Tuesday Open Thread

One of the MOST profoundly, powerful WOMEN in the world–our FLOTUS

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45 Responses to Tuesday Open Thread

  1. yahtzeebutterfly says:

    250 Savannah women made their voices heard in D.C.:
    http://www.sav-cdn.com/news/2017-01-19/250-savannah-women-make-their-voices-heard-washington-dc
    http://www.sav-cdn.com/sites/default/files/styles/slideshow__640x360/public/t312qt3t.JPG?itok=FB_Qs7uJ
    Excerpt:

    Elizabeth Rhaney’s sign features social activist and author Angela Davis and the quote, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

    “I think women’s issues go beyond typical issues like the gender wage gap,” said Rhaney, 26. Specifically, she mentioned the Black Lives Matter movement, gender identity, affordable health care and the possibility of families being separated via immigration policies.

    “Those are a few of them,” Rhaney said. “And it’s also just making sure vulnerable people, minorities, LGBTQ, are not targeted in the coming years.”

    • yahtzeebutterfly says:

      I imagine that, at this point, Mueller will know whether or not Trump tells the truth during the interview.

    • Ametia says:

      What yahtzee said!

    • majiir says:

      Watch the so-called strong leader try to weasel out of this interview. In fact, it has already begun. Cobb is trying to keep Mueller from asking Trump questions about certain things and is floating the idea of having Trump respond to any questions Mueller might ask in writing. We know what will happen if Trump submits written answers to Mueller’s questions—the answers will be written by Cobb and McGahn. I hope Mueller will reject everything that doesn’t involve a face-to-face session with Trump.

  2. rikyrah says:

    Anybody eat Acai bowls?

    If so, what do you put in them?
    Do you see any health benefits from them?

  3. rikyrah says:

    BREAKING: James Rybicki, @comey’s Chief of Staff, is resigning from the FBI, reportedly “on his own terms.”🤔

    Rybicki (plus McCabe & FBI General Counsel James Baker) can corroborate Comey’s memos that Trump pressured Comey to stop investigating Flynn.🤨https://t.co/RiCaCtfayQ https://t.co/KwborbEtn1

    — Dr. Dena Grayson (@DrDenaGrayson) January 23, 2018

  4. rikyrah says:

    Uh huh
    Uh huh

    Greitens won’t say whether he took a photo of woman with whom he’d had an affair
    By Jack Suntrup
    St. Louis Post-Dispatch

    EFFERSON CITY • Gov. Eric Greitens on Monday sidestepped one question asked repeatedly during a rare news conference: Did he take a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had had an affair?

    The question came in various forms from various news outlets. After initially addressing the affair, he attempted to steer the reporters back to the state’s $28.7 billion budget blueprint, the planned topic of the day.

    The question stems from Greitens’ admission this month that he had an extramarital affair in 2015. A related allegation is that he took a compromising photograph of the woman and threatened its release if she spoke of their relations.

  5. rikyrah says:

    JUST IN: Former FBI director James Comey was interviewed by Mueller’s team late last year, a source close to him tells NBC News. The focus of the interview was the memos he wrote about his interactions with President Trump, the source says. — @KenDilanianNBC pic.twitter.com/RtbDP9MjYR

    — MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 23, 2018

  6. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 1/22/18
    Republicans draft memo to smear FBI, plan public release
    Rachel Maddow reports on a plan by Republicans to use their access to intelligence materials to write a memo that smears the FBI in order to undercut American intelligence and law enforcement as it investigates Donald Trump.

  7. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 1/22/18
    Still no security clearance for Jared Kushner one year later
    Evan Osnos, staff writer for the New Yorker, talks with Rachel Maddow about Jared Kushner’s relationship with China and Kushner peculiar inability to attain a security clearance a year into the administration in which he is serving.

  8. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 1/22/18
    New report suggests Jared Kushner may be compromised by China
    Rachel Maddow looks at a new report in the New Yorker about U.S. intelligence concerns that Jared Kushner tried to mix personal business with U.S. China policy and made himself vulnerable to manipulation as a result.

  9. rikyrah says:

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 1/22/18
    Wray threatened to quit over pressure to fire McCabe: Axios
    Benjamin Wittes, MSNBC legal analyst, talks with Rachel Maddow about a new Axios report that FBI Director Wray stood up to pressure from A.G. Sessions to fire Deputy Director McCabe and threatened to quit over the matter.

  10. rikyrah says:

    President Trump is accused of paying $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to hide an affair a month before the election. In what is probably just a coincidence, the Trump campaign transferred $130K to the Trump businesses a month after the election. pic.twitter.com/KKknIC9ClC

    — Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) January 23, 2018

  11. rikyrah says:

    Trump let states make poor people work for their health care. In Kentucky, many say they’re now facing a dead end
    U.S. President Donald Trump has allowed Kentucky to become the first state to impose work requirements as a condition of receiving Medicaid. Medicaid recipients are terrified

    WASHINGTON—Wildlife technician. Probation officer. Flower clerk at the supermarket outside town. Anything, really.

    Christina Childers’s family has been poor for generations, and she isn’t picky. With a community college degree in hand and a university degree coming soon, Childers says she has been applying for more or less every decent job within three counties of tiny Campton, a rural Kentucky community with two dollar stores and not much else.

    She’s had no luck yet. For that sin, she might soon lose her health insurance.

    With the permission of the Trump administration, Kentucky last week became the first U.S. state to require poor people to do some form of work in exchange for continuing to get government health coverage.

    No previous president has allowed states to require labour to qualify for the Medicaid program. Since its creation in 1965, Medicaid has been available to everyone, employed or unemployed, whose income is below an income threshold set by their state — in Kentucky, $16,394 per year.

    Florida will be home to one of the year’s most important ballot initiatives: the state’s voters will be asked to decide whether to change Florida law and extend voting rights to the state’s 1.5 million convicted felons. The Florida secretary of state’s office confirmed this morning that the measure received the necessary number of signatures to qualify for this year’s ballot.

    • yahtzeebutterfly says:

      Fire her!

    • majiir says:

      Something that caught my attention about this was the school officials ordering students who recorded the incident to destroy evidence. They were doing everything they could to protect this woman which indicates to me they were more concerned about her than the fact that she committed an openly racist act in a public school. Because I’m a teacher who retired from a small, mostly rural, county in GA, I know the kids that reported that this happened are telling the truth. I’ve witnessed administrators and school board members bury facts to protect certain school system employees and students.

  12. rikyrah says:

    ICYMI:

    “Jared Kushner Is China’s Trump Card”

    In early 2017, shortly after Jared Kushner moved into his new office in the West Wing of the White House, he began receiving guests. One visitor who came more than once was Cui Tiankai, the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, a veteran diplomat with a postgraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University. When, during previous Administrations, Cui had visited the White House, his hosts received him with a retinue of China specialists and note-takers. Kushner, President Trump’s thirty-seven-year-old son-in-law and one of his senior advisers, preferred smaller gatherings…

    In Kushner, Cui found a confident, attentive, and inexperienced counterpart. The former head of his family’s real-estate empire, which is worth more than a billion dollars, Kushner was intent on bringing a businessman’s sensibility to matters of state. He believed that fresh, confidential relationships could overcome the frustrations of traditional diplomatic bureaucracy. Henry Kissinger, who, in his role as a high-priced international consultant, maintains close relationships in the Chinese hierarchy, had introduced Kushner to Cui during the campaign, and the two met three more times during the transition. In the months after Trump was sworn in, they met more often than Kushner could recall. “Jared became Mr. China,” Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon aide on Trump’s transition team, said.

    But Cui’s frequent encounters with Kushner made some people in the U.S. government uncomfortable. On at least one occasion, they met alone, which counterintelligence officials considered risky. “There’s nobody else there in the room to verify what was said and what wasn’t, so the Chinese can go back and claim anything,” a former senior U.S. official who was briefed on the meetings said. “I’m sorry, Jared—do you think your background is going to allow you to be able to outsmart the Chinese Ambassador?” Kushner, the official added, “is actually pretty smart. He just has limited life experiences. He was acting with naïveté.”…

    Kushner often excluded the government’s top China specialists from his meetings with Cui, a slight that rankled and unnerved the bureaucracy. “He went in utterly unflanked by anyone who could find Beijing on a map,” a former member of the National Security Council said. Some officials who were not invited to Kushner’s sessions or briefed on the outcomes resorted to scouring American intelligence reports to see how Chinese diplomats described their dealings with Kushner. Other U.S. officials spoke to Cui directly about the meetings. Kushner was “their lucky charm,” the former N.S.C. member said. “It was a dream come true. They couldn’t believe he was so compliant.” (A spokesman for Kushner said that none of the China specialists told him that “he shouldn’t be doing it the way he was doing it at the time.”)…

    As months passed, some members of the White House received their permanent security clearances, but Kushner continued to wait. For high-level appointees, the process is normally “expedited,” a former senior U.S. official said. It can be completed in several months, unless “derogatory information” pops up during the review.

    Kushner had an interim clearance that gave him access to intelligence. He was also added to a list of recipients of the President’s Daily Brief, or P.D.B., a top-secret digest of the U.S. government’s most closely held and compartmentalized intelligence reports. By the end of the Obama Administration, seven White House officials were authorized to receive the same version of the P.D.B. that appeared on the President’s iPad. The Trump Administration expanded the number to as many as fourteen people, including Kushner. A former senior official said, of the growing P.D.B. distribution list, “It got out of control. Everybody thought it was cool. They wanted to be cool.”

    ………………………………………..

    According to current and former officials briefed on U.S. intelligence about Chinese communications, Chinese officials said that Cui and Kushner, in meetings to prepare for the summit at Mar-a-Lago, discussed Kushner’s business interests along with policy. Some intelligence officials became concerned that the Chinese government was seeking to use business inducements to influence Kushner’s views. The intelligence wasn’t conclusive, according to those briefed on the matter. “I never saw any indication that it was successful,” a former senior official said, of Chinese efforts to compromise Kushner. The Chinese could have mischaracterized their discussions with Kushner. But the intelligence reports triggered alarms that Chinese officials were attempting to exploit Kushner’s close relationship with the President, which could yield benefits over time. “They’re in it for the long haul,” the former official said. (A spokesman for Kushner said, “There was never a time—never—that Mr. Kushner spoke to any foreign officials, in the campaign, transition, and in the Administration, about any personal or family business. He was scrupulous in this regard.”)…

    When Kushner was briefed by the F.B.I., he saw little cause for alarm, according to a person close to Kushner. He had no doubt that China and other countries were trying to persuade him to do things or to provide information, but he was, despite his inexperience in diplomacy and intelligence, confident in his ability to navigate these situations. After all, he told others, New York real estate is not “a baby’s business.”…

  13. rikyrah says:

    I’ll ask again…

    WHAT.IF.THIS.HAD.BEEN.44?

    Under Trump, the number of people with access to the U.S. government’s most closely held intelligence reports grew because “everybody thought it was cool” https://t.co/uys73yV8h6 pic.twitter.com/Q8mOPUUFYJ

    — Mark Berman (@markberman) January 21, 2018

    Silverman at BJ said that 44 had Seven people who read the PDB. Dolt45 has 6 more people than that.

  14. rikyrah says:

    Idk, Dems can do this again in a couple weeks, but the GOP won’t have CHIP as their hostage anymore. Plus threat of a second shutdown will kibosh any little momentum Trump will have post SOTU.

    — Zeddy (@Zeddary) January 22, 2018

    And I think Trump is going to start freaking out about the bad press. I still think there’s a good chance Kelly doesn’t survive the DACA fight.

    — Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 23, 2018

  15. rikyrah says:

    From Rampall at WaPo:

    … Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) are responsible for the completely avoidable three-day federal shutdown that Congress moved to end on Monday. They will likewise be responsible for the catastrophe coming in a few weeks if Congress can’t get its act together to raise the debt ceiling.

    McConnell and Ryan, after all, not only lead the majority party. They also control the legislative agenda. They determine which bills come up for a vote and when. And they knew far in advance the drop-dead deadlines for keeping the government funded.

    They also knew the Democrats’ conditions for cooperating.

    But McConnell and Ryan chose to do nothing. Worse than nothing: They frittered away their precious time and political capital on policy pursuits that were totally irrelevant. Worse than totally irrelevant: actively destructive…

    … The only thing McConnell and Ryan felt any urgency to work on was stuff their donors care about. They focused on that, and orchestrated more stopgap budgetary measures in their spare time. Monday’s, in fact, represents the fourth stopgap 2018 funding bill, with this one set to expire on Feb. 8. It does, at least, include a six-year reauthorization of CHIP.

    Don’t get me wrong. Trump has not exactly been helpful in brokering a deal on budgets, health care, immigration or other major policy issues. When he has gotten involved, he’s often struggled to remember what’s existing law, what his own positions are and how the legislative process even works.

    McConnell and Ryan have no such excuse. Collectively, they have served five decades in Congress. They know Congress’s arcane procedures and obligations and, again, they set the agenda. To date, that agenda has not included a single serious budget deal…

  16. rikyrah says:

    Was waiting to get a new computer at work…Dude just up and left. Said he had a ‘job’ to do. Computer’s sitting behind me…I guess he’ll be back later on today.

  17. rikyrah says:

    Trump election panel purchased Texas data identifying Hispanic voters: report
    BY OLIVIA BEAVERS – 01/22/18 05:06 PM EST

    President Trump’s now dissolved voting commission had asked Texas to turn over voting records that would identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, in addition to the regular detailed voter registration data other states provided, The Washington Post reported Monday.

    The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity filled out forms asking Texas, the state with the second-largest Hispanic population in the U.S., to provide the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” according to the report, which cited copies of the signed and notarized Texas voter data request forms.

    The president created the voting commission to investigate voter fraud, a move that came after he made the baseless claim that millions of illegal votes had been cast against him in the 2016 election, costing him the popular vote. Trump, however, disbanded the voting commission earlier this month, citing a handful of state and federal lawsuits against the panel.

    The Lone Star State has identified voters with a Hispanic name since 1983 in order to follow state and federal laws which require the state to send bilingual election notices that are written in both Spanish and English, Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos (R), told the Post. For such mailings, Taylor says Texas goes off the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of most common surnames by race and Hispanic origin.

    http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/370172-trump-voting-commission-purchased-texas-election-data-identifying

  18. Just tell us when will Jeff Sessions be arrested? #MuellerInvestigation #MuellerTime

    https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/955830041308483585

    • rikyrah says:

      Do you all think the KKKeebler Elf is silly enough to lie under oath to Bobby Three Sticks?

      • majiir says:

        I wouldn’t doubt that he’d attempt to lie to Mueller. Sessions has a long and sordid history of lying to avoid punishment or to get the agenda he wants enacted. What he may not know is that Mueller is way smarter than he is. Sessions only has experience in bullying others in Alabama and in the Senate. The sh*tty tactics he’s been using successfully against others aren’t likely to work against Mueller.

  19. Ametia says:
  20. rikyrah says:

    Forever FLOTUS 😍😍😍

  21. rikyrah says:

    Good Morning Everyone 😄😄😄

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