Veronica “Randy” Crawford (born February 18, 1952, Macon, Georgia) is an American jazz and R&B singer. She has been more successful in Europe than in the United States, where she has not entered the Billboard Hot 100 as a solo artist.[1] She has had multiple top five hits in the UK, including her 1980 number 2 hit, “One Day I’ll Fly Away”. Despite her American nationality, she won Best British Female Solo Artist in recognition of her popularity in the UK at the 1982 Brit Awards.
One of the most readily identifiable voices of any contemporary female vocalist, Randy Crawford‘s initial recognition came from her fiery vocal on “Street Life,” a 1979 song matching her with the Crusaders that was included on the soundtrack for Burt Reynolds’ film Sharky’s Machine. Crawford was born in Macon, Georgia, and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio; she worked in clubs as a teen, accompanied by her father.
Crawford was lead vocalist in a group that included bassist Bootsy Collins before touring as George Benson’s opening act in 1972. Cannonball Adderley invited her to sing on his LP Big Man. Crawford recorded “Don’t Get Caught in Love’s Triangle,” a song produced by Johnny Bristol, during a short stay on the label. She soon moved to Warner Bros., and after “Street Life,” recorded and toured Europe with the Crusaders. Crawford was tabbed Most Outstanding Performer at the 1980 Tokyo Music Festival. She remained with Warner Bros. through the ’80s and early ’90s, during which time she developed a strong following in Europe and Britain. In the new millennium, Crawford has remained quite active, often re-teaming with Crusaders keyboardist Joe Sample for such albums as 2006’s Feeling Good, 2008’s No Regrets, and 2012’s concert album Live.
Ladiess, I have to say this …. ROLL TIIIIDDEE!!!!
You know what? Ms Crawford and Janet Jackson favor each other a LOT!
ExxonMobil and Iran did business under secretary of State nominee Tillerson
Oren Dorell , USA TODAY Published 4:26 p.m. ET Jan. 9, 2017
ExxonMobil did business with Iran, Syria and Sudan through a European subsidiary while President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of State was a top executive of the oil giant and those countries were under U.S. sanctions as state sponsors of terrorism, Securities and Exchange Commission filings show.
That business connection is likely to surface Wednesday at a confirmation hearing for ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The sales were conducted in 2003, 2004 and 2005 by Infineum, in which ExxonMobil owned a 50% share, according to SEC documents unearthed by American Bridge, a Democratic research group.
ExxonMobil told USA TODAY the transactions were legal because Infineum, a joint venture with Shell Corporation, was based in Europe and the transactions did not involve any U.S. employees.
https://twitter.com/GroundswellMvmt/status/818513470878523392/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/caroline_holian/status/818619678511788032/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%
Letter of 2/12/2009 from Senator McConnell to Senator Reid about the standards to be met for considering Presidential nominees
1. The FBI background check is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a hearing being noticed.
2. The Office of Government Ethics letter is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing.
3. Financial disclosure statements (and tax returns for applicable committees) are complete and submitted to committee for review prior to a hearing being noticed.
4. All committee questionnaires are complete ad have been returned to the committee. A reasonable opportunity for follow-up questions has been afforded committee members, and nominees have answered, with sufficient time to review prior to a committee vote.
5. The nominee is willing to have committee staff interviews, where that has been the practice.
6. The nominee has had a hearing.
7. The nominee agrees to courtesy visits with members when requested.
8. The nominee has committed to cooperate the the Ranking Member on requests for information and transparency.
I wanna know…
what the phuck these muthaphuckas think they can ‘ work with him ‘ on.
tell me, muthaphucka.
https://twitter.com/TomthunkitsMind/status/818629387763548160/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
It’s about phucking time.
https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/818549039021064194/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/civilrightsorg/status/818532793332408322/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
@THR
Final Box Office: #HiddenFigures beats #RogueOne with $22.8M
Today urge your Senator to insist that Trump’s Cabinet nominees undergo Standard Background and Ethics Checks. Call (844) 241-1141 today!
https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/818538896283865089
“…Until very recently, and to all outward appearances, Jared Kushner was just another socially striving young businessman with inoffensively Bloombergian political values. But over the past year, something seems to have changed — in his beliefs, in his manner, in his relationship to his peers among New York City’s elite.
“Jared Kushner is the man,” said Stephen Schwarzman, the private-equity billionaire, as he introduced Trump’s emissary. (This account is based on interviews with multiple attendees.) Kushner, the 35-year-old husband of Ivanka, Trump’s favorite child, sat in a director’s chair, wearing a gray sweater and blazer over an open-collared shirt and a pair of gleaming white sneakers. He still has a boyish mien and a polite, ingratiating manner. But these days, he carries himself with the assurance of a man who just received the ultimate validation.
With little experience, and against all predictions to the contrary, Kushner had managed Trump’s way to the White House, and was now poised to be his most trusted adviser and enforcer in the West Wing. This left many of the staid business leaders in the audience confused about whether Kushner really shared their values and worldview — indeed, whether he had ever really belonged to their world at all.
Many were hoping — perhaps desperately — that Trump, a formerly unthinkable president, might at heart be a pragmatic dealmaker. If that were true, then maybe he could be moved by Kushner’s quiet advice, and maybe all his maximalist stances — build the wall, ban the Muslims, bring on the nuclear-arms race — were negotiable. After the election, the financial markets were buoyed in part by this (still unproven) theory. Three days before Kushner’s appearance, the Dow had closed at a record high. He had come to offer a message to his old friends: Be unafraid.
“I thought I would need to explain to the business community what a Trump presidency means,” Kushner began. “But the markets seem to have figured it out.” He told the audience about his own process of figuring out Trump’s appeal, saying that he had once lived in a “bubble” on the Upper East Side. He thought about immigration in terms of Silicon Valley’s needs, about education the way Robin Hood Foundation philanthropists did, about climate change in terms of carbon emissions, not mining jobs. Then, about a year ago, Kushner said, he had started traveling the country with Trump, going to rallies where thousands of ordinary Americans shouted in fury about government regulations and the Common Core curriculum. (And torturing terrorists and locking up his opponent, though Kushner didn’t mention those lines.) The gilded scales fell from his eyes.
David Zaslav, the chief executive of the Discovery cable networks, asked Kushner how it would be possible in the future to have a national discussion based on facts. Kushner replied that it was the media that was deluded about America, claiming his own computer models told him the morning of the election that Trump would capture more than 300 electoral votes. Recognizing that outlets like CNN and the Times were implacably against Trump, Kushner said, the campaign cut a deal to grant softball interviews to a local broadcast chain with a strong presence in the Midwest. Sympathizers on Facebook spread their own news through their social networks. The result, he said, was a campaign by alternative means. Kushner believes Trump’s victory was a repudiation of the media and both political parties — the entire governing Establishment. He said he was “proud” Trump had won only 4 percent of the vote in Washington, D.C..”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/jared-kushner-trump-administration-power.html
“…If you forgot the context, the handsome, reed-thin young man might as well have been giving a TED Talk about an ambitious start-up, instead of a government soon to be led by a right-wing populist whom his opponents called the “chaos candidate.” Ten blocks to the north, in his golden tower, Trump was nominating a climate-change skeptic for Interior secretary and tweeting gleefully about Russian hacking, even as his son-in-law said America needed to take a long-term view of the “warfare of the future.” Kushner imagines his role as managerial, not policymaking. “I’m not political,” he told the audience, not entirely credibly. In D.C., as Reagan’s adage goes, “People are policy,” and no person, other than Trump himself, has been as politically instrumental in advancing the new president’s ambitions.
Two nights later, as Mr. Trump learned he would soon be President Trump, it was Kushner’s voice that was screening the calls to his suddenly all-important cell phone. When Trump paid his first postelection visit to the White House, Kushner accompanied him, taking photos of the Oval Office with his iPhone and strolling with President Obama’s chief of staff. Now he and Ivanka were preparing to move to Washington, where they reportedly are set to occupy a $5.6 million mansion with their three children. “I’m hoping that he’s our Valerie Jarrett,” says Kathy Wylde, the Partnership’s chief executive, “the last person to speak to the president on matters that are important to New York.”
Kushner’s business dealings, like Trump’s, involve numerous partners and lenders from around the globe, even immigrants investing via a controversial cash-for-visa program, and are likely to come under great scrutiny. He has spent much of the transition period trying to figure out how to remove himself from potential conflicts of interest. Trump seems unconcerned. Kushner flattered the Partnership audience by saying the president-elect was happy to be bringing so many billionaires to D.C., asking, “Who else to do you want to see cutting deals?”
At the same time, he has been an internal supporter of Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman, now Trump’s polarizing senior counselor. “For a guy who was a progressive,” Bannon says, “he really gets this grassroots populist movement in a huge way.”
Trump doesn’t really appear to listen to anyone, but he likes to hear a lot of advice.
“…Throughout the campaign, the depth of Kushner’s commitment to Trump’s reactionary agenda was surrounded by a bit of what Henry Kissinger — a Kushner admirer — would call constructive ambiguity. He didn’t grant on-the-record interviews or give a speech expressing his beliefs at the Republican National Convention. His decision to leave behind his business, his prior political affiliations, and quite a few friendships in order to serve Trump remains mystifying to many people who thought they knew him. True, he had always been quick to champion Trump to his many detractors and expressed admiration for his knack for self-promotion and his impish ability to play the press for suckers. But Kushner never gave the impression that he had anything more than a grudging son-in-law’s level of tolerance for Trump’s more radical positions.
Back when Trump was spinning birther conspiracy theories, which were lapped up by gullible Republicans, one person who talked to Kushner says he offered assurances that his father-in-law didn’t really believe that stuff.
Yet Trump and Kushner have more in common than surface appearances might suggest. They are both bridge-and-tunnel guys — Trump is from Queens, Kushner from Livingston, New Jersey — who made their names in Manhattan and lived through tumultuous periods of tabloid fire and financial adversity. As a developer, Trump took big risks in the 1980s and faced bankruptcy in the 1990s; Kushner took big risks before the 2008 financial crash and flirted with losing his family’s flagship building, 666 Fifth Avenue. Both came back. Kushner is often called “soft-spoken,” in contrast to his bombastic father-in-law, but people who have worked with him say that’s deceiving: His voice is just literally soft. His opinions are anything but deferential. “He’s very aggressive,” says Zelnick, who says that once Kushner makes up his mind, “it may look like he’s barreling down a path.”
Above all, he and Trump share a clannish outlook on life, business, and politics. Trump prizes loyalty, especially when it flows upward, and no defender has been more steadfast during his turbulent struggle than Kushner. Neither forgets when he’s been wronged.
They both appear to enjoy the metallic taste of payback, although of the two, Trump may be the more forgiving…”
“…The Kushners are financial supporters of AIPAC, and Jared stage managed Trump’s primary-season speech to the lobbying group. He has also served as a bridge to the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has known the Kushners for years. Last summer, when Trump tweeted a Photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton many saw as anti-Semitic, Kushner hastened to his defense in a rare column in the Observer, citing his own family history and maligning “the speech police.”
When critics question Trump’s relationships with people like Bannon, the purported Svengali of the alt-right, Jared and Ivanka, who converted to Judaism, note that Trump wore a yarmulke at their wedding and has Jewish grandchildren.
Jared, born in 1981, grew up in a tight-knit environment structured around family and faith. His many aunts, uncles, and cousins would often descend on their home for Shabbos dinner. Some of the Kushners’ business associates lived in the neighborhood, within walking distance of an Orthodox shul. Through Jared’s teenage years, his father became increasingly involved in politics, becoming a top Democratic Party donor. Politicians with national aspirations, including Hillary Clinton, would regularly pay visits to the Kushners.
In July 2000, Vice-President Al Gore descended on Livingston to attend a fund-raiser for his presidential campaign. There were police on every corner, shutting down rush-hour traffic, as the vice-president’s motorcade climbed the hill to the Kushner home. “It was a big to-do in Livingston that day,” recalls Miles Berger, a business partner of Kushner’s who attended. What people remember now, though, is the 19-year-old who introduced the candidate. “Charlie put Jared up there to do the talking,” says Pat Sebold, a Democratic officeholder from Livingston. “I was impressed that he was a young guy and handled himself so well.”
To all appearances, Charlie was grooming his son to understand how power worked. All the New Jersey builders donated to politicians to smooth the way for their projects, but Charlie wanted more than just zoning approvals. He aspired to be a kingmaker. He was the financial force behind Jim McGreevey, a suburban Democratic mayor who won the New Jersey governorship in 2001. After his victory, McGreevey nominated Kushner for chairmanship of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In retrospect, the cynics said, that was Charlie’s flaw: his craving for a public role…”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/jared-kushner-trump-administration-power.html
“…The much-chronicled fall of Charlie Kushner began as a dispute with his brother Murray over the real-estate business, which triggered an epic family feud. A series of civil lawsuits uncovered evidence that piqued the interest of Chris Christie, the ambitious U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, who appeared to relish the idea of pursuing Governor McGreevey’s patron.
In July 2004, four months after his mother’s death, Charlie was indicted. Along with campaign-finance violations, investigators had discovered that he had staged a vicious retaliation plot against his sister Esther’s husband, luring him into an encounter with a prostitute that he taped for use as blackmail. The scandal contributed to the resignation, a month later, of McGreevey, who confessed he’d been having an affair with a former Israeli naval officer who had ties to Kushner.
The episode had a formative effect on Jared, whose life to that point had followed a glide path through Harvard — to which his father was a major benefactor — and prestigious internships. Whereas Christie, perhaps to his subsequent regret, righteously denounced Charlie’s “vile and heinous acts,” Jared saw his father as a victim of injustice.
“It’s an outrage that Charlie’s brother and sister cooperated with the government against him; that’s the lowest thing a Jew can do in my book,” says Ken Kurson, the current editor of the Observer, who is a longtime friend of the family. “Whatever ill-advised decisions Charlie may have made, it was a family spat and it was not a criminal affair.” (Murray’s side of the family did not respond to requests for comment, but some members have been vociferously critical of Jared’s role in Trump’s campaign.)
Charlie served nearly a year in an Alabama prison, where Jared and his mother visited him weekly. The Kushners were still wealthy, from their rental income, but their social status had evaporated. Jared was living in New York, where there were other routes to influence besides politics.
The media had contributed to his father’s problems by digging into his relationship with McGreevey. So it is perhaps understandable, in retrospect, that Jared’s first move was to buy a newspaper.
During the summer of 2006, Kushner canceled a planned trip to Germany to watch the World Cup in order to make a $10 million offer for the New York Observer.
The youthful staff at the Observer made subsistence wages, but the writers didn’t seem bothered about money. They competed instead for the fickle approval of the paper’s charismatic editor, Peter Kaplan, who cultivated an air of intellectual eccentricity punctuated by sarcastic exclamation points.
Kushner spent time around the newsroom — at least at first — where he listened politely as Kaplan tried to excite him about the romantic ideals of journalism. To the Times, Kaplan cited a scene from Citizen Kane, saying every young man should think it would be “fun to run a newspaper.”
Privately, though, he made a different cultural reference. Kaplan told friends that Kushner’s favorite book was The Count of Monte Cristo, the story of a wronged man who escapes prison, becomes rich, and uses his wealth to stealthily visit vengeance upon his unsuspecting enemies…”
“…The Observer acquired a website that published New Jersey insider political gossip, run anonymously by a former GOP consultant named David Wildstein. In 2009, it persistently attacked Christie as he ran for governor.
Later, Wildstein was hired by Christie and engineered the politically retributive traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge. After the scheme came to light, Kushner sent an email to Wildstein, who had resigned amid the investigation. “That’s another thing we have in common I guess with my Dad having done the same,” he wrote. “For what its worth, I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass.”
The newspaper served its purpose, though, as Kushner’s foothold in New York, where he made strategic friendships with older media moguls, like Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller, who understood the workings of power in the city.
Kushner was also close to Joel Klein, the schools chancellor, who influenced his views on education reform. He was friendly with Newark mayor and charter-school proponent Cory Booker, now a Democratic senator. (Kushner urged Trump to consider two controversial Democratic charter advocates, Michelle Rhee and Eva Moskowitz, for Education secretary.)
“… In 2006, Jared negotiated the purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, a record sum for a Manhattan office building at the time. The transaction was financed by an onerous amount of debt. The following year, the Kushner Companies liquidated its apartment portfolio for $1.9 billion. The shift was akin to trading a fleet of taxicabs for a single Formula 1 race car.
The Fifth Avenue purchase quickly ran into problems. Kushner’s loans were premised on the assumption that office rents would rise; instead, the economy crashed. Vulture investors bought the debt, threatening foreclosure. Kushner felt besieged, with few friends and no leverage. But he fought his way out, refinancing the loans, selling equity stakes to partners, and exploiting its retail space via a complex series of deals that resulted in a stabilizing cash windfall.
Kushner didn’t forget who had been unkind to him along the way. In one much-discussed episode, he later pushed the Observer staff to pursue a shaky tip about supposed malfeasance committed by one of his debt holders.
Kushner emerged from the crisis with a reputation as a gutsy dealmaker. He was soon buying again with backing from institutional investors like the CIM Group, an aggressive private-equity firm co-founded by a pair of former Israeli paratroopers.
He acquired the troubled retail space in the old New York Times Building from Lev Leviev, a diamond magnate who is reportedly friendly with Vladimir Putin.
He bought up rent-stabilized apartment buildings in the East Village and made a bold move into Dumbo, persuading the Jehovah’s Witnesses to sell him a coveted set of properties…”
“… One day in December, Abehsera, a 33-year-old in a black motorcycle jacket and matching baseball cap, showed me around the first phase of the project, called Dumbo Heights. The church’s former pamphlet-printing plant has been converted into office space, for which the owners are charging Manhattan-level rents.
The project is being marketed to the tech industry, to which Kushner has developed ties, partly through his brother, Josh, who runs the VC firm Thrive Capital. Jared was involved early on in Josh’s health-insurance start-up, Oscar, which has backing from Peter Thiel and is valued at $2.7 billion.
Oscar currently competes on the Obamacare health exchanges that Trump has pledged to abolish, though the company is shifting its business model, for instance, by selling plans to small businesses.
Before the election, Josh said he was voting for Clinton.
Kushner married Ivanka in October 2009, after an archetypically difficult courtship, involving a daunting obstacle (his parents’ religious objections), a magical reconciliation (staged by Wendi Deng aboard the Murdoch yacht), and an arduous test (Ivanka’s conversion, overseen by an eminent Modern Orthodox rabbi). Kushner’s public identity underwent its own conversion.
In the newspapers, he was no longer inevitably identified as a felon’s son — he was Ivanka’s husband, an auxiliary Trump.
Every marriage is a mystery to the world outside it, but the Kushner-Trump union is particularly well guarded. One thing at its core, especially today, is their allegiance to the domineering patriarch. “Donald relies heavily on his family,” says LeFrak. “I would say that Jared, he’s part of the mosaic. He fits into the family very well.”
“…The alliance crosses into business. In early November, a few days before the election, the Trump Organization began leasing apartments at Trump Bay Street, a new 50-story building in Jersey City’s waterfront district. Kushner and a local partner developed the building on a site they bought out of foreclosure in 2011.
As is his practice, Trump lends his name via a branding and management deal, while Kushner’s partnership owns and financed the development.
The partnership raised about a third of its projected $193 million cost via the federal EB-5 program, which offers green cards to foreign investors.
Bloomberg News reported that it was marketed to would-be Chinese immigrants with a video set to the theme from The Sopranos.
The visa program will soon face a contentious renewal debate in Congress, but the Kushner Partnership is rumored to be considering whether to use the same method for another Jersey City project. As Kushner distances himself from the family business, his father will likely play a higher-profile role.
In recent years, the Kushner Companies has also gotten back into the original family business: renting to the masses. In 2011, it began buying up portfolios of distressed apartment complexes around Rust Belt towns like Pittsburgh, Toledo, and Indianapolis.
The turnaround strategy was simple, Jared told the publication Multifamily Executive: “a lot of construction and a lot of evictions.” The following year, he acquired more than 5,500 apartments in Maryland, mainly in the blue-collar suburbs of eastern Baltimore County. The area has been depressed by factory closures, and Trump ran very strong there.
Between 2012 and 2016, a Kushner-affiliated corporate entity called JK2 Westminster LLC filed hundreds of tenant lawsuits in Maryland courts.
One defendant was Robert Bolen, a 64-year-old former Honeywell employee with a documented history of alcoholism and mental illness.
He was a disruptive resident of a bland brick complex called Carroll Park. Kushner’s management company evicted him in the summer of 2015.
That August, a few days before the first Republican debate, Bolen allegedly walked into the complex’s rental office, said “Good morning,” and opened fire with a shotgun, wounding two employees.
“…The consequences of Kushner’s decision to enlist in Trump’s campaign have reverberated through his life, business, even his synagogue, Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, where last summer there were protests over the rabbi’s plans to give the invocation at the Republican National Convention. (The rabbi canceled his participation.)
One real-estate executive who knows Kushner told me he doesn’t know if he will be able to shake his hand after the campaign. Another said: “I cannot be in business with Jared Kushner at the moment, because my wife would divorce me.” One of Kushner’s partners in the Dumbo Heights project, the German-born developer Aby Rosen, erected a giant billboard reading VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE — a blatant dig at Trump — on one of his buildings before the election. In September, the Real Deal reported that Rosen’s company had pulled out of a second deal with Kushner amid rumors of political tensions, though the primary reason appeared to be financial. (Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.)
“If the campaign was proof of anything, it was that neither prior campaign experience nor, perhaps especially, presidential-campaign experience was required,” says Rick Reed, a veteran consultant who made ads for Trump. Like the technology entrepreneurs he admires, Kusher looked at the business of campaigns and saw a complacent industry ripe for disruption. “Pollsters are total thieves,” he said in his speech to the Partnership. Kushner pushed the campaign to use direct-marketing strategies employed by private tech companies.
Arthur Mirante, who brokered the original sale of 666 Fifth, says that during the campaign he occasionally sent quizzical emails about Trump’s more outrageous statements. “Why did he have to do it that way, why did he say it this way? Et cetera,” he says. “And I would always get a typical Jared response from him that was, ‘Look, there’s a bigger picture here, you know, I know what he said maybe didn’t look good, but he really didn’t mean it that way.’ There was always the typical Jared explanation, totally devoid of politics. Just that there are things happening here that you don’t understand, and this is going to work out, trust me.”
Kushner received more scorching emails, too, some of them from people he respected. He viewed these as useful data points — he now knew who his loyal friends were. “I call it an exfoliation,” Kushner told Forbes in his only on-the-record interview since the election. The criticism seemed to trigger a practiced defense mechanism. In private conversations, he would return to the prior experience of his father’s arrest and his brush with financial ruin at 666 Fifth. “I’ve been in quite a few foxholes in my life,” he told one associate. “I think I’ve always found my way out.”
This time, though, he was fighting next to people like Steve Bannon.
Kushner, as a family member, was often the person called on to broach difficult conversations with Trump, such as firing Lewandowski or talking him out of offering the vice-presidency to Governor Chris Christie.
“…Right now, what Trump needs is a government. Kushner has been essential in assembling it for him. Along with Mike Pence, he moved within days of the election to assert control over the transition, reportedly playing the key role in neutralizing Christie, who had previously been in charge of the process. Christie had been doing a shoddy job, Kushner thought, was politically wounded by his scandal, and had shown soft commitment during the campaign’s low moments.
Kushner also hadn’t forgotten his father’s imprisonment.
Christie’s loyalists were purged, while Kushner recruited Bill Stepien, the ruthless campaign manager that Christie fired for his role in the bridge plot, to be Trump’s political director. After floating a series of leaden trial balloons — Republican National Committee chair? Homeland Security? — the diminished governor slunk home to Jersey.
The Count of Monte Cristo couldn’t have plotted it better.
When Bannon’s appointment came under fire, on the other hand, from groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Kushner tried to rally support from Jewish organizations.
Trump’s statements on Israel have been wildly inconsistent: During the primary campaign, he suggested he would maintain a “neutral” stance, then he nominated his bankruptcy attorney, a hard-line settlement supporter, as ambassador. He also has suggested he may put Kushner in charge of peace negotiations.
If Trump’s administration is anything like his campaign, or the rest of his life, it is likely to be split along lines of clan, with the conservative Republicans — Pence, Conway, and chief-of-staff Reince Priebus — competing for influence with the cadre of outsiders who are loyal to Trump, foremost among them Kushner and Ivanka. Already the factions are whispering and jockeying for influence.
It would be a mistake, though, to view Kushner as an ideological counterweight. He is earnest, in that sense, when he says he is “not political.” He has lived a life surrounded by politics, in which Democratic candidates frequently dropped by for dinner, but his liberalism was cultural, reflecting community values.
Now he has a new community.
Some suggest that Kushner could be a force for moderation, if not in terms of ideology, then at least in managing Trump’s incendiary tendencies.
If the campaign estranged Kushner from the privileged world he once inhabited, the election represented a conclusive break.
Some of the same Manhattan liberals who ostracized him during the campaign were rattled afterward, and they sent him emails, trying to offer healing words of congratulations and conciliation.
These went right in the trash. Kushner is in no mood to offer comfort — not to this town.
He’s going to Washington.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/01/jared-kushner-trump-administration-power.html
Leslie Jones @Lesdoggg 18h18 hours ago
Um Meryl didn’t give a fuck about that speech limit, they DID NOT play the music on her either. Serve that tea girl, put some lemon in it
uh huh
Like I said before…
Racist in word and PROFESSIONAL DEED:
https://twitter.com/MotherJones/status/818582130779422720/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
FOLLOW THIS THREAD. He breaks it down like a fraction.
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/818365899266785281?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/RepBeatty/status/818549302683385856
https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/818574002344103937/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Health secretary nominee kept federal dollars flowing to campaign donors
January 9, 2017 at 11:43 AM EST
Rep. Tom Price, the physician and Georgia Republican tapped for the nation’s leading health care job, has long criticized federal spending as excessive. Yet during his years in Congress, he’s worked hard to keep federal dollars flowing to his most generous campaign donors.
Price has been a go-to congressman, a review of his records show, for medical special interests hotly sparring with regulators or facing budget cuts. Over the past decade, he has waded into issues related to specific drugs and medical devices, making 38 inquiries with the federal Food and Drug Administration, according to federal records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. He questioned the FDA on his constituents’ behalf about matters as minute as a device for fertility treatment and an ingredient in pain creams.
In other cases, he has gone to bat for companies whose executives and employees have generously contributed to his campaigns and political action committees.
“It looks like he’s somebody who could throw the store open to a lot of niche special interests,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University who specializes in Congress. “These are things that fly under the radar. If you take a meat ax to Medicare, for example, everybody would know about it. But this kind of stuff is done in the dark of night.”
We were ethics lawyers for Bush and Obama. Trump’s cabinet hearings must be delayed
The Senate plans to hold confirmation hearings before all nominees’ financial disclosure reports and ethics agreements are finalized. That’s a dangerous move
As the former White House ethics counsels for Presidents Bush and Obama, we were involved in the submission of many presidential nominations to the US Senate for confirmation. We and others worked hard to make sure those nominees’ financial disclosure reports and ethics agreements were finalized and certified by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) before their hearings, so that the Senate and thus the public could explore any conflicts of interest and how they were addressed.
This week’s hearings for the president-elect’s cabinet are flouting that practice, and for that reason, should be postponed.
This point was made clear by Senator Mitch McConnell in a 12 February 2009, letter to the then majority leader Harry Reid, insisting that the “The Office of Government Ethics letter [be] complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing”.
McConnell’s point was important. Short-changing the ethics review process in Congress jeopardizes nominees’ ability to do their jobs if confirmed. The Senate, and all of us, need to know if nominees will, for example, sell investments that create conflicts. If not, will they recuse themselves from certain issues? Will they have so many recusals that they cannot reasonably perform their duties, or will they be running the constant risk of violating the anti-conflicts laws? Those bear criminal penalties, so the danger is a serious one.
Now, in 2017, with more billionaires than ever before being nominated for top jobs in the Trump administration, this argument for thorough review of financial disclosure and ethics agreements is more compelling than ever.
https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/818591342590914561?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/HelenKennedy/status/818522209283178498?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Jamie Foxx attacked at Los Angeles hotspot: report
http://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/celebrity/jamie-foxx-attacked-at-los-angeles-hotspot-report/ar-BBy5vZ0?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=U348DHP
Jamie Foxx was attacked by another restaurant patron at a popular Hollywood restaurant over the weekend and plenty of Tinseltown’s biggest names were on hand to witness it.
TMZ is reporting that the actor was with friends at Catch, the newest see-and-be-seen spot, when a man approached his table to complain that the group was too loud. A witness told the website that the man wasn’t too friendly during the table meeting either, saying, “You don’t want to mess with me. I’m from New York.”
A man at Jamie’s table wasn’t impressed, retorting with an expletive and telling the person that his hometown was Oakland.
After the short geography lesson, TMZ said there are varying accounts of what happened, but claimed that the man “lunged” at Jamie at actually made contact and even pulled him down to the table.
The witness told TMZ, which has grainy footage of the chaotic squabble, that Jamie won the battle, turning the guy around, putting him in a choke hold and taking him down.
The restaurant, naturally, sided with Jamie and kicked the guy out (remember, this is Hollywood). Catch was also littered with celebrities that night. Those who saw the scuffle included Jerry Bruckheimer, Cuba Gooding Jr., Michael Bay and Nicole Murphy.
Jamie didn’t tweet about the incident.
Here you go, Ladies
https://twitter.com/lemondrop110/status/818572899892203520
https://twitter.com/Essence/status/818566061746520064
A Dairy Queen owner unleashed a racist tirade against a customer. He no longer has a business.
By Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
January 9 at 6:10 AM
The Dairy Queen owner shouting the n-word at Deianeira Ford told her he could say whatever he wanted at his fast-food restaurant — that any accusations and complaints she uttered would fall on deaf ears.
Ford was vindicated two days later, when her Facebook post about the incident provoked outrage so strong that the Dairy Queen in Zion, Ill., didn’t open for business.
But her victory was tempered by something even more troubling that she heard at a protest: Although she was the most vocal victim of the owner’s racism, she was not the first.
On Wednesday, Ford had taken her two children to visit their grandmother — and, because they were well-behaved, she stopped by the Dairy Queen on the way home. She ordered a $5 box, but part of the order was wrong, and another part was missing.
So she asked the owner to fix the order, and when he balked, she asked for a refund. That’s when things spiraled.
The owner, James “Jim” Crichton, returned her $5, but gave her a mouthful, according to Ford and the police in Zion, 50 miles north of Chicago.
“He called me and my children n—–; he said I can go back to where I came from,” Ford told The Washington Post.
“He took out his flip phone and he said he would take a picture and put it on Facebook because he wants to show the world what kind of n—— he has to deal with. Then he shut the window and walked away.”
But the worst came a few moments later, from the back seat, where her two children were sitting, Ford said.
“My daughter is 3. She’s a little sponge; she repeats everything,” said Ford, 21, who is biracial. “She asked me: ‘Mommy, we n——?’ ”
Crying and shaking, Ford dialed 911.
SMH, these mofos are partying like it’s 1865, BUT AIN’T NOBODY PLAYING WITH THEM.
We were watching President Obama’s Legacy on CNN Saturday night and our little Haley asked …
Haley: “Are they going to do the election over”?
Me: No
Haley: No? What about Russia? That’s not fair. Not right.
Me: No. How do you know about Russia? Who TOLD YOU about Russia?
Haley: I saw it on the news.
Me: Mouth open….
Children understand a lot more than we give them credit for.
Children are like sponges, soaking up what they can hold.
That’s why we know bigotry & racism is TAUGHT.
ALWAYS REMEMBER, FLOTUS GAVE FULL-THROATED REMARKS ON THAT ORANGE POS.
Our First Lady took that MOFO to task FIRST. And all those 53% white women who still voted for Trump.,,,,…….
This is NOT normal. This is not TOLERABLE. It’s about basic human decency
NO MOFO, that POS gets no benefit of the doubt or respect
NONE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAN7z1EzeL0
Al didn’t sip no tea during Jenna’s apology.
Seriously, I ain’t mad at Jenna, THOUGH
And Meryl dragged his ass indeed! Pure fire!
https://twitter.com/jesseberney/status/818300121825869825
LOL Gibson & Vaughn 2 redneck HAS-BEEN racists.
LOL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwvKR0ODlWM
ICYMI Black women VOICES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ixDJ-oOno
From BJ:
For an action item today, here’s background on the GOP’s attempt to have Cabinet nominees bypass the standard ethical vetting procedures and a script for calling your Senators to ask that all Trump’s picks be vetted by the Office of Government Ethics.
Oh, and also oppose Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.
The Children of Barack: Thoughts and Reflections on Becoming Political in the Age of Obama
Trevor LaFauci January 8, 2017
This is the piece I’ve been afraid to write.
To be expected to put into words how much someone means to you is never easy. Whether at a wedding, a retirement party, a momentous birthday or even a funeral, words often fail to do justice with the gravity and importance of the occasion. There are certain events in life that go beyond words and when presented with these situations the best one can hope for is to at least try to convey the intended meaning as best as possible. In the end, people often receive high praise for their words of tribute but for the perfectionists among us, there remains a persistent nagging that we could have done something more. Unrealistic as it may be, it is a feeling that one can’t help but internalize. When speaking so positively of someone else, one is inevitably made to compare this person to themselves and this comparison often leads to a feeling of inadequacy. It may seem unfair, but it is human nature to place yourself in that other person’s shoes and reflect on their life as if it were your own. It is this reflective part of the writing process that can bring out a person’s humbleness and humility, especially when the subject of one’s writing is a person of tremendous character.
And that is why for me, it is so hard to write about President Barack Obama.
……………………………………………………………
And yet, over these last two months, I’ve never been prouder to call Barack Obama my president. Despite the possibility of his legacy being undermined by the incoming administration, President Obama has handled himself with the same dignity and grace as the very first day he came into office. His words still ring on high on hope at a time when many people are feeling hopeless. His reverence for the constitution has been on full display and, like always, he has continued to be the adult in the room. Along with his wife, Michelle, President Obama has left large shoes to fill that clearly won’t be filled by the incoming administration but that may not be filled for a generation or more. His work in the White House may be nearing an end, but his work on behalf of social justice issues will continue for years to come. He will recruit and train a new generation to follow in his footsteps.
And I, for one, will be there. Fired up and ready to go. Because we, as a nation, have come too far to turn back now. There has been too much progress made to stop now and there is work left to do. President Obama is fond of reciting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous phrase that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Right now, we are facing an upshot of the arc that seems to be bending away. But it will bend back. Maybe not today. Maybe not these next four years. But it will right itself. If there is one thing, just one thing, that President Barack Obama has meant to me it has been his unwavering hope in the American people. He has believed in me through thick and thin and I have come to feel the same way about him. Wherever life takes President Barack Obama, I will be there fighting with him. For a man who has meant so much to me, I owe it to him to help in any way possible.
It’s the least I can do.
You Know the Drill
by D.R. Tucker
January 8, 2017 11:00 AM
What will he say during the deposition? “My bad”?
For all my skepticism about the effort by young climate activists in Oregon to have the federal courts effectively shut down the fossil-fuel industry, I have to admit this is a clever idea:
The Task Before Us
by D.R. Tucker January 8, 2017 3:00 PM
POLITICAL ANIMAL BLOG
Was he appreciated in his time?
When Barack Obama leaves the Oval Office in twelve days, he would be well within his rights to depart from the White House as a bitter man–bitter over the level of unjustified hatred he received from the right, bitter over the mainstream media’s refusal to comprehensively cover his successes for fear that right-wingers would complain, bitter that his achievements weren’t always appreciated by some progressives. Yet, in all likelihood, he will not leave bitter.
He’ll be relieved that his work is over, and concerned that the new president will try to destroy almost all of it. He will leave cautiously optimistic that this country will survive.
It will be up to the rest of us to defend Obama’s legacy, and make permanent his achievements in the face of withering opposition. The unifying goal of the American progressive movement should be to complete Obama’s unfinished work: to ensure that every single resident of this country has full access to high-quality, affordable health care, that every child receives a high-quality education, that every woman makes one dollar for every dollar a man earns, that every human being on this earth enjoys a stable, pollution-free atmosphere. These goals can be achieved if progressives are unified. Donald Trump and the Republicans can’t defeat the left if the left doesn’t defeat itself.
Think about all the hatred the right wing directed at Obama from the moment he stepped off the podium at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. They’ve attacked him as incompetent and ignorant, someone who’s not even a citizen of the United States, an effete elitist, an uppity you-know-what. They say success is the best revenge…so if progressives managed to secure Obama’s achievements, would that not be the most successful way to stick it to those who have abused Obama and his family all these years?
Right-wingers have been trying to make permanent Ronald Reagan’s agenda ever since the 40th President left office 28 years ago. Why shouldn’t progressives try to do the same with Obama’s agenda?
Not This Nonsense Again
by D.R. Tucker
January 8, 2017 7:00 AM
……………………..
This has led to the usual allegations from those who apparently favor Ellison that Perez is little more than a hack who is not a true warrior for progressive change. This is, as you might imagine, a complete smear of Perez:
Ellison, Perez, Buckley, Harrison and Brown are all competent, high-quality candidates for the DNC gig; this will certainly not be the clusterscrew that was the race for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee after John McCain’s loss (the chairmanship race that Michael Steele infamously won). So we can we please knock it off with the suggestion that certain candidates are too “establishment” for their own good? Shouldn’t the most important criteria for this job be who can score the most victories over Republicans in 2018 and 2020, not who’s the least “establishment”?
The Media’s Handling of Leaked Material From Russia Was Shameful
It’s time for the media to do some soul searching.
by Steven Waldman
January 9, 2017 8:52 AM
One of the conclusions of last Friday’s report by the Director of National Intelligence on Russian interference in U.S. elections was that Moscow used the website DC Leaks, which came into existence last year, to disseminate stolen documents and emails. Many news organizations used that stolen material as the basis for news stories, often without explaining what DC Leaks was.
You might be thinking: it’s not fair to ding media sites for not knowing the shady nature of DC Leaks. How could they be expected to know such spook-craft before last week’s revelations?
Well, they could have started by reading the “About us” page of DCLeaks.com, which reads as if written by Boris Badenov:
“DCleaks is a new level project aimed to analyze and publish a large amount of emails from top-ranking officials and their influence agents all over the world.”
Or there’s this:
“The authorities are just lobbying interests of Wall Street fat cats, industrial barons and multinational corporations’ representatives who swallow up all resources and subjugate all markets.”
Yes, Natasha, vaht could better be than new level project with large amount of information about industrial fat cat barons that subjugate markets.
Beyond the fractured-fairy-tale syntax, there was plenty of warning about DC Leaks. On August 11, Bloomberg reported, “Security experts now say that site, DCLeaks.com, with its spiffy capitol-dome logo, shows the marks of the same Russian intelligence outfit that targeted the Democratic political organizations.” On August 12, the security firm, Threat Connect, issued a detailed paper headlined, “ThreatConnect Identifies DCLeaks As Another Russian-backed Influence Outlet.” The report included specific technical proof implicating DC Leaks, and also noted that DC Leaks’ first big document dump involved stolen emails from retired Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the former commander of NATO forces: “In this role as the most senior U.S. military official responsible for Russia, General Breedlove advocated for a more muscular response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.”
Good Morning, Everyone😐😐😐
Good Morning, Rikyrah & Everyone.
If you haven’t seen “Moonlight,” I’d highly recommend it.