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President Trump canceled a planned Camp David meeting with Taliban representatives in a move that proved he is different than former President Barack Obama, according to Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.

"I think that the important thing is to look at what actually transpired," she said. "What has transpired now is the president has done exactly the right thing. This president has shown that he is willing consistently to walk away from bad deals."

To that extent, the Wyoming lawmaker pointed to Trump pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia.

"This is a president who has demonstrated his willingness and his ability and his determination not to let the United States be taken advantage of," the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney said.

"The president demonstrated that he fully understands that the Taliban cannot be a partner for peace and that the United States should not be in a position where we're putting our security in their hands," she added...

We live in an age of plutocracy where money and extortion are the hidden ligaments of power. I don’t know whether you’ve read the jarring Politico article on Jerry Falwell Jr., who runs the family’s Christianity business in Lynchburg, Virginia. The focus of the story is that Falwell Jr. appears to run the operation not as a religious organization or university so much as a real estate investment vehicle. It appears to be a festival of self-dealing, setting various cronies up in their own businesses which stream money back to the family and using the whole operation as what amounts to a real estate investment private equity firm. Since most of the operation is at least nominally a nonprofit this is a major problem. Whatever we may think of the founding patriarch, Jerry Sr., at least according to the insider sources in the article, he ran the operation as one mainly dedicated to advancing his hyper-traditionalist vision of Christianity, in both the spiritual and political realms.

Jerry and his wife Becki seem to have a pattern of striking up intimate relationships with younger, extremely fit men; nude or provocative pics of Becki get into the mix somehow and then suddenly the younger guy is set up with his own business courtesy of a few million from the Falwells or Liberty University.

But the really wild stuff is oddly buried deep down in the Politico piece. Liberty University prohibits dancing and drinking. Jerry Jr. appears to operate by a different set of rules. One of the many anecdotes in the story is one in which Jerry and his son Trey are off clubbing in a Miami night spot and get photographed by some society website. Jerry brings in his cyber fixer from Liberty to make the pictures disappear. This is the same cyber-fixer who Michael Cohen hired to fix a series of online polls for Donald Trump back in 2015. How did he do that since the cyber-fixer works for Liberty University?

Well, he has a private consulting business on the side. He’s also now been promoted to the top at Liberty.

Jerry’s adventurous sexual lifestyle appears to be an open secret among Liberty University executives because he won’t shut up about it.

He’s “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” one Liberty official told Politico, a claim backed up by multiple Liberty insiders. Another former top Liberty official described a car ride in which “all [Jerry Jr.] wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort.”

Provocative or nude photos of Becki Falwell also seem to be an open secret among top Liberty executives and even present in many inboxes.

One story is of Jerry accidentally texting a photo of Becki in some sort of French Maid get-up to a bunch of work colleagues. Now, couples can and do share photos of themselves. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Texting accidents do happen. But what’s striking here is the backstory. Jerry was trying to send the photo to a guy named Ben Crosswhite, Becki’s and Jerry’s personal trainer.

You probably already know about Giancarlo Grande, the pool attendant who struck up a relationship with the Falwells after they stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. The three vacationed together at secluded resorts and Giancarlo eventually got set up in his own business running a gay-friendly but divey hostel in Miami. It’s in relation to the Giancarlo story that the nude photos we’d already heard about come into the story. Those are the ones Michael Cohen was brought to help with.

Keeping all this straight?

Well, that’s Giancarlo. Then there’s Ben Crosswhite. Ben is the physical trainer for both Falwells. Somewhat in the manner of Giancarlo, by dint of being the trainer for the Falwells, Ben got set up with his own physical training studio and gym business.

In any case, Jerry was sending the pictures of Becki in the French Maid costume to Ben “as a ‘thank you’ for helping his wife achieve her fitness goals,” according to Politico. But he accidentally texted them to his Liberty University colleagues and not Crosswhite. The Politico article describes how Crosswhite came to run the Crosswhite Fitness facility first as the Falwells private trainer and then by a whole Liberty University facility that was sold to him by Liberty in a sweetheart deal that no one at Liberty could make sense of.

In any case, given the Falwells’ role as staunch public advocates of gender and sexual traditionalism, this story is full of hypocrisy and a veritable overdose of schadenfreude. Where it becomes more than that is in piecing together Falwell’s relationship with Trump and his surprise endorsement of Trump at a critical moment in the 2016 primary cycle.

In 2019, support for President Trump is virtually an article of faith for white evangelicals. Maybe not quite up there with justification by faith but close. That was not nearly the case in early 2016. Indeed, Ted Cruz’s campaign reportedly thought they had lined up the endorsement until Falwell announced his support for Trump. Michael Cohen apparently brokered that endorsement. Cohen also had some role — still not fully explained — in making or trying to make some of the Becki Falwell nude pics disappear. When he wanted to fix some online polls for Trump in the lead up to his presidential campaign, Cohen hired the Falwell fixer who made the the Jerry clubbing pictures disappear.

I don’t know just what the Falwells’ relationships with these young men entails apart from being highly lucrative for the young men. This part remains a genuine mystery to me. I’m not being coy. I’m pretty confident that whatever it is is not consistent with sexual propriety as defined by Liberty University. But just what’s going on and who’s doing what isn’t clear. What is pretty much a dead certainty to me is that somehow the endorsement, Michael Cohen and the nude pics and all the lucky young men fit together. Remember, Cohen is a fixer. Quite specifically, one of his main jobs for Trump was cleaning up and covering up sexual assignations. Also, did I mention? How on earth did Jerry Falwell Jr. and Michael Cohen cross paths in the first place?

Something is going on here. All the reporters on the story seem to get the outlines of it at least. Someone at some point will get the whole thing.

Tennessee state Sen. Kerry Roberts (R) said on Monday evening that he wasn’t being serious when he bashed higher education as a “liberal breeding ground” that should be abolished.

...During his radio program last week, Roberts declared that “if there’s one thing we can do to save America today, it is to get rid of our institutions of higher education right now and cut the liberal breeding ground off.”

The lawmaker complained that the “stupid stuff” young people are being taught “is absolutely ridiculous.”

“And here we are as legislators paying for this garbage to be taught to our children,” Roberts said. “And we’re not doing anything about it in all these red states across America. We let it exist and it’s absolutely unbelievable.”

His rant was prompted by a pro-choice activist’s testimony against Tennessee’s abortion ban bill last month, a testimony which Roberts claimed was filled with “every liberal bit of indoctrination that you can get in a university setting.”

It's another example of religious hypocrisy.

She displayed one on top of her television.

Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. wants the FBI to get to the bottom of what he claims is a conspiracy against him involving former university officials.

During an interview with Hill.TV on Tuesday, Falwell claimed former Liberty University employees and board members were in cahoots to smear him, leading to Politico’s blockbuster expose on the evangelical leader’s alleged self-dealing and decidedly un-Christianlike sexual behavior.

“Our attorneys have determined that this small group of former board members and employees, they’re involved in a criminal conspiracy, are working together to steal Liberty property in the form of emails and provided them to reporters,” he told Hill.TV.

Falwell said the FBI will review documents in the coming days, but the FBI did not confirm that claim.

While reviewing images from the night in question, Browarnik discovered several previously unpublished photos from that evening in which Jerry Falwell Jr. and other members of the Falwell family can be seen—including Jerry’s wife, Becki, sons Trey and Wesley, and Trey’s wife, Sarah. In the images, the Falwells can be seen in the middle of the club’s dance floor while lasers and other light effects reflect around them. In at least two photos, Falwell family members can be seen holding alcohol. (Liberty University is notoriously strict about alcohol consumption, and students can receive demerits for co-ed dancing and be expelled for drinking.)

When NPR asked in April for the annual cost of Guantánamo's military court and prison, the Defense Department initially responded with a figure of $180 million a year. Three months later, it revised that number to $380 million a year. That does not include the $60 million annual expense of operating Guantánamo's naval base or the salaries of military personnel, including the 1,800 guards overseeing the detention center's prisoners.