The Chumph Family Mob – Money Laundering

You are what you associate with…

The Chumph isn’t the only crook in the family.

Ivanka Trump’s Old Jewelry Business Is Now Caught Up in an Alleged Fraud Scheme

Throw a dart at a map of the world and there’s a solid chance it will land near a spot where a Trump family business has allegedly gotten caught up in a money laundering scheme.

There’s Panama, where the Trump Ocean Club is said to have washed dirty cash for Russian gangsters and South American drug cartels. There’s Azerbaijan and the Trump Baku, where the money allegedly being laundered was said to belong to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. And of course, there’s the Trump Soho in Manhattan, a magnet for money from Kazakhstan and Russia, and a property that one former executive on the project now calls “a monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.”

In each of those cases, the Trump Organization has denied any wrongdoing and has sought to distance itself—and the Trump family—from the property, saying they merely licensed ​the Trump name. But as it turns out, it’s not just Trump-branded real estate developments that perhaps have attracted the wrong kinds of money.

Thanks to an overlooked filing made in federal court this past summer, we can now add a jewelry business to the list of Trump family enterprises that allegedly served as vehicles to fraudulently hide the assets of ultra-rich foreigners with checkered backgrounds. In late June, the Commercial Bank of Dubai sought—and later received—permission to subpoena Ivanka Trump’s now-defunct fine jewelry line, claiming its diamonds were used in a massive scheme to hide roughly $100 million that was owed to the bank, according to filings at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

High-end real estate is a common vehicle for money laundering, in part because, until recently, the industry was effectively exempt from many of the laws that prevent laundering through other types of assets, such as the “Know Your Customer” laws that apply to banking. But diamonds, too, hold an important place in the money launderer’s toolkit. Mountains of dirty money can be converted into tiny diamonds, which are easy to store or smuggle across national boundaries, and convert back into cash when the opportunity arises.

The Trumps are not the only Western business owners whose ventures have been tied to alleged money laundering and fraud schemes, but they are the only ones who are also in charge of American foreign policy, making the entanglements—and possible points of leverage—that arise from such ventures matters of national security.

Ivanka Trump launched Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry roughly a decade ago, partnering with a young real estate and diamond heir named Moshe Lax. It was her first independent business venture. She licensed her name for use by Madison Avenue Diamonds, which did business under Trump’s name in exchange for royalties. Trump also owned an equity stake in the business for an unspecified period. Around the time they were going into business together, Lax introduced Trump to Jared Kushner, the man who would become her husband, at a luncheon for real estate heirs he convened in Midtown Manhattan.

Trump and Lax set up a flagship boutique on Madison Avenue and publicly showered praise on each other, but the partnership eventually soured. Lax has been accused of all kinds of wrongdoing, from stiffing creditors to extortion, in numerous lawsuits, some of them related to Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry and some of them unrelated.

Trump terminated her relationship with Lax late last year, and according to the Trump Organization, Lax still owed her money as of August. Meanwhile, the defunct diamond line is getting dragged into court proceedings like this latest Dubai case, which alleges a plot by the family of prominent Emirati oil traders named the Al-Saris.

A decade ago, the high-flying Al-Saris controlled a multibillion-dollar oil-trading empire, but then hit a rough patch, reportedly becoming mired in legal battles over unpaid bills and sanctions imposed in 2012 on the family’s firm, FAL Oil, for selling oil to Iran.

Apparently strapped for cash, the Al-Saris are alleged to have borrowed over a $100 million from the Commercial Bank of Dubai. They defaulted on the debt and, according to court documents, proceeded to hide their assets in a network of shell companies, through which they bought diamonds and Las Vegas real estate. In addition, to Ivanka’s line, the bank—which filed a fraud suit in 2014—says the Al-Saris purchased diamonds from Jacob Arabo—better known as “Jacob the Jeweler”—for the same purpose. As “Jacob the Jeweler,” Arabo became famous as a diamond dealer to the stars (he was sentenced to 30 months in prison in 2008 for lying to investigators about Detroit’s “Black Mafia Family” drug trafficking ring).

In this new case, the Commercial Bank of Dubai has not accused the jewelry line or Arabo of any wrongdoing. Arabo’s business did not respond to requests for comment, nor did FAL oil, the Al-Sari- owned enterprise at the center of the dispute. Lawyers for the Dubai bank, which is being represented in New York by Mayer Brown LLP, declined to comment.

Josh Raffel, a White House spokesman who fields Ivanka-related inquiries, did not respond to questions about the subpoena request, nor did Alan Garten, the general counsel of the Trump Organization.

The attempt to subpoena the jewelry business has so far escaped public notice, likely in part because court documents name only “Madison Avenue Diamonds”—the corporate entity that was registered to do business as “Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry”—and do not mention the Trump name. Though Trump has since cut all ties to Madison Avenue Diamonds, the timeline of the underlying case suggests any alleged transactions would have taken place when the company was still doing business as Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.

As a practical matter, such a subpoena request—from the Commercial Bank of Dubai—now potentially injects the business dealings of the first family into a vicious legal fight between Arab world power players at a time when the Trumps are also using the power of the presidency to influence the region….

 

The Year in Trump Racism

A quick review…

 

Who Exactly are Omarosa’s “People”?

The Omarosa revenge tour is in full swing. She is supposedly writing a “tell all” book about her time spent at Trump’s knees.

Not sure what “juicy details” she is going to “reveal” in her tawdry effort at retaliation, but there is a problem.

You see – as part of the high level security clearance that you are granted to be in the same room of the President of the US, you are under a special set of laws protecting National Security, and sign an agreement not to disclose information about the inner workings of the White House for a period of 10 years. Anything you write has to be reviewed by Government Security Lawyers in that time period.

Now…I don’t know if you have ever seen the result of such review – but they tend to look like this –

So…Good luck with that!

Anyway…On Omo’s recent claim she was working for “Her people”…

 

Hey Chumph! Don’t Even Think About Firing Mueller

Senator Mark Warner is one of my state’s Senators. Know him through business and have met him several times through mutual acquaintances.

He is a businessman…And he doesn’t make idle threats.

 

Memphis Plays “Whack a Reb” Around Republican State Racists

Nice move, Memphis!

In a rapidly emerging war between municipalities, the Trump administration and white-wing, neo fascist Republican dominated legislators opposed to local rule…

Another mile marker.

 Memphis takes bold legal action to circumvent Tennessee state rule and remove Confederate statues

The city of Memphis engaged in a “massive operation” on Wednesday to take down two controversial Confederate statues before the morning light, the Commercial Appealreports.

The Memphis City Council first unanimously voted to sell two public parks to a private entity. Within minutes, Memphis Police Department officers had deployed to the sites of statues honoring Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Within one hour of the vote, Mayor Jim Strickland had signed the ordinance.

The sale of the parks was a legal mechanism to circumvent a decision by the Tennessee Historical Commission intended to prevent local governments from taking down the statues.

“Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park have been sold. Operations on those sites tonight are being conducted by a private entity and are compliant with state law,” Mayor Strickland explained. “We will have further updates later tonight.”

 

Getting a Handle on What Sexual Misconduct Actually Means

I think everyone except white-wing evangelicals agrees that a forcible sex act is rape.

But what about a coworker looking at another and saying “Damn, she’s fine”?

Stealing a kiss in what you think is a romantic moment to find out she/he isn’t that in to you? I mean, in the old movies, that always seemed infamously to lead to slap a la Cary Grant and Doris Day.

Trying to force a coworker into a sexual encounter? No question this is wrong.

Can a woman be accused of sexual misconduct in attempting to coerce an unwilling male?

So where exactly are the lines?

And what can we do as a society to make sure everyone is on the same page? What is and is not acceptable is rapidly changing. As well as out view of “who” is believable. Misconduct isn’t going to be swept under the rug (unless you are a Republican).

 

What Does ‘Sexual Misconduct’ Actually Mean?

The almost infinite shades of creepy misbehavior on display are challenging the legal and cultural categories used to describe them.

“Enough is enough,” proclaimed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a December 6 press conference. Whatever the details of her colleague Al Franken’s sexual misbehavior, said Gillibrand, who has been aggressively pushing for Congress to tackle its harassment problem, he needed to step down. “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say: None of it is OK. None of it is acceptable.”

It most definitely is not. But as the public outrage over sexual misconduct gains force, it is swallowing up an increasingly diverse range of allegations, from the relatively petty (such as those lodged against Franken) to the truly monstrous (such as the claims regarding Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes). In between those poles exist almost infinite shades of creepy—which, sadly, will necessitate a great many discussions about how to deal with, and even talk about, the different types of offenses and offenders.

This is, in some ways, uncharted territory. In the past, questions of culpability were largely left to the legal realm: As long as a man didn’t get arrested or lose a lawsuit—and sometimes even if he did—he could get away with an awful lot while suffering little more than a bad-boy reputation. But the current reckoning is different, a rising tide of public shaming driven in part by shifting attitudes and expectations among younger women. Going forward, it’s hard to tell how the new lines will be drawn, much less where.

Women should be respected. Period. But not all offenders are created equal. The pattern of coercive harassment of employees allegedly perpetrated by chat show host Charlie Rose or former Representative John Conyers is not the same as the fumbling, drunken stupidity of which The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush stands accused. Thrush may or may not deserve to lose his current job for having made booze-fueled passes at, and subsequently talked smack about, female colleagues at his previous job. But his alleged offenses pale when compared to, say, ex-ABC pundit Mark Halperin’s alleged practice of groping, rubbing his erections against, and even masturbating in front of junior staffers—and then threatening to kill the careers of those who rebuffed him. (Like many of the men caught in this whirlwind, Halperin disputes at least some of the allegations against him.)

Some of the misbehavior being detailed is flat-out bizarre. Comedian Louis C.K. admitted to being a nonviolent but nevertheless intrusive exhibitionist-masturbator. It remains a public mystery precisely what Garrison Keillor did to get his radio show killed. (Something about touching a woman’s bare back when her shirt fluttered open?) Representative Joe Barton had every right to text naked pics of himself to one of his girlfriends, but threatening to use the Capitol Police to keep her quiet about their relationship was a no-no. As for former Representative Trent Franks, who felt it appropriate to pressure multiple young aides to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife: Someone needs to explain that The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction, not a how-to guide.

Then, of course, there are the many and varied accusations circling President Donald Trump, not to mention his own boasts in this area—none of which he has addressed in a remotely coherent, much less persuasive fashion. (The Access Hollywood tape is empty locker room talk! No, wait, it’s a fake! He has never met these women! Not even the ones he’s been photographed with! Or the one who was on his show!) But that, alas, is a special topic to be saved for another day.

It is precisely because this movement is so powerful that it’s important to avoid (through frustration or disgust, exhaustion or confusion) sweeping every bad act and actor into the same mushy heap. That kind of sloppiness breeds excess and backlash. Right now, even our language is inadequate to the moment. Shoving Weinstein and Ailes under the same umbrella of sexual “misconduct” or “misbehavior” as Franken or Thrush renders such terms all but meaningless. Weinstein terrorized scores of women—psychologically, professionally, and physically—for multiple decades and is currently under investigation for rape. That’s not “misconduct” or “harassment.” It’s an atrocity, possibly wrapped in multiple felonies. Both genders need to find a way to address some of these qualitative distinctions without sounding like anyone is being let off the hook.

This may sound obvious, until, for instance, you wander into an angry Twitter mob of John Conyers supporters demanding to know why the ex-congressman’s sins are seen by many to be worse than Franken’s. Well, for starters, Franken didn’t use tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to secretly settle an aide’s harassment claim. As for the underlying misconduct, if one believes the accusations, Conyers’s transgressions—committed repeatedly against his own employees in direct abuse of his power over them—were empirically more egregious and revolting. (Asking an aide to touch his junk or else find him another woman who would? Come on.) This isn’t to say that Franken didn’t behave like an entitled pig. But, until the drip, drip, drip of low-level grope-and-slobber stories accumulated, the case for his being pushed from office was not nearly as clear as the one against Conyers….More...

 

Democrats Set Up to Lose Again In Virginia

Democrats lose by pursuing “bipartisanship”…

Republicans don’t give a damn about what anyone thinks and ram through their agenda.

Until Democrats learn to shove it up Republican ass with a 4×4…Democrats will continue to lose.

Democrats have also become the “white women’s” Party – which is a losing proposition. They had better start paying attention to all of their bases.

Ralph Northam – biggest Democrat comeback in Va history, with Governorship, Lt Governorship, a majority in the House…And one vote away from a majority in the Senate…

And he is already going mamby-pamby.

Wake the fuck up!

We wouldn’t be in this Chumphshit mess if Obama had hung a few of the regnant white wing bastards from the light posts.

Obama’s Lesson for Virginia

When it comes to expanding Medicaid, Gov.-elect Ralph Northam shouldn’t bother with bipartisanship.

Ralph Northam ran on Medicaid. “We need to expand Medicaid in the commonwealth of Virginia,” the Democratic gubernatorial candidate said at a major rally in Richmond just a few weeks before the election. “Right now there are 400,000 working Virginians that don’t have access to health care. That is immoral.”

In his first interview since the election, Ralph Northam says he won’t take that step. “I have let our people know that I will work with the legislature that was elected by the people,” he said in an interview with the Washington Post. “I’m not approaching anybody … in the Senate or the House.” The Post notes that “Northam said he has no plans to try to force Republicans to accept a broad expansion of Medicaid.”

It’s true that Northam won’t enter office with Democratic majorities in the General Assembly. But he’ll be close. Democrats swept state legislative elections in a surprising wave that, after several recounts—including one race determined by a single vote—gave them 50 seats in the 100-member House of Delegates, with incoming Lieutenant Gov. Justin Fairfax as the tie-breaking vote. Along with Republicans’ razor-thin minority in the state Senate—19 seats in a 40-member chamber—Democrats are a hair’s breadth away from the votes they need to expand Medicaid. Bringing a few Republicans into the Northam administration, or convincing one or two of the most vulnerable GOP members to switch sides, would open the floor to expanding the health care program.

Northam, who himself switched parties before entering electoral politics and was later courted to switch back by Republicans, is clearly committed to an Obama-esque vision of civility and compromise. But before heading down that road, the incoming governor should remember one of the lessons of Obama’s presidency: Voters may say they like bipartisanship, but they don’t actually vote for it.

Despite an electorate that clearly wanted Democrats to take the lead, Northam is preaching bipartisanship in Richmond. His advice to freshman Democratic lawmakers? “Learn the system, number one. And really make good relationships on both sides of the aisle. … I’ll try to lead that. We talk about the doctor being in, healing, and I’ll try to bring people together and emphasize doing what’s in the best interest of Virginia.”

We’ve seen this logic before. In the first year of his presidency, Barack Obama tried to find common ground with the GOP on issues of presumably mutual concern. He brought Republicans into his Cabinet, extending offers to Robert Gates, former Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois, and Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire. A week after his inauguration, Obama met with congressional Republicans, seeking support for his stimulus plan and offering concessions on several items. And far from jamming health care through Congress, the White House deferred to a bipartisan “Gang of Six” led by Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. By the end of his first 100 days in office, most Americans—66 percent according to Gallup—believed Obama was making a sincere effort to find common ground with the Republican Party, fulfilling a key campaign promise.

But while the public likes bipartisanship, it doesn’t reward it. Obama’s overtures didn’t insulate him or his Democratic allies from a growing sense of discontent and a landslide that would obliterate the party’s majority in the House of Representatives. What voters typically reward is performance, and the administration’s zeal for compromise on stimulus and health care produced measures that weren’t large enough or generous enough to give voters a sense of security in the wake of a disastrous recession.

Compromise is part of governance, but given the yawning ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats, there is real tension between pursuing that bipartisanship and building legislation that works. During Obama’s presidency, the pressures of partisanship and ideology meant Republicans were never going to support an expansive health insurance program. Still, Democrats built their program around the possibility of bipartisan support, yielding a law with real weaknesses.

Ralph Northam clearly values compromise and bipartisanship, but he runs a risk in elevating them over his unambiguous promise to expand Medicaid. Northam won’t have to stand for re-election—the governor of Virginia can’t serve consecutive terms—but the energy that elevated state Democrats and delivered a shocking victory in the House of Delegates can dissipate as easily as it emerged. Indeed, in the wake of his interview with the Post, Northam was hit with a social media backlash, excoriating him for backing away from his Medicaid pledge.

If Obama’s experience doesn’t weigh on Northam, that backlash should. If Northam can lead Virginia to fully implement the Affordable Care Act, there’s a decent chance voters will remember in two years and vote accordingly. They won’t remember, and won’t care, if he reaches out to Republicans to craft a half-measure that doesn’t address the problem.

 

Fox News Analysts Tell Truth About FBI and Chumph

Not sure how long Shep is going to be on Faux…He is injecting a little too much reality into the sewer.

Neopolitano brings up a couple of good points. The FBI acquisition of CHumph emails was legal…And the CHumph is in big trouble.

 

Tavis Smiley Fights Back

Appears that Tavis isn’t having any of it.

 

Sally Yates – Uprising!

The first line of battle against the Chumph and Republican reprobates…

Sally Yates calls for uprising of Americans to ‘stand up, speak out’ and relocate ‘core values’

The United States is at another critical moment in history where Americans must decide what kind of country they want to be. That’s what former acting Attorney General Sally Yates wants the country to understand.

In an op-ed for USA Today, the foe of President Donald Trump once tried to warn and help the administration, only to be thrown out of office. Yates thinks this is part of a calling for Americans to decide if they’ll uphold the “country’s core values.”

“Our founding documents set forth the values that make us who we are, or at least who we aspire to be,” Yates wrote. “I say aspire to be because we haven’t always lived up to our founding ideals — even at the time of our founding. When the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were being enslaved by their fellow Americans.”

She recalled the Jim Crow South when Americans were forced to decide whether they wanted to be defined by lynchings or a promise of equal justice. While Americans have sometimes fallen short of what it strived for, Yates explained that they still shared a vision of what the country meant and what was expected of leaders.

She listed values that unite the United States and asked Americans to look back at the Preamble to our Constitution to harness the inspiration:

“’We the people of the United States’ (we are a democratic republic, not a dictatorship),” Yates wrote. “‘In order to form a more perfect union’ (we are a work in progress dedicated to a noble pursuit) ‘establish justice’ (we revere justice as the cornerstone of our democracy) ‘insure domestic tranquility’ (we prize unity and peace, not divisiveness and discord), ‘provide for the common defense’ (we should never give any foreign adversary reason to question our solidarity) ‘promote the general welfare’ (we care about one another; compassion and decency matter) ‘and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity’ (we have a responsibility to protect not just our own generation, but future ones as well).”

She explained that the Bill of Rights similarly gets to the point of allowing for individual liberty and other rights that Americans are taking for granted.

“But without vigilance can erode and slip away, such as freedom of speech (our right to protest and be heard); freedom of religion (the essential separation between how one worships and the power of the state); and freedom of the press (a democratic institution essential to informing the public and holding our leaders accountable),” she continued.

The rule of law is generally another essential principle, according to Yates. It implied we are approaching a lawless world in which any possible criminality on the part of the president could be ignored by portion of the citizens.

“The promise that the law applies equally to everyone, that no person is above it, and that all are entitled to its protection,” she wrote. “This concept of equal protection recognizes that our country’s strength comes from honoring, not weaponizing, the diversity that springs from being a nation of Native Americans and immigrants of different races, religions and nationalities.”

Yates noted that one thing that separates the United States from an autocracy is the “strict separation between the Justice Department and the White House on criminal cases and investigations.” It should ensure the public would believe in the legitimacy of the criminal process. Truth is another thing that ensures the U.S. doesn’t stumble drunkenly into an autocracy.

“There is such a thing as objective truth,” she explained. “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.”

She said that failing to tell the truth is important. If Americans can’t trust their public servants and fail to hold them accountable for lies, “we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.”

She closed with a powerful call to action:

“We are not living in ordinary times, and it is not enough for us to admire our nation’s core values from afar…So stand up. Speak out.”

 

Republican Financed Fake Sexual Harassment Claims Against Democrat Congressman

Not real surprised at this.

Democrats are absolute idiots for bending over to get rid of Franken.

He said – She said gets into some ambiguous territory at times. Doesn’t mean that sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t common. Just means there is a lot of room for misinterpretation of motives.  Invited a woman on my staff some years ago to a group happy hour where I bought a round of drinks for my staff.. Either I didn’t make the invitation clear enough, or she misunderstood my meaning. She responded saying she had a boyfriend. I was a bit taken aback, and felt it was necessary to explain it was an invitation to join the group of 30 or so staff. and my meaning wasn’t to suggest some sort of private get together.

So, it is possible to say something or do something which is misinterpreted. Sure there are jackasses out there…But firing of people without some sort of due process is getting way out of hand,

In this case the “accuser” turns out to be a paid Republican troll, with a history of false allegations…

 

Submarining the Chumph

Submarining the most hated POS in America, anyway they can. The war inside the Executive Branch cornholing Putin’s Bitch any way they can.

Federal employees have found ingenious ways to thwart Trump’s absurd anti-Obama agenda

Pundits have joked that President Donald Trump has a list of accomplishments from Barack Obama’s administration and is going through them one by one in efforts to destroy them. While the reality is probably less about Obama and more about progressive policies in general, the Trump administration has gone through a list of Obama-era accomplishments and attempted to undermine or end them.

In a Monday report, Bloomberg News revealed government employees are circumventing absurd Trump administration demands by simply renaming things.

The example Bloomberg highlighted is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) opinion that climate change is real, it’s a serious problem and that it is man-made. Trump’s policy, however, vacillates between believing it isn’t real or that it’s a “hoax” perpetuated by the Chinese. Trump’s appointees at the Commerce Department have complained to the staff at NOAA, which it oversees, but they’ve never demanded changes to scientific findings, research or reports.

Some of the estimated two million staffers have managed to “obstruct, slow down or simply ignore” Trump.

“Everything coming out of NOAA does not reflect this administration,” retired lawyer David Schnare said. He worked for a think tank that is skeptical about climate change. “It reflects the last one.”

The same is happening at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where a report was released contradicting Trump’s position about banking regulations. Embassy staff at the State Department are maintaining programs that boost economies in developing nations, which is in opposition to Trump’s “America First” philosophy. Instead of it being about the economy of a third-world nation, they changed the label so that it’s about creating markets for U.S. exports.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry commissioned a report on the dangers of putting energy onto the power grid from wind and solar energy. The published report proved the exact opposite. Pentagon staffers have outright refused to implement Trump’s policy of barring transgender soldiers from serving in the military. In November, they paid for one such gender-reassignment surgery for a soldier.

The General Services Administration (GSA) has a fleet of over 1,000 electric cars thanks to a 2011 program aimed at building “a 21st century clean energy economy.” That’s in conflict with the Trump administrations’ position on climate change as well. So, the GSA labeled it as a job creator.

“GSA recognizes that emerging technologies play a significant role in our mission to save taxpayer dollars, create jobs and stimulate economic growth in the United States; which is one reason we provide the federal fleet with vehicles that offer the latest and most efficient transportation technologies available, including electric vehicle (EV) technology,” the agency celebrating “National Drive Electric Week.”

The largest barrier to the White House being able to enforce their agenda from top to bottom is Trump’s inability to hire or appoint the necessary staffers and leaders. “Less than two-thirds as many appointments have been submitted and won Senate confirmation,” Bloomberg reported, comparing it to where the Obama administration was at the same time.

Even with appointments, however, there are millions of government employees who maintain their job regardless of who is in office.

“It’s an enormous challenge for a new president and administration to exert influence over the bureaucracy,” Vanderbilt political science professor David Lewis explained. “They know a lot more than the political appointees who come into the agencies. That gives them an advantage.”

While Trump will likely blame “the deep state” or partisan hacks in departments, the bureaucrats are far from it.

“The bureaucracy is generally resistant, no matter what the hell you’re trying to do,” said former Clinton and Obama transition head Leon Panetta. When a president begins as Trump did, admitting he plans to disrupt things, getting staff to implement such policies “is gonna take a hell of a lot longer.”

In the NOAA case, Trump appointees attacked the report “unacceptable” and “inflammatory.” The report was then leaked to the press, which makes it more difficult for staff to make any changes without the public noticing.

 

Sen. Cory Booker Under Protective Detail After Assasination Threat

White wingers…Again.

Corey Booker (l) and Va Senator Doug Jones

Sen. Cory Booker Gets Extra Security Following Death Threat

Police have beefed up security at the senator’s residence in Newark, New Jersey.

Police in Newark, New Jersey, were providing increased protection to Sen. Cory Booker(D-N.J.) after the lawmaker and his family received a death threat.

Newark police were notified by U.S. Capitol Police “regarding a threat on the life” of Booker and his family members, the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Saturday in a statement. “As a result, members of the Police Division’s Executive Protection Unit have been assigned to provide security at the Senator’s residence in Newark,” the mayor said, according to ABC News.

Baraka did not elaborate on the threat.

Booker was recently in Alabama for the special Senate election that pitted Republican Roy Moore against Democrat Doug Jones. Booker, who’d canvassed for Jones, celebrated the Democrat’s surprising victory last week.

Booker, one of President Donald Trump’s most vociferous critics in Congress, has in recent days blasted the Federal Communications Commission decision to repeal net neutrality, slammed what he called Trump’s “all-out assault on the LGBTQ community,” and called for the president to resign over accusations of sexual harassment.

 

Democrats Losing The Base

Black folks have been the most reliable voters for the Democrat Party the last 50 years. But the Party has delivered very little in return for that loyalty. That lack of delivery has led to voter apathy, and is the leading culprit in Hillary losing to the Chumph.

We, as a people are now under existential threat from Trump and his white wing followers – but the Party and it’s policies are being driven by the interests of white women.

Black voters just delivered two major victories for the Democrats in Virginia and Alabama. That vote wasn’t as much for Democrat candidates, as against the Chumph white supremacists.

If elected Democrats don’t find a way to head off the Chumph…They are going to lose again in 2018 and 2020.

I’m A Brown Woman Who’s Breaking Up With The Democratic Party

I realize now that the love has been one-sided.

Dear Democratic Party:

You were the love of my life. I fell in love early and hard. I have been the kind of party loyalist ― the kind of sappy, soapbox-y, clichéd devotee ― that makes Fox News moonwalk with glee.

The first vote I ever cast, at 18, was for Bill Clinton. The last vote I cast was for his wife, Hillary. My adoration for Hillary bordered on mania. In college, I named my ficus plant after her. Twenty years later, I canvassed, held fundraisers, dragged my 8-year-old daughter door to door, proudly wore HRC’s face on T-shirts and housed campaign volunteers in my home.

I loved you so much that I cried each time I voted. Thinking about the women who died fighting for my right to vote did it every time. I cried when I voted for Bill. For Barack Obama. I wept when I voted for Hillary. You’ve been that kind of mad love to me.

And now I want to break up.

I realize now that the love has been one-sided, unrequited. You’ve never recognized me, as a brown woman. You’ve taken my love, my money, my tokenism, with nary anything in return. You married the white woman and hooked up with me on the side.

Black Lives Matter is a second ― or third ― thought. Where is your outrage over the national epidemic of police brutality against black people? You continue to call angry white men who commit mass murder “lone wolves.” But if someone who looks like me screams “Allah” and fires a gun, it’s “terrorism.” And you wonder why angry white men are gunning down innocent brown men at bars, in their yards, on the street.

For all your talk about Dreamers, there’s been little action. You don’t seem to give a crap about kids of color who will be kicked out of this country, the only country they know. What if all those Dreamers were white? I suspect there’d be a very different outcome.

You spend a lot of time and energy wooing white voters, while giving short shrift to voters of colors and assuming we’ll always show up for you.

To be fair, there’s no reason for you to assume otherwise. We always show up for you. Take, for example, the special election in Alabama on Tuesday. Had black people not shown up, an accused child molester would be our newest senator.

What will Doug Jones do for the black folks who put him in the Senate? If history is any indication, very little.

This past year, I held and attended numerous fundraisers for your candidates. I donated money every time I was asked. I marched: for women, for children, for reproductive rights, for science. I traveled across the country for the March for Women in Washington, D.C. It was there that I got the first hint that you weren’t that into me. The giveaway? The sea of white women in pink hats with brown and black women dotting the waves like debris. I let it slide but I kept my eyes and ears open.

My fellow brown and black sisters started to notice, too — and the chatter began, in whispered hushes at first, then loud and clear. You are a party of white feminists. Of white feminism, the kind of feminism that focuses on the struggles of white women. It was the first time I’d heard the term, most likely because self-awareness is hard and I was a brown woman trapped in a white feminist’s world.

But then I woke up. I saw you with clear eyes for the first time.

For every Kamala Harris and Pramila Jayapal sticking their brown and black necks out for me, there are dozens of white female Democrats who want me to shut my trap.

Your advocacy for reproductive rights zeros in on wealthy white women. Women of color and other marginalized women get sidelined. The gender pay gap is worse for black and Latina women than it is for white women. Women of color make up 64 percent of women in U.S. jails. Why isn’t the Democratic Party talking about this and trying to fix it?

My own “liberal” white congresswoman in Colorado has given me a hint as to why.

At the congresswoman’s town hall in February, Neeti Pawar, the brown female founder of the South Asian Bar Association of Colorado, was one of the only people of color in a room of nearly a thousand. She asked about immigration and DACA protections. The congresswoman scoffed. When Pawar pressed on, she was told to remain silent or she’d be asked to leave. During a follow-up, staffers told Pawar that civil rights weren’t the representative’s “issue.” Brown and black people don’t have the luxury of sidelining civil rights. It’s life and death for us.

And it didn’t stop there.

I was organizing a fundraiser for a U.S. senator earlier this month, and had planned to use the opportunity to highlight women of color by having black women introduce him. The congresswoman’s staff caught wind of the event and asked if she could introduce the senator. I explained my position but invited her to come as a guest. No response. When pressed on her stance on racial inclusion, her staff didn’t respond to me directly but tattled on me to the white women co-hosting the event.

I know there are some good ones among you. But for every Kamala Harris, Maxine Waters and Pramila Jayapal sticking their brown and black necks out for me, there are dozens of white female Democrats who want me to shut my trap, and say please and thank you. I should be grateful for scraps while white women enjoy a proper marriage with you.

I’m done with all that. And if you don’t want to lose more women like me, there are a few basic things you can do.

Pay attention to the reproductive health of women of color and other marginalized women. Do something, anything, to protect Dreamers. Or, if you’re really feeling bold, move forward on some form of reparations for black people.

Finally, mentor young people of color to run for office. Campaign for brown and black folks. Raise money for them. Show up for them. I’d come running back to you with open arms if you did even a few of these things.

In the meantime, I’ll be on the sidelines waiting, watching, hoping, praying. You broke my heart.

 

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