monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Israel is very much our ally, and rightly so.

Trump’s high-profile denial of manmade climate change has occasionally overshadowed the many other ways his agencies are contradicting established research.

The agriculture department last month rolled back standards for schools to serve more whole grains, less salt and non-fat flavored milk. Department officials claimed schools struggled with the programs because students wouldn’t eat healthier foods.

Power plant and car standards are being rolled back, as are pesticide restrictions and wildlife protections.

The interior department initially sought to remove references to manmade climate change in a report about how sea-level rise might flood national parks.

A Democratic staffer for the House science committee, which plans to investigate the administration’s science cuts, said it’s been hard to even track all the agency changes.

Jared Kushner told his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, that firing former FBI Director James Comey and ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn would help end an investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Trump’s ousted White House transition team chairman Chris Christie claims.

Kushner, who serves as a senior White House adviser, misjudged the two firings, Christie states in his book Let Me Finish, a copy of which was obtained by The Guardian ahead of its January 29 release. According to Christie's account, Kushner believed that firing Flynn would put a stop to conversations about links between the Trump campaign and Russia during in the 2016 presidential election. Kushner, Christie wrote, also told Trump that firing Comey would not cause “an enormous ****-storm.” In both cases, Kushner's alleged advice proved to be spectacularly ill-judged.

“Again, the president was ill served by poor advice,” Christie wrote, based on detailed talks with Kushner in which he acted in an informal capacity.

Trump in February 2017 fired Flynn, after he misled Vice President Mike Pence, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer about his talks with a Russian ambassador during the transition. The president in May 2017 fired Comey, who was then leading the probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians, citing his handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server usage.

Christie, who served as New Jersey governor, was relatively kind to Kushner in regards to the 2016 Trump Tower meeting that he, Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort attended with Russians offering damaging information on presidential candidate Clinton.

The meeting was “dumb” and Kushner and Trump Jr.’s attendance was a “sign of profound inexperience,” Christie wrote. It was a much more forgiving take than that included in journalist Michael Wolff's January 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, when he quoted fired White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as saying the meeting was “treasonous.”

Christie on MSNBC’s Deadline White House in December 2017 said that Kushner “deserves the scrutiny, you know why? Because he was involved in the transition and involved in meetings that call into question his role.”

Kushner has reportedly been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller with respect to the Trump Tower meeting.

In his book, Christie also says Kushner was the main reason Bannon was carrying out his firing, not long after Trump won the election.

“Steve Bannon…made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago,” Christie wrote.

“The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” Bannon is quoted as saying.

Christie attributes Kushner’s alleged acts against him as stemming from Christie’s days as a U.S. attorney in New Jersey in the early 2000s. Christie prosecuted Kushner’s father, billionaire real estate developer Charles Kushner, for tax evasion, illegal campaign donations and witness tampering, which led him to serve two years in federal prison.

All eight of the people involved in the “sex trainings” have also been ordered to pay a fine of around $6,000.

Quote:

shocked! SHOCKED I tell you! A judge sided against a Republican?! GASP!

But that has nothing to to with how much money he's raking in at his D.C. hotel. CJ was making it seem as if he were foregoing his salary as an act of magnanimity, and I'm suggesting he did it because someone advised him it would look bad for a professed billionaire to be drawing a salary supported by the taxpayers. He should make more of these gestures — like putting up his own money to fund his border security improvements.

The problem isn’t theoretical: Saudi Arabia, for example, spent roughly $270,000 at Trump’s Washington hotel during one of the country’s lobbying campaigns last year. Some of that money directly benefited the president.

I know what you guiys wanted, he should divest himself completely from the empire he built and only live off the salary he makes as President.

Seriously, in the past, wealthy presidents and other high office holders have taken measures to avoid any appearance of impropriety. It might take more work with Trump because of the extent of his businesses but it's not rocket science and would do much to improve the cloud of unethical behavior which surrounds his administration.

Racists to the Right, Anti-Semites to the Left
In a populist age, can party establishments sideline bigots?

The two efforts are similar but not parallel. The push against King is an attempt to redraw a line effaced by Donald Trump’s race-baiting, and since as you may have noticed Trump is still the president, it matters only as a possible marker for a post-Trump Republican future, not a defining statement for the G.O.P. today. The exodus from the Women’s March, on the other hand, is an attempt to get out ahead of a problem before it becomes worse — before anti-Semitism migrates from the left-wing fringe to the center, before the party starts getting its own versions of Jeremy Corbyn in positions of real influence.

I say “mostly” because the shocking defeat of Hillary Clinton did create a power vacuum in which more crankish figures — from various Resistance grifters to the Women’s March’s Farrakhan–friendly organizers — have gained prominence. But still, nothing like the prominence now enjoyed by grifters on the right.

Thats cause ya cant learn anything from Trump, so you might as well just get fat.

In the past 40 years, every other president has either sold his businesses or put them into a blind trust, in which an independent trustee is named to manage the businesses and the president is barred access. That includes Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Carter even sold his family’s peanut farm to avoid raising ethical questions.

'I will serve my six-year term in the Senate': Kirsten Gillibrand vows she WON'T challenge Trump in 2020 if she wins reelection this year

Then Sen. Barack Obama made a similar promise that he broke to run in 2008

still the racist slob youve always been eh?