President-elect Donald Trump will name Andy Puzder, CEO of a major fast-food chain, to serve as Labor secretary, according to Bloomberg.
Puzder, who’s the CEO of CKE Restaurants, met with Trump for the second time on Wednesday. CKE Restaurants is the parent company of burger chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.
During Thursday morning’s transition call, Trump aides wouldn’t confirm or deny that Puzder would be tapped for the position, but said there will “additional Cabinet information” announced later in the day.
Puzder served as an economic adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and has been a vocal opponent of President Obama’s controversial rule expanding overtime pay.
Obama’s rule, which would require overtime pay for most salaried workers who make less than $47,476 annually, is temporarily on hold due to a Texas court’s order.
In an op-ed published in May, Puzder argued that the rule adds to the “extensive regulatory maze the Obama Administration has imposed on employers.
International Franchise Association’s President and CEO Robert Cresanti applauded Trump’s expected nomination, calling Puzder “an exceptional choice” to helm the Labor Department.
Thursday Reads: Trump’s Inferno
Posted: December 8, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads, Trump, We are so F'd 63 Comments
Well, the year 2016 continues to be a challenging one. I seriously can’t look at any type of media without wanting a script for a happy pill along with a huge bottle of Jamison. It’s just really like living through the Divine Comedy. We’re getting closer and closer to the lower levels as we’re approaching the first season of the Mad King of Hell.
Today’s circle is the one where the Greedy push boulders against the boulders of the Wasteful. It’s a sin against sin extravaganza. Maybe the WWE executive Linda McMahon can arrange for something compelling? I’m sure it’s more up her alley than her pending appointment to lead the SBA into oblivion.
The WSJ has a great article behind it’s awesome paywall illustrating exactly how much of a spider’s web Trump Enterprises represents with the news that it would take an army of forensic scientists and hackers to figure out all the combinations of potential conflicts the Mad King of Hell has with enemy states and other states and his portfolio. Here’s a brief description from WAPO’s Plum Line. The oligarchy of kleptocrats is nearing perfect completion. This continues to be the perfect storm for the End Days of OUR Republic.
If you want to understand why the conflicts-of-interest involving Donald Trump’s business holdings and presidency could matter enormously in the months and years to come, read this single sentence buried in today’s big Wall Street Journal piece about those holdings:
It’s not clear how much Mr. Trump’s businesses would benefit from his proposal to cut business tax rates.
The key part of that sentence is the phrase, “it’s not clear.” The Journal piece reports that Trump has employed a “web” of limited liability companies to house assets accounting for over $300 million of the revenues he reported in disclosure forms last year. The crucial revelation in the piece is that these entities are a key reason why many of the specific details of Trump’s holdings remain shrouded in “opacity.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports this morning: “Trump is considering formally turning over the operational responsibility for his real estate company to his two adult sons, but he intends to keep a stake in the business and resist calls to divest, according to several people briefed on the discussions.”
As I’ve reported, if Trump merely turns his businesses over to family members (never mind whether he keeps a stake), it will not remove the potential for conflicts or even corruption. His family could stand to benefit from his policy decisions, or alternatively, other entities could seek to curry favor with the new president through deals that benefit his businesses, and by extension, his family (or himself, if he keeps a stake). Ethics experts believe only putting his interests into a genuine blind trust, via the liquidation of his assets, would truly remove the possibility of conflicts.
But, now that this looks unlikely to happen, what needs to be emphasized is not simply that such conflicts are very real possibilities, though that’s important. It also matters greatly that our lack of knowledge of the full range and scope of his interests makes it hard to evaluate whetherthese conflicts are taking place in any given situation, and if so, what they truly mean. And that’s where the new Journal story comes in. Here is the rub of the matter:
None of the 96 LLCs examined by the Journal appear to regularly release audited financial statements. That opacity — compounded by Mr. Trump’s decision to break with decades of precedent by declining to release his tax returns — makes it impossible to gauge the full extent of potential conflicts between his business interests and presidential role.
The scope and complexity of Mr. Trump’s private business holdings is unprecedented for incoming presidents, said Norman Eisen, President Barack Obama’s former White House ethics lawyer. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
It’s not clear how much Mr. Trump’s businesses would benefit from his proposal to cut business tax rates.…
Mr. Trump’s wealth is impossible to measure with precision. His financial disclosure form isn’t externally audited and — following government rules — often uses bands, such as more than $50 million, rather than exact amounts to report assets and revenue or income. Only a handful of the hundreds of entities listed in Mr. Trump’s financial disclosure publish audited financial statements — and those figures don’t necessarily illuminate Mr. Trump’s financial situation.
Trump has called for huge tax cuts, including for top earners and businesses, and Congressional Republicans are all but certain to go forward with the same. But, as the Journal points out, we cannot know what impact these policies will have on Trump’s own businesses — or his family’s.
Trump has no intention of giving up his stake in the family kleptocracy. Hey, why should he? No one can even get him to release his taxes. It’s going to take a full on court battle to get him do do anything remotely constitutional or legal. It’s his MO.
Meanwhile, the appointments to the Cabinets continue to be Orwellian. The meetings will likely resemble those infamous scenes from the “Wolf Of Wall Street”. Trump is naming a fast food CEO to be Labor Secretary that will make you ill.
And now, if President-elect Donald Trump has his way, an enemy of the Fight for $15 movement will lead the U.S. Labor Department.
On Thursday, Trump revealed that he had nominated Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants, to be Labor Secretary. CKE Restaurants is the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., two fast food companies that have been targeted by Fight for 15. Puzder himself is on record as an opponent of raising the minimum wage, and has said that he would like to try automating service more service jobs in response to wage hikes.
Then, there is further evidence that Trump has no idea what he’s doing in terms of US diplomacy. To make matters worse, his latest possible appointment as Secretary of State is so bad that he makes Rudy G look tame by comparison. Remember disgraced shill Rep. Dana Rohrabacher? He’s out there defending Russia’s Human Rights Record. Again, Trump’s new mantra for the American people is let them all rot and die while we get rich. As long as Trump et al become rich as Russian Oligarchs, we can just suffer.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has emerged as a dark-horse pick for Donald Trump’s secretary of state, tangled with a Yahoo News host Wednesday over whether Russia is a major human rights abuser. Rohrabacher’s verdict: It’s “baloney.”
The exchange is pretty remarkable — in part because he was debating a Yahoo host who just happens to be from the former Soviet Union, but mostly because Rohrabacher seemed to dismiss long-standing and documented evidence of abuses in Russia. Rohrabacher seemed to take exception to Russia being mentioned in the same breath as China when it comes to human rights abuses.
I doubt seriously the Republic will withstand all of this. In his farewell to the Senate, outgoing Senate Majority Leader and future retiree Harry Reid believes the filibuster will soon be dead.
To hear Reid tell it, the party’s electoral collapse wasn’t a result of poor messaging or even a bad candidate. It stemmed from looser campaign finance rules, FBI Director James Comey and the influence of a few powerful individuals — namely the Koch brothers, his long-running nemeses. The outgoing Senate minority leader is unapologetic on behalf of his party, and remains resolute that Democrats don’t need to chart a new political course after their 2016 debacle.
“They have Trump, I understand that. But I don’t think the Democratic Party is in that big of trouble,” Reid said in a half-hour interview with Politico on Wednesday, one day before he’ll deliver his farewell address. “I mean, if Comey kept his mouth shut, we would have picked up a couple more Senate seats and we probably would have elected Hillary.”
And Reid not only refused to admit any misgivings about invoking the “nuclear option” for most nominations — a move that’s backfiring now by empowering Republicans — he predicted it’s just a matter of time before the filibuster is done away with altogether.
Though the filibuster is Democrats’ best weapon against Trump, Reid said it would be a “mistake” for his party to reflexively oppose whatever Trump proposes. But the outgoing minority leader also wants Democrats to stand firm for their core principles, urging lawmakers to do “everything in their power” to block “wacky” Supreme Court nominees and to not be “complicit” in supporting GOP priorities like tax cuts for the rich and repealing Obamacare.
Frankly, any Democrat should OPPOSE everything the Republicans try to do at this point. It’s our only hope.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Chaos Happens
Posted: December 5, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, American Gun Fetish, Black Lives Matter, Congress, misogyny, morning reads 44 Comments
It’s Monday! It’s cold, gloomy, drizzly, thundering, and gray here in Swampland. I’m trying to decide when exactly we get to start the America Held Hostage Day count. At the moment, I’m holding out hope on a few bits of good news so I’m going to start on that note.
A judge has ordered a Presidential Election recount in Michigan so Trump and the Michigan AG can stew in their evil soup with their evil hearts.
A federal judge has ordered Michigan election officials to begin a massive hand recount of 4.8 million ballots cast in the presidential election at noon Monday.
U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith issued a ruling just after midnight Monday in favor of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who sought to let election officials bypass a two-business-day waiting period that would have delayed start of the recount until Wednesday morning.
Goldsmith’s order said the recount “shall commence and must continue until further order of this court.” Goldsmith wrote.
The deadline to finalize the vote total for the Electoral College is Dec. 13 and federal election law requires a period of “safe harbor” for presidential electors before the presidency is finalized on Dec. 19.
The manual recount process was scheduled to begin Wednesday as specified by state law, and in a rare Sunday hearing in federal court, Goldsmith had questioned the harm posed by waiting.
“Defendants shall instruct all governmental units participating in the recount to assemble necessary staff to work sufficient hours to assure that the recount is completed in time to comply with the ‘safe harbor’ provision,” of federal election law.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJvYo5pZEfE
Senate Democrats may actually be steeling themselves for a fight over nominations if you believe what’s being reported on Tiger Beat on the Potomac. Will enough of them stall the Republican menace headed our way? There’s an old church down the street dedicated to St. Jude built during the yellow fever days. Maybe I should adopt that altar for awhile.
Senate Democrats are preparing to put Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks through a grinding confirmation process, weighing delay tactics that could eat up weeks of the Senate calendar and hamper his first 100 days in office.
Multiple Democratic senators told POLITICO in interviews last week that after watching Republicans sit on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court for nearly a year, they’re in no mood to fast-track Trump’s selections.
But it’s not just about exacting revenge.
Democrats argue that some of the president-elect’s more controversial Cabinet picks — such as Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Steven Mnuchin for treasury secretary — demand a thorough public airing.
“They’ve been rewarded for stealing a Supreme Court justice. We’re going to help them confirm their nominees, many of whom are disqualified?” fumed Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “It’s not obstruction, it’s not partisan, it’s just a duty to find out what they’d do in these jobs.”
Senate Democrats can’t block Trump’s appointments, which in all but one case need only 51 votes for confirmation. But they can turn the confirmation process into a slog.
The latest abomination of appointing a political lackey with absolutely no credentials for the job is Ben Carson to HUD. It appears that Trump is just going to fill the cabinet with one Heckuva Job Brownie after another. I don’t see much point in excerpting the bad news which you can go read at the NPR link if you so choose.
First Americans have won a concession from the Army Corps of Engineers. The agency will find a way to avoid the land of a sovereign nation of Lakota. The Feds have denied the permit to build the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Federal officials have denied the final permits required for the Dakota Access Pipeline project in North Dakota.
The Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday announced it would instead conduct an environmental impact review of the 1,170-mile pipeline project and determine if there are other ways to route it to avoid a crossing on the Missouri River.
“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” Army Assistant Secretary for Civil Works Jo-Ellen Darcy said in a statement.
“The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”
The announcement comes one day before the Army Corps of Engineers’ deadline for demonstrators to leave the protest site. The governor of North Dakota had also issued an emergency evacuation order.
Protestors have clashed with police, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a Sunday statement that the Department of Justice “will continue to monitor the situation in North Dakota in the days ahead” and stands “ready to provide resources to help all those who can play a constructive role in easing tensions.”
One of the weirdest things to come out of the trend of right wingers to completely fall for fake news happened in the District this weekend. A whack from NC with a very large gun showed up at a restaurant to investigate a supposed child sex ring Hillary Clinton was running at the location. How dumb exactly are these Trump-Billies and how dangerous are they?
A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.
The incident caused panic, with several businesses going into lockdown as police swarmed the neighborhood after receiving the call shortly before 3 p.m.
Police said 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee was able to flee and notify police. Police said Welch proceeded to discharge the rifle inside the restaurant; they think that all other occupants had fled when Welch began shooting.
Welch has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Police said there were no reported injuries.
Interim D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said police arrived on the scene minutes after the first call, set up a perimeter and safely arrested Welch about 45 minutes after he entered the restaurant.
This shooter lives in a conspiracy theory hell realm.
One of the key pieces of “evidence,” for example, comes from the emails WikiLeaks says came from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. The emails include references to pizza. The conspiracy theory holds that based on how frequently pizza comes up, “pizza” must be code for pedophilia.
Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis told NPR that the entire theory is “an insanely complicated, made-up, fictional lie-based story” that people in the “reality-based” community quickly dismissed as an “insane sort of joke.”
But on the fringes of the Internet, some people have been taking it seriously. The restaurant has received hundreds of death threats. Now it has had an actual armed assault.
You can wonder no further when I saw that I avoid going to Jefferson Parish whenever possible. This is 
a white flight community of some of the worst looking strip malls and houses you could ever imagine. It’s also home to the folks that think Steve Scalise and David Duke are election material.
A former Jets Player was gunned down in a road rage incident and the Sheriff has basically let the man go because he may be “standing his ground”. New photo imagines of the scene show that to be highly unlikely. What isn’t likely but well documented is that we still need the Black Lives Matter movement more than ever. The white dude that shot the former player and black man has been cited for road rage incidents before.’
New details are emerging about 54-year-old Ronald Gasser, the man who confessed that he shot and killed former NFL player Joe McKnight in New Orleans last Thursday, an apparent road rage incident. According to the Jefferson Parish sheriff, Gasser was arrested at the same intersection a decade ago for another road rage incident in which he allegedly followed a victim and punched him several times. NBC’s Blake McCoy reports for TODAY.
The man who was attacked by Gasser was spit on but not shot. Try guessing the key variable in this scenario that saved his life.
As of Saturday night, no charges had been brought against Gasser, who was released Thursday night by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office after questioning. The decision to release Gasser without pressing charges has prompted outrage on social media and led to questions about Louisiana’s stand-your-ground law.In recent days, McKnight’s family members, friends, teammates and supporters have expressed grief and outrage over the killing. At a candlelight vigil held Saturday night at the Lincoln Manner Gym in Kenner where McKnight first made a name for himself as a high school football standout, around a dozen speakers expressed anguish over the road-rage-prompted fatal shooting.
“It was senseless,” U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune at the vigil. “You’re in a car with the ability to drive away, with the ability to roll your windows up, and you feel the only choice you have is to shoot three times? I can’t comprehend that.”
I can only imagine how bad it’s going to get for all of us that don’t fall into the neat little category of “safe” that only the mind of a Trump-Billy can conjure. We can only look forward to more incidents of white male violence against minorities and women. I’d be willing to be the kathouse on it.
That’s it for me today! Please share what you’re reading! I hate to just keep raining bad news on your head like the weather down here rains the cold. So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Civics Lessons and Incivility Lesions
Posted: November 25, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: Trump Family Kleptocracy 65 Comments
Well, it just keeps getting stranger and stranger …
It does feel like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of sorts. Let me sort out some of the stranger headlines for you.
Lawrence Lessig–one of the most brilliant legal minds we have today–suggests we let the electoral college actually choose the winner of the Presidential election. He argues that this is what Hamilton had in mind when he and other framers of the US Constitution designed the Electoral College. Will any of the Electors listen?
Conventional wisdom tells us that the electoral college requires that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president. That view is an insult to our framers. It is compelled by nothing in our Constitution. It should be rejected by anyone with any understanding of our democratic traditions — most important, the electors themselves.
The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].” But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice” — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule “the people” or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
Many think we should abolish the electoral college. I’m not convinced that we should. Properly understood, the electors can serve an important function. What if the people elect a Manchurian candidate? Or a child rapist? What if evidence of massive fraud pervades a close election? It is a useful thing to have a body confirm the results of a democratic election — so long as that body exercises its power reflectively and conservatively. Rarely — if ever — should it veto the people’s choice. And if it does, it needs a very good reason.
So, do the electors in 2016 have such a reason?
Jill Stein continues her fundraising and path to recount and challenge three key swing states with a variety of statistical anomalies in a year where it was obvious the Russians wanted to hack and influence the results. Stein has raised over $4.5 million dollars.
Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is preparing to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states.
Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a multimillion-dollar fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states.
Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities.
“These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified,” she said in a statement. “We deserve elections we can trust.”
Stein’s move came amid growing calls for recounts or audits of the election results by groups of academics and activists concerned that foreign hackers may have interfered with election systems. The concerned groups have been urging Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee, to join their cause.
Donald Trump won unexpected and narrow victories against Clinton in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin earlier this month and may yet win Michigan, where a final result has not yet been declared.
I am hoping but not hopeful. There’s evidence that “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.”
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem with facebook conversions of all sorts.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
“They want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” said Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who along with two other researchers has tracked Russian propaganda since 2014. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”
The Trumpanzee Center for Orwellian Cabinet appointments demands an apology from Mitt Romney. Criticizing the Orange Apeman is simply not allowed.
Fox News is reporting that Donald Trump’s transition team wants Mitt Romney to publicly apologize for railing against the president-elect during the campaign.
A transition official told Fox’s Ed Henry that some in Trump’s inner circle want the former Massachusetts governor to apologize in order to be seriously considered for the secretary of State.
Trump is reportedly considering whether to pick Romney or former New York City Mayor Rudy Giulianifor the coveted cabinet position.
Giuliani is the preferred choice of Trump’s loyalists and grassroots supporters, while Romney is a favorite of establishment conservatives.
Mount Doom is about to become the White House if we can’t stop the Orange Apeman from taking the oath of office. It will cost us millions and millions of dollars … It also means that Federal Taxpayer money will go directly to the Trump Family Kleptocracy.
The Secret Service is in negotiations with the Trump Organization to take over two vacant floors in the gilded 68-story Fifth Avenue tower, law enforcement sources told The Post.
The federal agency and the NYPD plan to run a 24/7 command post out of the space that would be housed at least 40 floors below Trump’s $90 million penthouse triplex, where wife Melania and their 10-year-old son Barron will continue to reside at least through the spring, sources said.
The first 26 floors of the glass-clad skyscraper are commercial tenants while the remaining levels are luxury apartments.
But several commercial floors are currently vacant, sources said. The Secret Service is eyeing two contiguous floors for over 250 agents and cops, sources said.
The Secret Service must protect the president and his family wherever they go, including visits back to their permanent homes.
Meanwhile in the furtherance of destroying public education, we have Cruella DeVile being put up as Secretary of Education. Betsy DeVile is best known as a full fledged member of the American Extremist Christoban Terrorist cult.
The DeVoses are top contributors to the Republican Party and have provided the funding for major Religious Right organizations. And they spent millions of their own fortune promoting the failed voucher initiative in Michigan in 2000, dramatically outspending their opposition. Sixty-eight percent of Michigan voters rejected the voucher scheme. Following this defeat, the DeVoses altered their strategy.
Instead of taking the issue directly to voters, they would support bills for vouchers in state legislatures. In 2002 Dick DeVos gave a speech on school choice at the Heritage Foundation. After an introduction by former Reagan Secretary of Education William Bennett, DeVos described a system of “rewards and consequences” to pressure state politicians to support vouchers. “That has got to be the battle. It will not be as visible,” stated DeVos. He described how his wife Betsy was putting these ideas into practice in their home state of Michigan and claimed this effort has reduced the number of anti-school choice Republicans from six to two. The millions raised from the wealthy pro-privatization contributors would be used to finance campaigns of voucher supporters and purchase ads attacking opposing candidates.
And the kleptocracy continues as “Steve Bannon’s data firm in talks for lucrative White House contracts: Cambridge Analytica is backed by Robert Mercer, whose daughter is on the Trump transition team, while Trump’s soon-to-be chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is on the board”. Republicans aren’t so found of balanced budgets know that the funds are streaming into their billionaire donors’ nasty pocketses.
The data company that helped push Donald Trump to victory is now hoping it will win two lucrative contracts to boost White House policy messaging and to expand sales for the Trump Organization.
Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm that uses personality profiling, claims Steve Bannon as a board member, who will soon officially be Mr Trump’s chief strategist.
The firm is backed by billionaire investor Robert Mercer, whose daughter Rebekah sits on the 16-person Trump transition team.
The news casts further shade over the president-elect’s potential conflicts of interest, after a group of Indian businessmen came to Trump Tower this week and the revelation that Mr Trump’s children, who have sat in on meetings with world leaders, would run his “blind trust”. He has faced increasing calls to divest from his business assets to avoid further conflicts.
The Republican National Committee would have to approve any deals with Cambridge Analytica as it normally pays for White House communication consultants.
Yes folks, the Trump Kleptocracy is resplendent with obvious conflicts of interest.
In a blatant conflict of interest, President-elect Donald Trump’s new Washington, D.C. hotel is marketing rooms to foreign diplomats looking to curry favor with his incoming administration.
The Washington Post reports that the Trump International Hotel — in the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue that the president-elect’s company leases from the federal government — staged a reception for the diplomatic community on Tuesday, one week after the election.
Several diplomats who attended the reception told the Post that spending money at the hotel is “an easy, friendly gesture to the new president.”
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’” one Asian diplomat said. “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’”
The arrangement violates no ethics laws because the president is exempt from rules barring federal employees from profiting from their positions.
He’s basically going to be impeachable from DAY ONE.
But he said that the answer would be different if a foreign government sought to make a payment to a sitting president. In a footnote, Mr. Barron added, “Corporations owned or controlled by a foreign government are presumptively foreign states under the Emoluments Clause.”
Mr. Trump’s companies do business with entities controlled by foreign governments and people with ties to them. The ventures include multimillion-dollar real estate arrangements — with Mr. Trump’s companies either as a full owner or a “branding” partner — in Ireland and Uruguay. The Bank of China is a tenant in Trump Tower and a lender for another building in Midtown Manhattan where Mr. Trump has a significant partnership interest.
Experts in legal ethics say those kinds of arrangements could easily run afoul of the Emoluments Clause if they continue after Mr. Trump takes office. “The founders very clearly intended that officers of the United States, including the president, not accept presents from foreign sovereigns,” said Norman Eisen, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for Mr. Obama from 2009 to 2011.
We’re so completely fucked that there will never be enough lubricant to help us.
I continue to be despondent here in the land of swamps. Enjoy the last days of the Republic. We’ll be struggling to keep it from here on out.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: There must be No New Normal
Posted: November 21, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Crime | Tags: Elections have consequences 56 Comments
We must fight all efforts to normalize a Trumpified America and a press that tries to normalize right wing hate groups and the behavior of a leader with a Personality Disorder. There are too many people in this country whose lives will be getting appreciably worse. There is already an explosion in the number of hate crimes. If you cannot be a fighter then be an active witness to all of this and maintain the position that this is unique and in no way normal then speak your mind and values.
>TL Noelle feeling overwhelmed.
November 17 at 4:44pm ·
Driving for Uber in Murfreesboro and got a call for a pick up at MTSU. Once I got there, I saw 3 guys hovering threateningly over a young woman wearing a hijab. I called my rider and saw the woman check her phone and answer it, and through the phone and my window I heard one of the guys yell, “Don’t answer your phone when we’re trying to talk to you, didn’t anyone teach you manners over there?”
I was instantly filled with some crazy, angry adrenaline and thought, “I need to get her home safely.” I turned off the car, and got out, clutching the can of mace on my keychain tightly. I used the woman’s name to greet her. She looked up as I asked how she was, making a joke about how she seemed to be hanging out with the wrong crowd. One of the guys stepped forward and started to say I should turn around – I continued to walk towards the young woman and talk to her while raising my hand with the can of mace and very deliberately turned off the safety. The guy stepped away from me, and I put my arm around the woman and walked with her towards the car. I helped her in and then got in and drove down the road a ways where I pulled over to ask the young woman if she needed anything, and to allow myself to stop shaking.
The young woman was speechless most of the ride home but she got there safely, and I gave her my card in case she felt unsafe calling an Uber again some evening. I’m overwhelmed that I witnessed that happening and handled it that well… but I’m done with racism in this country. I will never not speak up.
We still haven not seen the President Elect’s taxes. What sort’ve fresh hell do they contain? We also know that he has not stopped conducting his personal business and that he is actively meeting with people that are funneling money to him from foreign countries. Don the Con is continuing to enrich himself with taxpayer money.
President-elect Donald Trump reportedly met this week at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners, raising fresh questions about a separation between the Trump’s business and future work in the White House.
Trump’s children, who are part of his presidential transition team, also attended the meeting with Atul Chordia, Sagar Chordia and Kalpesh Mehta, according to India’s Economic Times.
The business partners are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai. A picture of Trump standing alongside the men while giving a thumbs up was posted on Twitter earlier this week.
The meeting comes as Trump vowed to hand off his business to his three adult children in a blind trust to avoid potential conflicts of interest while serving in the Oval Office.
A spokeswoman for Trump told The New York Times that the three Indian real estate executives flew from India to congratulate Trump.
“It was not a formal meeting of any kind,” said Breanna Butler, a Trump Organization spokeswoman.
Butler and Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, declined to comment when asked by the Times if the meeting included any discussion of Trump businesses in India or expanding that business.
But Donald Trump Jr. showed interest in expanding the business further in India, Mehta told the Economic Times.
A former deputy editor at GQ India told the Times that he hosted an event at Sagar Chordia’s hotel during the presidential campaign, saying the Indian businessman expressed “elation” about the opportunities Trump’s candidacy could bring.
https://twitter.com/shubham9601/status/798650633632890880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
This meeting with real estate developers from India is most definitely a conflict of interest.
According to a report from The New York Times on Saturday, Trump met with Sagar Chordia, Atul Chordia and Kalpesh Mehta on Tuesday in Trump Tower. The three men have said in the past that they wished to expand their business relationship with the Trump Organization now that Trump has been elected run the country. Sagar Chordia confirmed by text message with The New York Times the accuracy of an Indian newspaper report saying the meeting had indeed been about expanding deals with Trump’s businesses.
Breanna Butler, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, has defended the incident on the grounds that “it was not a formal meeting of any kind.”
If the meeting had been legitimate, of course, one must question why it wasn’t formally announced by the Trump transition team at the time that it happened — especially considering the flak Trump has received for inefficiency in arranging meetings with foreign leaders.
This isn’t the first time Trump has been accused of cultivating his business relationships in inappropriate ways since being elected. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, Trump has business operations in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and a number of other countries, and has refused to either sell his business interests or give them to a so-called “blind trust” during his administration, as other presidents have done with their business ties in the past.
We face a presidency with enormous consequences for every one of us. The conflict of interests between Trump’s businesses and the public interest of the USA is enormous. We cannot ignore this. We can not let the press or any one else normalize this.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that foreign diplomats are booking rooms at Trump’s hotel in D.C., hoping to curry favor with the president-elect. The same paper reports today on the dangers associated with Trump’s “vast assortment of foreign business interests never before seen in past presidencies,” creating conditions that “could open him to foreign influence and tilt his decision-making as America’s executive in chief.”
The Post added that some of the potentially problematic deals are relatively new: during his presidential candidacy, Trump launched eight business deals “that appear tied to a potential hotel project in Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he ‘would want to protect.’”
And remember, Trump has no intention, at least not yet, of creating a blind trust for his investments and private-sector enterprises.
The Huffington Post had a good summary on the scope of the problem.
No president has ever held a fortune that spans the globe. He has licensed his name to buildings in far-flung countries, including Azerbaijan, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea and Turkey. Some are allies, some are ruled by autocratic dictatorships and some are at odds with American interests. Further, he owes hundreds of millions of dollars each to the government-owned Bank of China and the privately owned Deutsche Bank. The Trump Organization has plans to continue to expand the company around the globe during its namesake’s presidential administration.
Not only do these foreign holdings, debts and future deals present imminent conflicts of interest for American foreign policy, but they also create an immediate constitutional concern. The U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause states that no government official shall receive favorable payment from a foreign government, foreign government-owned company or foreign official without the consent of Congress. It is, in essence, an anti-bribery clause preventing foreign corruption.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who’ll serve as Trump’s chief of staff, insisted yesterday that the White House counsel’s office will “make sure” everything’s kosher. It wasn’t reassuring: Priebus didn’t explain exactly what steps the counsel’s office would/could take, and it doesn’t help address some of the ongoing questions arising now, during the transition process.
There’s no indication that Republicans are going to deal with this dangerous situation.
This morning, The Post published an ambitious effort to gauge the full scope of that business empire and the potential for conflicts it creates. The story concludes: “At least 111 Trump companies have done business in 18 countries and territories across South America, Asia and the Middle East.” Included in this are deals that were launched during Trump’s candidacy that are tied to a hotel project in Saudi Arabia, which Trump has vowed to protect militarily.
…
Governmental ethics experts believe all of this creates the potential for a variety of conflicts of interest. Trump has said he is turning his empire over to his children. But this doesn’t eliminate the potential problems here. Government policies, both domestic and foreign, could still impact his family’s holdings. Foreign governments or foreign companies controlled by foreign governments could still do business with Trump entities on terms favorable to the latter in an effort to curry favor with the new administration. One can even envision domestic businesses doing the same, in an effort to ensure against policies that run counter to their interests.
TPM documents that Don the Con is cashing in hugely in Argentina.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protest by their familiy disappeared, during the March by the life (Marcha por la Vida) against the Argentine military dictatorship that governed the country between 1976 and 1983. October, 5, 1982.
Photo: Eduardo Longoni
For a number of years, Trump and his Argentine partners have been trying to build a major office building in Buenos Aires. The project has been held up by a series of complications tied to financing, importation of building materials and various permitting requirements.
According to a report out of Argentina, when Argentine President Mauricio Macri called President-Elect Trump to congratulate him on his election, Trump asked Macri to deal with the permitting issues that are currently holding up the project.
This comes from one of Argentina’s most prominent journalists, Jorge Lanata, in a recent TV appearance. Lanata is quoted here in La Nacion, one of Argentina’s most prestigious dailies. Said Lanata: “Macri called him. This still hasn’t emerged but Trump asked for them to authorize a building he’s constructing in Buenos Aires, it wasn’t just a geopolitical chat.”
(For Spanish speakers, here’s the original Spanish we’ve translated: “Macri llo llamó. Todavía no se contó pero Trump le pidió que autorizaran un edificio que él está construyendo en Buenos Aires, no fue solo una charla geo política.”)
Separately, Trump’s business partner on the project, Felipe Yaryura, was there on election night at the Trump celebration in New York City.
Why aren’t we hearing about this in the American press?
Indeed, why not? We’re too busy picking on the cast of Hamilton. Top network execs and anchors will be meeting with Don the Con on Monday. This was arranged by the harpy of lies, campaign mommy.
Meanwhile, the real support of the Trump movement met in a neo-Nazi, KKK extravaganza. The press are conveniently calling the Heil Victory folks their preferred label of Alt-right. This is another thing we cannot normalize. We cannot normalize the Trump Reality.
What if the push against “normalizing” the potential horrors of a Trump administration ends up making the actual administration seem better by comparison?
In the 10 days since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency, critics — liberal and conservative alike — of Donald Trump and his inner circle have warned that his presidency will violate, undermine, and permanently weaken democratic norms. Comparisons have been made to the rise of Putinist autocracy in Russia (here at Vox and elsewhere), to the slow descent of Turkey into authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Nazi Germany.
People fret that the Trump administration will crack down on a free press; that it will only serve to enrich itself; that it will try to keep itself in power indefinitely. You’ve probably seen warnings that we shouldn’t even assume there will be another presidential election in 2020, because President Trump might have found a way to suspend or amend the Constitution by then.
Given everything that’s happened this year — including what the past two weeks have revealed about the Trump administration-in-waiting — it’s hard to say that planning for the worst-case scenario is irrational. The people most alarmist have, generally, been the most correct. (One notable exception: There was violence at neither the Republican National Convention nor on Election Day.)
But what if the reality of the Trump administration turns out to be not quite the worst-case scenario? What if it is simply very bad in less unprecedented ways? Won’t that seem, by comparison, normal?
This is the real danger of a fight against “normalization” that assumes that the country is being drawn inevitably down the road to authoritarianism: The Trump administration could take another path and go unnoticed.
Donald Trump probably won’t cancel elections, but he could — and is relatively likely to — oversee a sweeping rollback of voting rights. His administration may not throw journalists in jail, but it could easily step up surveillance of domestic protesters. His appointees may not entrench a permanent oligarchy, but it could still — for millions of people in America — reduce the willingness and ability to participate in public life to zero.
I have no doubt that I will be upset, depressed, angry, and despondent for quite some time. I will not accept this as the new normal me. None of this is normal. It’s what happens with something very dark takes over your country.
Meanwhile, the taxpayer will be footing a tremendous bill for the first family’s refusal to act like the first family. Melania will not move to the White House. Don the Con will spend most of his time in the Mount Doom which will have to be up-armored and blockaded a lot. There have been rumors that Baron is autistic and this might be the reason she doesn’t want him moved from his home in the Tower of Sauron.
The decision to remain in their Midtown home will increase the security presence around Trump Tower — an effort that will involve both Secret Service and the NYPD, an expert familiar with high-level security told The Post.
“That building is going to become the White House of New York,” said Jim Reese, a former Delta Force commander and president of TigerSwan, a global security company based in North Carolina.
Here’s a rumor mill if you’re interested in the speculation which is just speculation. It would be somewhat interesting that Trump felt so free to mock disabled people while having a son that could, himself, be disabled. It would also explain some of Don the Con’s fascination with the Anti-Vaxxers but that’s probably another thing that wouldn’t be disclosed. Just add to the pile of things that we’ll never know about the person who will be in the position to strip us of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I will resist. I will witness. I will fight.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: “Something wicked this way comes …”
Posted: November 18, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads | Tags: Elections have consequences, fascism, Racism 29 Comments
Welcome to the start of an Orwellian Dystopia. Will the Vichy Democrats enable the demise of Civil Rights? How many of us will stand up to defend our Bill of Rights?
A man deemed “too racist” to be a Federal judge by a judiciary committee led by Senate Republicans during the Reagan years has just been nominated to the be the nation’s head enforcer of Civil Rights law. Jeff Sessions “once joked that he only took issue with the KKK’s drug use and referred to civil rights groups as “un-American.”
The man who President-elect Donald Trump will nominate as the 84th attorney general of the United States was once rejected as a federal judge over allegations he called a black attorney “boy,” suggested a white lawyer working for black clients was a race traitor, joked that the only issue he had with the Ku Klux Klan was their drug use, and referred to civil rights groups as “un-American” organizations trying to “force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), an early Trump supporter who has been playing a major role on the Trump transition team, met with the president-elect in New York on Thursday. In a statement, the Trump team said the president-elect was “unbelievably impressed” with Sessions.
On Friday morning, Trump and Sessions confirmed that Sessions had been offered the attorney general position.
J. Gerald Hebert remembers Sessions’ time as the top federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama, well. Speaking to The Huffington Post earlier this month, Hebert said he was stunned that an Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a possibility.
More than three decades ago, Hebert was in his 30s and working on voting rights cases for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He was based in D.C. but spent time in Alabama working with Sessions, who was a U.S. attorney in Ronald Reagan’s administration.
“He was very affable, always wanting to have a conversation, a cup of coffee,” Hebert said. “Over the course of those months, I had a number of conversations with him, and in a number of those conversations he made remarks that were deeply concerning.”
After Sessions was nominated to be a federal judge in 1986, Hebert appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about these remarks. It was unusual for a career DOJ lawyer to testify about a judicial nominee’s character, and Hebert said at the time that he did so with “very mixed feelings,” telling senators he considered Sessions “a friend.” Hebert told them Sessions had “a tendency to pop off” and that he was “not a very sensitive person when it comes to race relations.”
HuffPost reviewed a transcript of the Sessions’ 1986 confirmation hearings. In this selection, Hebert testified that he had once relayed comments about a white lawyer being described as a race traitor, and that Sessions had responded by saying “he probably is” …
The ADL CEO has announced he will register as Muslim if such a registry–as promised by the future Trump Administration–is enacted. Many Jewish Americans are concerned with the threat of laws that remind them of Europe’s awful past.
The head of an organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism says he will register as a Muslim should President-elect Donald Trump create a national database for the religion’s followers.
“The new administration plans to force Muslims to register on some master list,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told listeners at the group’s Never is Now Conference in New York Thursday, according to Haaretz. “As Jews we know what it means to be forced to register.
“I pledge to you that because I am committed to the fight against anti-Semitism that if one day Muslim-Americans are forced to register their identities, that is the day this proud Jew will register as Muslim. Making powerful enemies is the price one must pay, at times, for speaking truth to power.”
Trump supporters have floated a registry of Muslim immigrants as part of efforts to combat radical Islamic terrorism, but officials with his transition team have denied any such plans.
Greenblatt added Americans must reject all forms of discrimination regardless of which minority group it targets.
“No one has an excuse for excusing intolerance. We must stand with our fellow Americans who may be singled out for how they look, where they’re from, who they love or how they pray,” he said
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), an immigration hard-liner who has been advising Trump, said Wednesday that transition policy advisers were debating the merits of such a database.
Many Holocaust survivors are as traumatized by this election as sexual assault survivors and victims of abuse.
The dramatic increase in anti-Semitism and hate crimes since Election Day is a horrifying flashback for veteran Jewish Americans.
…
“It’s a very traumatic time for survivors and their families,” said Eva Fogelman, PhD, a New York-based, licensed psychologist and a pioneer in the field of Holocaust survivor post-traumatic stress disorder.
“There’s been a definite spike in anxiety among survivors in the past week,” Fogelman added. “They witness hate speech and anti-Semitic symbols from their childhood follow them here, and it triggers a relapse in their trauma. One of my patients said, ‘I lived through one Hitler, I don’t want to live through another.’”Though sleeplessness and nightmares about their wartime experiences are the most common symptoms, intense fear of leaving and losing one’s home is another.
Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, an Army veteran, will become Trump’s CIA director if confirmed by the Senate. He is a Tea Partier. 
He’s a supporter of the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk data collection program and sought to restore the agency’s access to the data it had already collected under the Patriot Act from its inception through late last year.
Pompeo is also one of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.
Pompeo, who grew up in the traditionally Republican enclave of Orange County, California, founded Thayer Aerospace, a company that made parts for commercial and military aircraft. After selling Thayer, he became president of Sentry International, a company that manufactures and sells equipment used in oil fields.
He was elected to Congress in 2010 on a wave of tea party support and with backing from the Koch Industries political action committee. The Wichita-based conglomerate’s PAC is well known for its support of conservative candidates.
Though Pompeo is generally known for his opposition to Obama administration policies, he’s occasionally given heat to some fellow Republicans. Last year, his name was floated as a potential rival to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin to become House speaker.
Trump’s choice for NSA is a horrifying pick also. He’s got contacts with US enemy states.
But Flynn has also shown an erratic streak since leaving government that is likely to make his elevation disconcerting even to the flag officers and senior intelligence officials who once considered him a peer.
Flynn stunned former colleagues when he traveled to Moscow last year to appear alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at a lavish gala for the Kremlin-run propaganda channel RT, a trip Flynn admitted he was paid to make and defended by saying he saw no distinction between RT and U.S. news channels such as CNN.
Flynn said he used the trip to press Putin’s government to behave more responsibly in international affairs. Former U.S. officials said Flynn, seen dining next to Putin in photos published by Russian propaganda outlets, was used as a prop by the autocratic leader.
Flynn was forced out of his job as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 over concerns about his leadership style. After the ouster, he frequently lashed out in public against President Obama and blamed his removal on the administration’s discomfort with his hard-line views on radical Islam.
Spurning the decorum traditionally expected of retired U.S. flag officers, Flynn became a fervent campaigner for Trump and was given a high-profile role speaking before the GOP convention, an appearance in which he led the crowd in “lock her up” chants against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Flynn’s behavior drew the ire of former colleagues and superiors, including retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who made Flynn his top intelligence officer during critical stretches of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I’m trying to regain my nerve to fight all this but I feel like I’m getting way too old to do 
much good. However, if Paul Ryan has his way, I will likely be on the ice floes.
Here’s some advice from Sarah Kendzior who has:
…. studied authoritarian states for over a decade, I would never exaggerate the severity of the threat we now face. But an American kleptocracy is exactly where president-elect Trump and his backers are taking us. That’s why I have a favor to ask you, my fellow Americans.
We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump.
She has many suggestions but this was the most poignant. I think we must hold on to our values and be prepared to defend them.
That voice is your conscience, your morals, your individuality. No one can take that from you unless you let them. They can take everything from you in material terms – your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely. They cannot take away who you truly are. They can never truly know you, and that is your power.
But to protect and wield this power, you need to know yourself – right now, before their methods permeate, before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.
My heart breaks for the United States of America. It breaks for those who think they are my enemies as much as it does for my friends. You still have your freedom, so use it. There are many groups organizing for both resistance and subsistence, but we are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave – and it is often hard to be brave – be kind.
But most of all, never lose sight of who you are and what you value.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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