Rico.

    Buzz Feed: Christopher Steele’s Other Report: A Murder In Washington.

  2. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 11:24 am

    Those baby elephants are adorable!

    • Enheduanna says:
      March 27, 2018 at 3:39 pm

      I love the happy face on that first one and the one dipping his trunk in the water trough??? That is too adorable for words.

  3. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 12:00 pm

    Hey BB. Thought you might like to read this:

    http://blogs.wgbh.org/on-campus/2018/3/23/campus-radio-purdues-mitch-daniels-kaplan-acquisition/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_term=20180327&utm_content=1440941250

    • dakinikat says:
      March 27, 2018 at 12:02 pm

      (Mitch Daniels) Market research tells us [Purdue] is known for academic excellence particularly in the, what are now known as the STEM disciplines, but also for being a place that is resolute about remaining accessible and affordable to students. We have not raise tuition here in five years we won’t again next year. Lowered the cost of other things to be less expensive in unadjusted dollars to attend Purdue and 2019 than it was in 2012. Now both those things are highly consistent with a land grant heritage that we never lose sight of. We were put here by Abe Lincoln and his allies to open the doors of higher education beyond the wealthy beyond the privileged and the elites. While we pursue excellence in research and scholarship every day, we are still tightly wedded to that mission of extending the franchise of education. And that’s really what the move toward what will now be produced Global is about.

      (OCR) Purdue Global will be a combination of Purdue and Kaplan. What do you think Kaplan is known for?

      (MD) They are known for bringing higher education to those who missed it the first time. Their typical, or the average student, at what has been Kaplan University is a 33-year-old woman, three-fourths are women, with a family and a job who had some college credit but didn’t finish. Life somehow intervened. And helping those working adult learners get to the finish line is a proven way to improve their opportunities in life, their income and the range of jobs that they are qualified for and one of the most important things can happen to the country. Every day’s news is about the skills gap, the good jobs that are going unfilled.

      (OCR) And you think they’ve done a good job?

      (MD) I do think they’ve done a good job. We spent a lot of time looking at that. Unlike some of their peers they have been willing to be accountable. They have measured, for instance, the income results two years, five years out for their graduates. They’ve worked hard on trying to help their graduates succeed.

      • dakinikat says:
        March 27, 2018 at 12:12 pm

        http://blogs.wgbh.org/on-campus/2018/3/24/purdue-kaplan-make-unconventional-bid-reach-adult-students/

        With the number of college-age students declining, schools in the Midwest and New England face tough times. That’s why some schools struggling to control their costs are embracing older learners online to weather the storm.

        In his annual State of the University address in Boston, University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan said he wants to expand online courses to reach working class adults.

        “Growing our online footprint will make a UMass education more affordable, not just by delivering it at a lower cost but by generating revenue to hold costs down for all of our students,” Meehan said.

    • bostonboomer says:
      March 27, 2018 at 3:22 pm

      Thanks, will read!

  4. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 12:19 pm

    BB listed it but I want to reiterate: Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chicagoinc/ct-met-stevens-2nd-amendment-0328-chicago-inc-20180327-story.html

    The Chicago-born Northwestern grad, 97, wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times Tuesday that the constitutional right to bear arms is “a relic of the 18th century.”

  5. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 12:27 pm

  6. Pat Johnson says:
    March 27, 2018 at 12:38 pm

    There is a plague on this land by the name of Trump. Nothing is safe from this scourge. Just be certain that anything that bears the signature of Barack Obama is poised to be obliterated as soon as the document is presented to the virus named Trump who will gladly scrawl his name across the document, feeling as if he has achieved something during his miserable stewardship.

    Today the military transgender people are once again on the chopping block. This directive from a man who never served. The environment is at risk as he goes about deregulating everything in sight in response to the greedy corporations and CEOs he admires.

    Tax laws have been enacted that swell the coffers of the already rich while the middle and working class scramble. Healthcare has been repeatedly threatened and hangs on by a thread. Hurricane victims in Puerto Rico are summarily ignored. DACA is still undecided while voting rights take hit after hit in order to appease the POTUS.

    Porn stars and Playmates have invaded the Oval Office. Treaties have been torn up. War talk trickles down with dubious appointments of hawkish advisers being named. Cabinet members continue to drain the treasury and the public with their preferred tastes of privilege.

    The gun lobby continues to flourish. Military weapons are still available with few age limits imposed. White supremacy has found a home in this current atmosphere of hate and distrust. Our allies distrust us. Our enemies are embraced. Democracy has taken hit after hit by this man who is without intelligence, compassion or integrity. His word cannot be trusted. His is a fake and a dangerous one at that.

    This makes so many of us uneasy. Strictly speaking I am not concerned by his various infidelities since he was elected with the knowledge of the Access Hollywood tape. His idiot supporters saw nothing wrong then or now. They are hypocrites. Totally without value who could and still do support this vacant, hollow, evil man.

    I would much prefer to see and hear from those whose businesses were ruined by Trump’s failure and refusal to pay his bills. Those who suffered monetary loss at the hands of a lawyered up deadbeat. These people running a small business were also threatened with lawsuits because Trump found it enjoyable to cheat those who were unable to fight back. Let us hear from them.

    Someday there may be an antidote for the plague that is Trump. Meanwhile, we must patiently sit back and hope that the day may soon arrive. I fear it will require a lot of patience and hard work to rid us of this infection called Trump.

    Justice must be brought to bear against this stain. I never thought I would live to see anything this horrendous in my lifetime.

    • Enheduanna says:
      March 27, 2018 at 1:12 pm

      I’m seeing more and more articles about some of his fed-up constituency. They turned on him in the PA special election and the coal miners are waking up now that their health care is threatened.

      I would also like to see these voters – who he never cared a nickel for in the first place – to wake the fk up.

    • bostonboomer says:
      March 27, 2018 at 3:24 pm

      Pat, your comment should have been on the front page!

    • RonStill4Hills says:
      March 28, 2018 at 10:46 am

      I think that the purpose is to do as much damage as possible in order to convince his authoritarian would be fascist minion that good ( democratic ) government is impossible and that an America First strong man is needed.

  7. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 1:54 pm

    Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, is awarded the Kennedy Profile in Courage Award

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/03/27/mitch-landrieu-mayor-of-new-orleans-is-awarded-kennedy-profile-in-courage-award/?utm_term=.fea90d375d66

    • Sweet Sue says:
      March 27, 2018 at 7:16 pm

      What’s your on the ground take on Landrieu, Dak?

      • dakinikat says:
        March 28, 2018 at 9:50 am

        He’s been key in touristifying everything. Most of us are pretty pissed at him.

        https://newrepublic.com/article/144446/democrats-deserve-better-mitch-landrieu9

        Never mind that Landrieu’s administration led New Orleans into this year’s hurricane season with its drainage system in shambles. Never mind that the form of centrism Landrieu is peddling—formalized in August under the recycled banner of “New Democracy”—is terminally confused. In this moment, with months of Trumpism behind us and many more to go, Landrieu has juice.

        When will we stop mistaking the hollow oratory of unexceptional centrists for steadfast moral leadership?

        • dakinikat says:
          March 28, 2018 at 9:52 am

          It’s frustrating to watch Landrieu rhapsodize about policy issues he doesn’t truly fight for. But what’s more concerning is his apparent misunderstanding of New Orleans’ oldest and most pervasive problems. He says he wants to alleviate gun violence, poverty, crime, mass incarceration, and economic inequality, but he doesn’t seem to see grasp why it is important to address these problems simultaneously.

          That poverty is at the root of crime is indisputable. But as Landrieu leaves office, only 1 percent of the city’s budget is dedicated to economic development and opportunity, while 44 percent of black men in New Orleans remain jobless. The city’s poverty rate has risen since his inauguration, leaving one out of two black children living in poverty. Perhaps he believes it is coincidence that areas of concentrated poverty are also the ones that suffer the highest levels of gun violence.

          But Landrieu’s approach to crime reduction has never highlighted economic revitalization. He is a disciple of the antiquated ideology that says crime is the product of culture, and that culture should be primarily altered through arrests and incarceration. One in seven black men in New Orleans is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. It is difficult to imagine how this system of incarceration, taken to an even greater extent, could possibly be the answer.

          In 2015, Mitch Landrieu debated Ta-Nehisi Coates on the best ways to aid areas of concentrated crime. “There is a culture of violence that permeates certain sections of the United States,” Landrieu claimed.

          Coates responded:

          I think what we often miss when we talk about culture is that it becomes an easy way to not acknowledge that people are making rational decisions within the life, within the structures, within the places they live. . . . We have redlined to herd certain people into certain neighborhoods. We deprive those neighborhoods of resources. We deprive those neighborhoods of jobs. We create what sociologists call “criminogenic conditions.” . . . We have to start taking the structural forces that got us here seriously.

          Even if law enforcement were the key to crime reduction, Landrieu has failed in this regard. Despite his pledge to create a stronger police force, there are 29 percent fewer police officers in the NOPD than when he came into office, turning private security companies that patrol rich neighborhoods into booming businesses. Emergency 911 response times have nearly doubled.

          Meanwhile, New Orleans had the fourth highest homicide rate in the country in 2016, a rate nearly 60 percent higher than Chicago’s. And 2017, so far, has been even deadlier. Landrieu, despite his attempts to curb crime through law enforcement, will leave the city with a higher homicide and violent crime rate than it had when he took office.

          9

    • RonStill4Hills says:
      March 28, 2018 at 12:49 pm

      Where is Mary?

      Is she still in politics?

      • dakinikat says:
        March 28, 2018 at 1:22 pm

        Mary’s a lobbyist now. I think she is totally out of it. I haven’t seen her do anything public since she lost her re-election to that moron Cassiday

  8. bostonboomer says:
    March 27, 2018 at 3:27 pm

    NPR: ‘They Don’t Care’: Whistleblower Says Cambridge Analytica Aims To Undermine Democracy

    https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/27/597279596/they-don-t-care-whistleblower-says-cambridge-analytica-seeks-to-undermine-democr

  9. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 3:39 pm

    • dakinikat says:
      March 27, 2018 at 3:44 pm

      New tax cuts are unlikely to spur business investment to any large extent, according to a new survey conducted by the Atlanta Fed in conjuction with academics.
      The survey shows some three-quarters of executives had made no spending plans at all in response to the passage of the tax cuts.
      “We’re sticking with our initial assessment that the potential for a sharp acceleration in near-term output growth is limited,” Atlanta Fed economists write.

      I worked for the Atlanta Fed. It’s not hotbed of liberal economists there.

    • NW Luna says:
      March 27, 2018 at 8:56 pm

      Hmmm, sounds like Krugman et al. were right all along. Of course.

      Trump knows nothing about economics, and even if he did the whole tax scam was designed to make rich people even more rich.

  10. Pat Johnson says:
    March 27, 2018 at 5:42 pm

    I love elephants!

    60 Minutes did a piece one year on saving baby elephants whose mothers had been murdered and it showed their “human emotions” up close.

    They weep and mourn their dead. The easily show affection. They parent well. They are glorious creatures who must be protected at all costs.

    Those who hunt them are murderers. There is no reason on earth that could possibly be warranted.

    Long live these noble and amazing animals.

  11. dakinikat says:
    March 27, 2018 at 5:49 pm

    Read the letter Kraft left on plane for Parkland students

    https://sports.yahoo.com/read-letter-kraft-left-plane-173849746.html

    At the suggestion of former U.S. congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona – who survived a shooting in 2011 – and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, Kraft loaned one of the team’s two planes to fly about half of the families of the 17 of the victims of the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at the high school, a handful of the students who were injured, and a group of students who would be performing a song at the march on Saturday in Washington.

    A copy of the letter and a Patriots’ cap was left on each of the students and families’ seats on the plane.

  12. NW Luna says:
    March 27, 2018 at 9:00 pm

    Zuckerberg’s refusal to testify before UK MPs ‘absolutely astonishing’

    Mark Zuckerberg has come under intense criticism from the UK parliamentary committee investigating fake news after the head of Facebook refused an invitation to testify in front of MPs for a third time.

    The chair, Damian Collins, said it had become more urgent the Facebook founder give evidence in person after oral evidence provided by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie. The MP said: “I think, given the extraordinary evidence we’ve heard so far today, it is absolutely astonishing that Mark Zuckerberg is not prepared to submit himself to questioning in front of a parliamentary or congressional hearing, given these are questions of fundamental importance and concern to his users, as well as to this inquiry. “I would certainly urge him to think again if he has any care for people that use his company’s services.”

    Zuckerberg has been invited three times to speak to the committee, which is investigating the effects of fake news on UK democracy, but has always sent deputies to testify in his stead.

    MPs are likely to take a still dimmer view of his decision if he decides to testify before Congress in the US. It was reported on Tuesday that he may do so, with CNN suggesting that he has bowed to public pressure and that the company is now considering strategy for his testimony.

    Previously, when the committee travelled to Washington DC in February to obtain oral evidence from US companies, Facebook flew over its UK policy director rather than send a high-level executive to speak to the committee.

    Zuckerberg is a coward. And no, he has no care for the people who use Facebook.

    • NW Luna says:
      March 27, 2018 at 9:03 pm

      Mark Zuckerberg agrees to testify before Congress over data scandal

      A date has not yet been set, and the spokesperson for the House committee declined to confirm reports that the hearing was scheduled for 12 April.

      The Senate judiciary and commerce committees have also invited Zuckerberg to appear at hearings. His decision to testify before the US Congress was first reported by CNN, and contrasts with his refusal to appear before members of parliament in the UK.
      …
      However, news of US congressional evidence paves the way for a major showdown for Zuckerberg, 33, who has come under increasing pressure from lawmakers and the general public to account for Facebook’s business practices since the company acknowledged last September that it had sold advertisements to Russian agents seeking to influence the US presidential election.

      In October, Facebook sent its general counsel, Colin Stretch, to run the gauntlet of two days of congressional hearings while Zuckerberg travelled to China and shared photos of his Halloween costume on his Facebook profile.

      But the clamor for a show of public accountability reached a fever pitch following the Observer’s reporting that the Facebook data of about 50 million Americans was acquired by the political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica after being harvested by another company.

    • quixote says:
      March 27, 2018 at 10:21 pm

      Zuck is an amoral bundle of inadequacies. Faceblot was *started* to track the “hotness” of “chicks.” (Those being women smart enough to get into Harvard.) With a mentality like that, in what universe could he ever be expected to care about what anyone else needs or wants? The only potentially decent thing I know about him is that he married his college sweetheart and hasn’t made an exhibition of himself humiliating her.

      As for testifying: in the UK there are mostly people, politicians, media, who don’t get money from NRA, Russia, etc etc etc. He’d face real questions, plus European privacy laws (until Brexit, March 2019). In the US? Tons of Repub (and Dem?) congresscritters are complicit in taking tainted money, and they’d never be rude to a billionaire in any case.

      He expects to skate through it here and he knows he wouldn’t there.

      • NW Luna says:
        March 27, 2018 at 10:37 pm

        …hasn’t made an exhibition of himself humiliating her.

        As far as we know. Yet.

        I recall that back when FB and MySpace were both things, FB had the reputation of being for mainstream whites whereas MySpace attracted more POC and non-mainstream people — possibly because of the music focus. Then FB shot past them with memberships and MySpace dived downhill.

        I like a lot about Twitter, but not some of its recent changes. Especially irking is the lack of customizability in what you’re sent. Can’t restrict the feed to only the people you follow — it puts in lots of what other people liked and that can drown out the tweets from people you do follow. It’s often a good way to get news and links to info, assuming you follow legit people and not Faux News.

  13. NW Luna says:
    March 27, 2018 at 10:23 pm

    Another nauseating chronic sexual assaulter.

    Larry Nassar’s former boss arrested over nude pictures of female students

    A Michigan State University official who oversaw a clinic that employed Larry Nassar was charged on Tuesday with sexually harassment and compiling nude student selfies on his work computer, in the first charges to spring from an investigation into how complaints against the disgraced former sports doctor were handled.

    William Strampel, who until December was dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, was also charged with failing to enforce or monitor protocols set for Nassar after a female patient complained of inappropriate sexual contact.

    The 70-year-old Strampel, who has been jailed, was scheduled for arraignment in the afternoon. His attorney, John Dakmak, declined to comment.

    The complaint, which alleges Strampel solicited nude photos from at least one female medical student, said he used his office to “harass, discriminate, demean, sexually proposition, and sexually assault female students in violation of his statutory duty as a public officer.”

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