NYTimes: Trump Approves Strikes on Iran, but Then Abruptly Pulls Back
WASHINGTON — President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
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wapo:When Trump visits his clubs, government agencies and Republicans pay to be where he is
When President Trump finished the first official rally of his reelection campaign this week, he got on Air Force One. But he didn’t go home to Washington. Instead, he flew 190 miles in the opposite direction — to visit his own Doral golf resort, outside Miami.
The resort’s profits have fallen since Trump took office. But it had a major event planned for the next day, a fundraiser for Trump’s reelection campaign.
It would be his 126th visit to one of his properties since taking office. And this visit — like more than a dozen before it — would bring paying customers, allowing Trump to play a double role.
The president would be the headliner and the caterer.
Trump has bigger designs for the Doral club: He has suggested holding next year’s Group of Seven meeting — a gathering of world leaders — at Doral or another of his luxury resorts, current and former White House staffers said.
Since taking office, Trump has faced pushback about his official visits to his properties from some of his aides, including inside the White House Counsel’s Office. They worried about the appearance that he was using the power of the presidency to direct taxpayer money into his own pockets, according to current and former White House officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump has rebuffed such warnings, overruling a recommendation that he not visit his Turnberry golf club in Scotland last summer, according to aides. And in recent months, he has scheduled even more detours from official trips to visit his businesses — golf courses in Ireland, Los Angeles and Doral.
In all, his scores of trips have brought his private businesses at least $1.6 million in revenue, from federal officials and GOP campaigns who pay to go where Trump goes, according to a Washington Post analysis.
They gave Trump valuable marketing opportunities — to showcase his opulent properties on an international stage
Trump’s preference for his own properties also has reshaped the GOP fundraising schedule, with benefits for the Trump Organization.
About one-third of all the political fundraisers or donor meetings that Trump has attended — 23 out of 63 — have taken place at his own properties, according to the Post analysis of federal campaign finance records and the president’s public schedule. Campaign finance records show several Republican groups paying to hold events where Trump spoke. GOP fundraisers say they do that, in part, to increase the chances Trump will attend.
Pat, I completely understand the ramifications on local retail trade of purchasing stuff on the internet. I also understand the dynamics of trade in the internet age. Two of those dynamics have existed since at least the late 1800s. Think Sears, Roebuck- which began as a mail order retailer in 1893 and did not operate a retail store until 1925. Two elements of the dynamic that exist now that did not exist before are an instant worldwide supply chain driven by the rise of Asian manufacturing, reliable transoceanic transportation of goods by boat and air and by trade agreements among political and military foes, and of course, the internet.
Many of the old malls are being turned into apartments and for most there are long waiting lists. Often thought this was a great idea or refurbishing them as school classrooms.
On Thursday, President Trump responded to Iran’s downing of an American surveillance drone by authorizing military strikes, then changing his mind.
“Both sides have their stories. Iran says they shot down the drone because it was flying over their country. But America says it wasn’t flying over Iran, it was just flying very, very close. Yeah. ‘I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you — Mom! Iran hit me!’” — TREVOR NOAH
“But who are you going to believe, Iran or the U.S. government … is a question that used to be really easy to answer.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“I don’t think America should launch a full-out war to avenge a flying Roomba, all right?” — TREVOR NOAH
“This would be like declaring war over a downed washing machine. But it could happen. Remember, World War I started when an anarchist stole the kaiser’s toaster.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“That’s right, Iran shot down an unmanned drone. They said they wanted to send America a clear message. But Trump was like, ‘Everyone knows if you want to send the U.S. a message, you do it on Twitter.’” — JIMMY FALLON
“It’s getting serious, though. An Iranian general named Hossein Salami said they’re ready for war. Trump’s already got troops in Turkey ready for action, but Putin’s warning the White House against the conflict. So if you’re keeping track, we’ve got Salami and Turkey on white, hold the Russian.” — JIMMY FALLON
The Punchiest Punchlines (100,000 Invisible People Edition)
Trump called into Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday and talked about his re-election rally in Orlando, claiming, among other things, that 121,000 people were there — so many, he said, that some were turned away.
“The city officials in Orlando estimated the crowd at 19,792, so he’s only off by about 100,000 people.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
“[As Trump:] We were begging them not to come so hard that they heard us before we said it and they never showed up, so that’s a win.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“It’s exactly like a tailgate party — lots of drinking and everyone is cheering for a 300-pound man with possible brain damage.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
My idea for those massively inefficient consumers of tremendous amounts of energy is to raze them then convert entire mall properties, to include the acres of parking, into green space.
In the UK, the locals made a big deal of having daylight ’round the clock. It didn’t make much difference to us. We were focused on home, or where our targets were, or being sure to close the drapes so we would get a good night’s sleep.
Something not nice is going on with YouTube, promoting far right stuff. One was the lying father of the lying daughter who is leaving the WH after a couple years of lying, promoting some hate group. The next was an ad for the far right Hinsldale college. uck.
I like a merger of both patd’s and Flatus’ ideas…. make malls into senior living facilities with lots of green space around them.
I use online places like Amazon and Chewy because the nearest mall is miles away. Just got an order from Chewy yesterday that I ordered on Wednesday morning. Picked up the box in my garage.
George Conway blasted President Trump and called for him to resign from office after he walked back a planned military strike against Iran in response to the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone.
“Trump didn’t realize UNTIL TEN MINUTES BEFOREHAND that a planned airstrike would kill over a hundred people and would therefore be grossly disproportionate to the loss of a UAV?” Conway, lawyer and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, tweeted Friday. “To say this is amateur hour would defame amateurs.”
“Resign. If you didn’t know this until it was almost too late, you’re even more of an idiot than people think you are,” Conway tweeted in response to Trump. “Do the country and the world a favor. Go back to real estate, where the worst you can do is kill banks.”
“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,” Trump tweeted.
Iranian officials said Friday that Trump warned them that an attack was imminent. The officials also said Friday that they were informed of the planned attack in a “short period” before it was initially scheduled to be carried out.
“In his message, Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues,” one Iranian official said.
U.S. and Iranian officials are disputing the location of the drone when it was shot down late Wednesday, with Iran arguing that it had entered the country’s airspace.
The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk drone was shot down by an Iranian missile system in an “unprovoked attack.”
Centcom denied claims from Iranian officials stating that the drone had flown over Hormozgan Province in southern Iran.
“This attack is an attempt to disrupt our ability to monitor the area following recent threats to international shipping and free flow of commerce, ” Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, said in a statement.
The New York Times reported late Thursday that Trump had ordered a strike overnight against Iran, but pulled back.
Following that report, Conway railed against Trump in a late-night tweet that he has since pinned to his Twitter page, slamming the commander-in-chief as an “erratic, unstable, incompetent, ignorant, intellectually lazy, narcissistic, and sociopathic man whose judgment no serious, intelligent person trusts.”
deserves an encore and in case you missed it in above comment:
Conway … slamming the commander-in-chief as an “erratic, unstable, incompetent, ignorant, intellectually lazy, narcissistic, and sociopathic man whose judgment no serious, intelligent person trusts.”
Felix Sater, a real estate developer who helped Donald Trump secretly pursue a Trump-branded tower project in Moscow, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Friday after months of delay, but the session will be behind closed doors. Sater, though, tells Mother Jones he would have happily appeared in open session—begging the question of why the committee would not question him publicly.
“I was always willing to testify publicly,” Sater said on Thursday.
[…]
Sater told Mother Jones that he thought the committee might prefer a closed session given the amount of sensitive national security information that could come up. “I can understand that there is [too] much NATSEC stuff for them to be comfortable with it being public,” he noted, perhaps referring to his previous role as a US government informant.
In that position, Sater helped the US government prosecute mob figures, and he claims he assisted in tracking down Osama bin Laden and other national security operations. But most of Sater’s testimony Friday is expected to focus on his work with Cohen to help the Trump Organization secure an agreement to develop a Moscow tower, which could have earned Trump hundreds of millions of dollars. The effort to land the deal, which began in October 2015, continued through at least June 2016. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that he had no business with Russia. In fact, Cohen communicated with the office of Dmitry Peskov, a top deputy to Russian President Vladimir Putin, in January 2016 to seek help with the deal. And throughout this stretch, Trump praised Putin on the campaign trail.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Sater plans to share with the committee details about the tower effort that have not been publicly detailed, including advice he received from a former Soviet army general relating to the project.
The House Intelligence Committee will issue a subpoena to Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Donald Trump who was the chief negotiator for the failed Trump Tower Moscow project, after he failed to show up for a voluntary interview Friday morning.
“The committee had scheduled a voluntary staff-level interview with Mr. Sater, but he did not show up this morning as agreed,” said Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “As a result, the committee is issuing a subpoena to compel his testimony.”
Sater told POLITICO that the interview is “being rescheduled.”
His attorney, Robert Wolff, said in a statement that Sater couldn’t attend Friday’s interview “due to health reasons” but looks forward to voluntarily appearing once it’s rescheduled.
The Trump Tower Moscow project has been a central focus of the Democrat-led committee’s investigation into whether Trump is compromised by foreign actors. Sater was initially scheduled to testify before the panel in March, but the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation prompted Schiff to postpone the interview.
“Mr. Sater helped spearhead President Trump’s efforts to build a ‘Trump Tower’ in Moscow, including attempts to reach out to Vladimir Putin. He must come testify,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a member of the Intelligence Committee.
A star-studded cast broke down evidence President Trump obstructed justice laid out in special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report as part of a short video released Thursday by NowThis.
During the five minute and 37 second video, actors take turns discussing the various allegations of obstruction of justice committed by Trump during his 2016 campaign and time in the Oval Office.
The video features frequent Trump critics, like Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness and Star Trek’s George Takei, as well as Robert De Niro who’s played Mueller in several Saturday Night Live Skits and Martin Sheen, famous for playing the West Wing’s President Josiah Bartlet.
[…]
The video also features Christine Lahti, Laurence Fishburne, Sophia Bush, Stephen King, Rob Reiner, Rosie Perez and Kendrick Sampson.
The stars talk through Mueller’s findings and allegations reported throughout the 400-page document.
“All this is in the report, please just read it for yourself,” Sheen said.
That was a long haul Craig. Glad it is finally over.
Joe Biden’s recent remarks would be less of a problem if hadn’t sided with the Eastlands of the senate on issues like busing.
And really Tweety keeps referring to those senators as “seggys” I assume for segregationist but really I have never heard that term ever
“Perhaps – I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears. ” ― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Thinking of the good old days of “no way can you down load a meg of bits in an hour” while downloading a sixteen gig file.
The world changed when the first Intel multicore processors were introduced to the motherboard makers. When memory was measured in meg in a plain chip it changed more, and when disc space was measured in hundreds of megs an even greater change. Once the hardware caught up to the software dreams the entire world changed. We are now seeing the results of high horsepower in rigged elections, hacked systems, stolen databases and Amazon. Good and bad, the world of today is very different from the world of 2000.
trump is now surrounded by enemies : the ayatollah, erdogan, king kim, Merkel, May, Obrador, Slim, Fox, Branson, Schiff, Waters, Nadler, Pelosi, WaPo, NYT, the Sentinel, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, The Nation, America Magazine, NYM, Mother Jones, Father Time, the Mueller team, the NY AG, SDNY, EDVA, judge moore, Amash, will, kristol, Rubin, Box, Johnstone, Schwarz, Wilson, Wolff, NPR, PBS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Craig Crawford, SNL, Gen Clark, Gen McCaffery, Gen McRaven, gen kelly, mike flynn, mike cohen, wesselberg, kanye, Stormy, Mexico, Canada, commie China, Cuba, Venezuela, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., California, New York, Pope Francis, Muslims, dark people, the courts, the judges, the justices, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, scientists, teachers, unions, migrants, farmers, environmentalists, the diplomats, the generals, ‘deep state’, the VA, the NIH, the pollsters, the McCains, Weld, Hogan, Kasich, Conway, flake, corker, collins, murkowski, tillerson, the Mueller Report, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the BBC, the CBC, Der Spiegel, Agence France, Le Monde, L’Oservatore, Al Jazira, Global Warming, Amazon, Costco, the nfl, the Emmies, the Oscars, Kaepernick, DeNiro, Damon, Whoopie, Daniels, Redford, Hoffman, Milano, Swift, Hilton, Streisand, Hanks, O’Donnell, Baldwin, Midler, women, the entire bush crime family, bill clinton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, two dozen ravening Dem candidates, and mostly Hillary Clinton.
trump is surrounded. The enemy is everywhere. No one will protect him but two senile former lawyers, Julie Annie & Dershowitz.
The best thing trump can do now is to call down airstrikes on his position.
I was listening to NPR the other day doing an interview with Carlos. He has a new album out. He was ask what it was like having to play some of his old stuff from 50 years ago, He used Black Magic Woman as an example. A band mate wrote the song and shared it with the rest of the band in a parking lot in LA and everytime he plays the song it takes him back to that parking lot. Talk about a song with memory of place.
I remember the first time I heard Black Magic Woman, too. It was at a party. I was in the very nice basement of a house in Minneapolis. Upstairs and down there were prolly 100 stoned folks. Not me – I was a starched underwear uptight kind of guy. A few people I worked with were there : Jim Mackey (stoned), cutie Ardella Schaap (not a stoner) and Ardella’s straight arrow fiancé were among them. I was feeling pleasantly tipsy – I think from some Irish Whisky. Very pleasantly tipsy, as I remember. Black Magic Woman suddenly froze that place and time in my mind.
The advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s in her forthcoming book.
In “What Do We Need Men For?,” her account of being harassed and mistreated by a series of men, which St. Martin’s Press is expected to publish next month, Ms. Carroll, the author of “Ask E. Jean” in Elle magazine, alleges that Mr. Trump raped her in 1995 or 1996, in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. An excerpt that includes her account was published on New York magazine’s website earlier Friday.
Mr. Trump, in a statement, emphatically denied the incident. “I’ve never met this person in my life,” he said. “She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
In her book, Ms. Carroll describes what begins as a friendly encounter, as Mr. Trump, whom she’d met once before, asks her to try on lingerie that he is considering buying as a gift. Once they entered the dressing room, according to Ms. Carroll, Mr. Trump pushed her against the wall, pushed his mouth against her lips, then pulled down her tights, unzipped his pants and forced his “fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”
Ms. Carroll, now 76, wrote that she struggled and fought back and ran out of the dressing room, and that the whole episode lasted no more than three minutes. She wrote that she didn’t go to the police after the encounter but did tell two close friends, both journalists. One friend, a magazine writer, begged her to go to the police and offered to go with her. The other friend, a television anchor, advised Ms. Carroll not to report the assault because Mr. Trump’s lawyers would “bury” her. Ms. Carroll said she never came forward because she feared death threats and “being dragged through the mud, being dismissed.”
Mr. Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct before and was heard boasting of sexual assault in the “Access Hollywood” tape. Ms. Carroll’s descriptions of her encounter with Mr. Trump are the most explosive allegations in the book and will likely reignite the discussion over the president’s treatment of women and the assault allegations that have been raised against him.
Reached by phone at her home in upstate New York on Friday afternoon, Ms. Carroll said she decided to write about her experience now because she felt she owed her readers transparency. “I just thought, it’s time, I owe it to my beloved readers. I can’t keep up this facade,” she said.
She initially planned a book in which she traveled the United States and spoke with women about their problems with men, but she decided on a more personal account after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein surfaced.
The details of her encounter with Mr. Trump are still vivid in her memory, including the clothing she wore and her feeling of shock, Ms. Carroll said. “It’s welded into my brain.”
One of Ms. Carroll’s friends, the magazine reporter, confirmed with The Times that Carroll called her shortly after the events described in the book and told her what had happened. The friend, who asked The Times to withhold her name because she feared negative repercussions that could result from the book, said she urged Carroll to report the incident to the police and offered to go with her. Ms. Carroll seemed conflicted about what to do, the friend said, and even laughed about it.
Her other friend, the TV anchor, also confirmed with The Times that Ms. Carroll described the assault in the days afterward. She also asked The Times to withhold her name.
Ms. Carroll said that she didn’t dwell on her memories in the years after it happened. “I am one of those people who puts the past clearly behind them,” she said.
But in the book, she hints at lasting trauma, when she notes that after the encounter, she never had sex with anybody again. “Maybe all this just killed my desire for desire,” she said in the interview.
The memoir, which The Times obtained a copy of, is described by her publisher as a “darkly funny and very personal” account about Ms. Carroll’s “sometimes very dark history with the opposite sex.”
She accuses other powerful men of sexual harassment, including former CBS’s former chief executive Les Moonves, as well as her encounters and troubled history with mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends and husbands and a serial killer.
A spokesman for Mr. Moonves didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In the New York excerpt, he denied that the harassment occurred.
Lawyers for St. Martin’s conducted a legal review of Ms. Carroll’s memoir, said Elisabeth Dyssegaard, executive editor at St. Martin’s.
to honor the day, newsweek: Summer Solstice Traditions: How Do Different Cultures Celebrate Midsummer Around The World?
he summer solstice falls on Friday, June 21, 2019, celebrating the longest day of the year and the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere.
You can read more about the history of Summer Solstice here: Summer Solstice 2019: When Is The First Day of Summer and Why Is It The Longest Day of The Year?
[continues]
“I score this as grand ayatollah 4 and trumpussy 0. And it’s still early innings.”
X-R, you talking about this?
NYTimes: Trump Approves Strikes on Iran, but Then Abruptly Pulls Back
WASHINGTON — President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.
As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.
Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.
The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.
[continues]
wapo: When Trump visits his clubs, government agencies and Republicans pay to be where he is
When President Trump finished the first official rally of his reelection campaign this week, he got on Air Force One. But he didn’t go home to Washington. Instead, he flew 190 miles in the opposite direction — to visit his own Doral golf resort, outside Miami.
The resort’s profits have fallen since Trump took office. But it had a major event planned for the next day, a fundraiser for Trump’s reelection campaign.
It would be his 126th visit to one of his properties since taking office. And this visit — like more than a dozen before it — would bring paying customers, allowing Trump to play a double role.
The president would be the headliner and the caterer.
Trump has bigger designs for the Doral club: He has suggested holding next year’s Group of Seven meeting — a gathering of world leaders — at Doral or another of his luxury resorts, current and former White House staffers said.
Since taking office, Trump has faced pushback about his official visits to his properties from some of his aides, including inside the White House Counsel’s Office. They worried about the appearance that he was using the power of the presidency to direct taxpayer money into his own pockets, according to current and former White House officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump has rebuffed such warnings, overruling a recommendation that he not visit his Turnberry golf club in Scotland last summer, according to aides. And in recent months, he has scheduled even more detours from official trips to visit his businesses — golf courses in Ireland, Los Angeles and Doral.
In all, his scores of trips have brought his private businesses at least $1.6 million in revenue, from federal officials and GOP campaigns who pay to go where Trump goes, according to a Washington Post analysis.
They gave Trump valuable marketing opportunities — to showcase his opulent properties on an international stage
Trump’s preference for his own properties also has reshaped the GOP fundraising schedule, with benefits for the Trump Organization.
About one-third of all the political fundraisers or donor meetings that Trump has attended — 23 out of 63 — have taken place at his own properties, according to the Post analysis of federal campaign finance records and the president’s public schedule. Campaign finance records show several Republican groups paying to hold events where Trump spoke. GOP fundraisers say they do that, in part, to increase the chances Trump will attend.
[continues]
Andy Marlette June 21, 2019
In case any MAGAt starts off on a jingoistic anti-Iran spiel you might remind them of the above truth.
Pat, I completely understand the ramifications on local retail trade of purchasing stuff on the internet. I also understand the dynamics of trade in the internet age. Two of those dynamics have existed since at least the late 1800s. Think Sears, Roebuck- which began as a mail order retailer in 1893 and did not operate a retail store until 1925. Two elements of the dynamic that exist now that did not exist before are an instant worldwide supply chain driven by the rise of Asian manufacturing, reliable transoceanic transportation of goods by boat and air and by trade agreements among political and military foes, and of course, the internet.
https://twitter.com/auhttps://twitter.com/audreyreneehu/status/479936965497081857dreyreneehu/status/479936965497081857
Many of the old malls are being turned into apartments and for most there are long waiting lists. Often thought this was a great idea or refurbishing them as school classrooms.
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall-is-now-micro-apartments-2016-10
from today’s NYTimes “best of late night”:
Trump Drones On
On Thursday, President Trump responded to Iran’s downing of an American surveillance drone by authorizing military strikes, then changing his mind.
“Both sides have their stories. Iran says they shot down the drone because it was flying over their country. But America says it wasn’t flying over Iran, it was just flying very, very close. Yeah. ‘I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you — Mom! Iran hit me!’” — TREVOR NOAH
“But who are you going to believe, Iran or the U.S. government … is a question that used to be really easy to answer.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“I don’t think America should launch a full-out war to avenge a flying Roomba, all right?” — TREVOR NOAH
“This would be like declaring war over a downed washing machine. But it could happen. Remember, World War I started when an anarchist stole the kaiser’s toaster.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
“That’s right, Iran shot down an unmanned drone. They said they wanted to send America a clear message. But Trump was like, ‘Everyone knows if you want to send the U.S. a message, you do it on Twitter.’” — JIMMY FALLON
The Punchiest Punchlines (100,000 Invisible People Edition)
Trump called into Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday and talked about his re-election rally in Orlando, claiming, among other things, that 121,000 people were there — so many, he said, that some were turned away.
“It’s exactly like a tailgate party — lots of drinking and everyone is cheering for a 300-pound man with possible brain damage.” — STEPHEN COLBERT
[continues]
Jamie, my idea for some of the larger enclosed defunct malls was a three-bee:
part seniors residence (but not nursing homes), part adult education facilities* and part early start/kindergarten programs*
* some of the live-in seniors employed as teachers, administrators or staff therein
My idea for those massively inefficient consumers of tremendous amounts of energy is to raze them then convert entire mall properties, to include the acres of parking, into green space.
Try this again. Hyvää Juhannusta!
In the UK, the locals made a big deal of having daylight ’round the clock. It didn’t make much difference to us. We were focused on home, or where our targets were, or being sure to close the drapes so we would get a good night’s sleep.
Something not nice is going on with YouTube, promoting far right stuff. One was the lying father of the lying daughter who is leaving the WH after a couple years of lying, promoting some hate group. The next was an ad for the far right Hinsldale college. uck.
I like a merger of both patd’s and Flatus’ ideas…. make malls into senior living facilities with lots of green space around them.
I use online places like Amazon and Chewy because the nearest mall is miles away. Just got an order from Chewy yesterday that I ordered on Wednesday morning. Picked up the box in my garage.
by George, from the hill:
George Conway blasted President Trump and called for him to resign from office after he walked back a planned military strike against Iran in response to the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone.
“Trump didn’t realize UNTIL TEN MINUTES BEFOREHAND that a planned airstrike would kill over a hundred people and would therefore be grossly disproportionate to the loss of a UAV?” Conway, lawyer and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, tweeted Friday. “To say this is amateur hour would defame amateurs.”
“Resign. If you didn’t know this until it was almost too late, you’re even more of an idiot than people think you are,” Conway tweeted in response to Trump. “Do the country and the world a favor. Go back to real estate, where the worst you can do is kill banks.”
Conway’s comments came after Trump confirmed via Twitter that the U.S. had been “cocked and loaded” to retaliate against Iran, but that he called off the mission at the last minute after learning that 150 Iranians would die.
“We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,” Trump tweeted.
Iranian officials said Friday that Trump warned them that an attack was imminent. The officials also said Friday that they were informed of the planned attack in a “short period” before it was initially scheduled to be carried out.
“In his message, Trump said he was against any war with Iran and wanted to talk to Tehran about various issues,” one Iranian official said.
U.S. and Iranian officials are disputing the location of the drone when it was shot down late Wednesday, with Iran arguing that it had entered the country’s airspace.
The U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said the U.S. Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk drone was shot down by an Iranian missile system in an “unprovoked attack.”
Centcom denied claims from Iranian officials stating that the drone had flown over Hormozgan Province in southern Iran.
“This attack is an attempt to disrupt our ability to monitor the area following recent threats to international shipping and free flow of commerce, ” Lt. Gen. Joseph Guastella, commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, said in a statement.
The New York Times reported late Thursday that Trump had ordered a strike overnight against Iran, but pulled back.
Following that report, Conway railed against Trump in a late-night tweet that he has since pinned to his Twitter page, slamming the commander-in-chief as an “erratic, unstable, incompetent, ignorant, intellectually lazy, narcissistic, and sociopathic man whose judgment no serious, intelligent person trusts.”
deserves an encore and in case you missed it in above comment:
Conway … slamming the commander-in-chief as an “erratic, unstable, incompetent, ignorant, intellectually lazy, narcissistic, and sociopathic man whose judgment no serious, intelligent person trusts.”
something is fishy about this turn of events.
last night mother jones reported:
this morning in politico:
The House Intelligence Committee will issue a subpoena to Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Donald Trump who was the chief negotiator for the failed Trump Tower Moscow project, after he failed to show up for a voluntary interview Friday morning.
“The committee had scheduled a voluntary staff-level interview with Mr. Sater, but he did not show up this morning as agreed,” said Patrick Boland, a spokesman for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “As a result, the committee is issuing a subpoena to compel his testimony.”
Sater told POLITICO that the interview is “being rescheduled.”
His attorney, Robert Wolff, said in a statement that Sater couldn’t attend Friday’s interview “due to health reasons” but looks forward to voluntarily appearing once it’s rescheduled.
The Trump Tower Moscow project has been a central focus of the Democrat-led committee’s investigation into whether Trump is compromised by foreign actors. Sater was initially scheduled to testify before the panel in March, but the completion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation prompted Schiff to postpone the interview.
“Mr. Sater helped spearhead President Trump’s efforts to build a ‘Trump Tower’ in Moscow, including attempts to reach out to Vladimir Putin. He must come testify,” said Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a member of the Intelligence Committee.
from the hill:
A star-studded cast broke down evidence President Trump obstructed justice laid out in special counsel Robert Mueller‘s report as part of a short video released Thursday by NowThis.
During the five minute and 37 second video, actors take turns discussing the various allegations of obstruction of justice committed by Trump during his 2016 campaign and time in the Oval Office.
The video features frequent Trump critics, like Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness and Star Trek’s George Takei, as well as Robert De Niro who’s played Mueller in several Saturday Night Live Skits and Martin Sheen, famous for playing the West Wing’s President Josiah Bartlet.
[…]
The video also features Christine Lahti, Laurence Fishburne, Sophia Bush, Stephen King, Rob Reiner, Rosie Perez and Kendrick Sampson.
The stars talk through Mueller’s findings and allegations reported throughout the 400-page document.
“All this is in the report, please just read it for yourself,” Sheen said.
Closing on house in an hour. Southern Command signing off.
Happy Summer Solstice!
Craig… I had to sell my parents house.. it was a relief finally signing those papers… but it was sad too. Wishing you the best.
House of ‘rents up for sale. Course it’s been for sale bout 15 years or more…..
Yes RR, is there a word for equal parts happy and sad?
That was a long haul Craig. Glad it is finally over.
Joe Biden’s recent remarks would be less of a problem if hadn’t sided with the Eastlands of the senate on issues like busing.
And really Tweety keeps referring to those senators as “seggys” I assume for segregationist but really I have never heard that term ever
Saudade (Portuguese)
There is even a music score
farewell, southern command
“Perhaps – I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears. ”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
https://youtu.be/VG9OTPwvxVA
If Hope Hicks is having an affair with SFB, that would confirm that officially she has the worst taste in men – the World’s Title.
Or she wants into the will by signing prenup number four.
Thinking of the good old days of “no way can you down load a meg of bits in an hour” while downloading a sixteen gig file.
The world changed when the first Intel multicore processors were introduced to the motherboard makers. When memory was measured in meg in a plain chip it changed more, and when disc space was measured in hundreds of megs an even greater change. Once the hardware caught up to the software dreams the entire world changed. We are now seeing the results of high horsepower in rigged elections, hacked systems, stolen databases and Amazon. Good and bad, the world of today is very different from the world of 2000.
Ms Pat,
Regarding yours of 6:01 am, yes I was thinking of trump’s diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of nerve.
trump is now surrounded by enemies : the ayatollah, erdogan, king kim, Merkel, May, Obrador, Slim, Fox, Branson, Schiff, Waters, Nadler, Pelosi, WaPo, NYT, the Sentinel, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, The Nation, America Magazine, NYM, Mother Jones, Father Time, the Mueller team, the NY AG, SDNY, EDVA, judge moore, Amash, will, kristol, Rubin, Box, Johnstone, Schwarz, Wilson, Wolff, NPR, PBS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Craig Crawford, SNL, Gen Clark, Gen McCaffery, Gen McRaven, gen kelly, mike flynn, mike cohen, wesselberg, kanye, Stormy, Mexico, Canada, commie China, Cuba, Venezuela, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., California, New York, Pope Francis, Muslims, dark people, the courts, the judges, the justices, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, scientists, teachers, unions, migrants, farmers, environmentalists, the diplomats, the generals, ‘deep state’, the VA, the NIH, the pollsters, the McCains, Weld, Hogan, Kasich, Conway, flake, corker, collins, murkowski, tillerson, the Mueller Report, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the BBC, the CBC, Der Spiegel, Agence France, Le Monde, L’Oservatore, Al Jazira, Global Warming, Amazon, Costco, the nfl, the Emmies, the Oscars, Kaepernick, DeNiro, Damon, Whoopie, Daniels, Redford, Hoffman, Milano, Swift, Hilton, Streisand, Hanks, O’Donnell, Baldwin, Midler, women, the entire bush crime family, bill clinton, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, two dozen ravening Dem candidates, and mostly Hillary Clinton.
trump is surrounded. The enemy is everywhere. No one will protect him but two senile former lawyers, Julie Annie & Dershowitz.
The best thing trump can do now is to call down airstrikes on his position.
my favorite memory of place song.
https://youtu.be/LF9JPq5NU5w
I can only listen to one Prine song at a time. Then I need something to pick me up
Vive la Vida, (Live the life)
https://youtu.be/qxbmHc9ZBys
ahhhhh…. nothing like a little Carlos to celebrate the evening of Summer Solstice!
Here’s my selection… Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Roll one, smoke it, then sit back and enjoy
Thanks, Mr Jack ! That’s a ton of beautiful music.
Thanks Renee. that helped
Jack
I was listening to NPR the other day doing an interview with Carlos. He has a new album out. He was ask what it was like having to play some of his old stuff from 50 years ago, He used Black Magic Woman as an example. A band mate wrote the song and shared it with the rest of the band in a parking lot in LA and everytime he plays the song it takes him back to that parking lot. Talk about a song with memory of place.
Jack
Thanks, Ms Renee. I love LBM.
Xrep
My pleasure
Jack
I remember the first time I heard Black Magic Woman, too. It was at a party. I was in the very nice basement of a house in Minneapolis. Upstairs and down there were prolly 100 stoned folks. Not me – I was a starched underwear uptight kind of guy. A few people I worked with were there : Jim Mackey (stoned), cutie Ardella Schaap (not a stoner) and Ardella’s straight arrow fiancé were among them. I was feeling pleasantly tipsy – I think from some Irish Whisky. Very pleasantly tipsy, as I remember. Black Magic Woman suddenly froze that place and time in my mind.
Pat
I just published something for Sunday if you need it or next week if not.
Jack
I love Europa. IMHO it is Carlos’ best work. There are other songs I enjoy but Europa is great work.
jack, thanks. will look out for it tho’ fearless leader may be back and in the driver’s seat by then.
in the meantime, from today’s NYTimes:
The advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s in her forthcoming book.
In “What Do We Need Men For?,” her account of being harassed and mistreated by a series of men, which St. Martin’s Press is expected to publish next month, Ms. Carroll, the author of “Ask E. Jean” in Elle magazine, alleges that Mr. Trump raped her in 1995 or 1996, in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. An excerpt that includes her account was published on New York magazine’s website earlier Friday.
Mr. Trump, in a statement, emphatically denied the incident. “I’ve never met this person in my life,” he said. “She is trying to sell a new book—that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
In her book, Ms. Carroll describes what begins as a friendly encounter, as Mr. Trump, whom she’d met once before, asks her to try on lingerie that he is considering buying as a gift. Once they entered the dressing room, according to Ms. Carroll, Mr. Trump pushed her against the wall, pushed his mouth against her lips, then pulled down her tights, unzipped his pants and forced his “fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”
Ms. Carroll, now 76, wrote that she struggled and fought back and ran out of the dressing room, and that the whole episode lasted no more than three minutes. She wrote that she didn’t go to the police after the encounter but did tell two close friends, both journalists. One friend, a magazine writer, begged her to go to the police and offered to go with her. The other friend, a television anchor, advised Ms. Carroll not to report the assault because Mr. Trump’s lawyers would “bury” her. Ms. Carroll said she never came forward because she feared death threats and “being dragged through the mud, being dismissed.”
Mr. Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct before and was heard boasting of sexual assault in the “Access Hollywood” tape. Ms. Carroll’s descriptions of her encounter with Mr. Trump are the most explosive allegations in the book and will likely reignite the discussion over the president’s treatment of women and the assault allegations that have been raised against him.
Reached by phone at her home in upstate New York on Friday afternoon, Ms. Carroll said she decided to write about her experience now because she felt she owed her readers transparency. “I just thought, it’s time, I owe it to my beloved readers. I can’t keep up this facade,” she said.
She initially planned a book in which she traveled the United States and spoke with women about their problems with men, but she decided on a more personal account after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein surfaced.
The details of her encounter with Mr. Trump are still vivid in her memory, including the clothing she wore and her feeling of shock, Ms. Carroll said. “It’s welded into my brain.”
One of Ms. Carroll’s friends, the magazine reporter, confirmed with The Times that Carroll called her shortly after the events described in the book and told her what had happened. The friend, who asked The Times to withhold her name because she feared negative repercussions that could result from the book, said she urged Carroll to report the incident to the police and offered to go with her. Ms. Carroll seemed conflicted about what to do, the friend said, and even laughed about it.
Her other friend, the TV anchor, also confirmed with The Times that Ms. Carroll described the assault in the days afterward. She also asked The Times to withhold her name.
Ms. Carroll said that she didn’t dwell on her memories in the years after it happened. “I am one of those people who puts the past clearly behind them,” she said.
But in the book, she hints at lasting trauma, when she notes that after the encounter, she never had sex with anybody again. “Maybe all this just killed my desire for desire,” she said in the interview.
The memoir, which The Times obtained a copy of, is described by her publisher as a “darkly funny and very personal” account about Ms. Carroll’s “sometimes very dark history with the opposite sex.”
She accuses other powerful men of sexual harassment, including former CBS’s former chief executive Les Moonves, as well as her encounters and troubled history with mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends and husbands and a serial killer.
A spokesman for Mr. Moonves didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In the New York excerpt, he denied that the harassment occurred.
Lawyers for St. Martin’s conducted a legal review of Ms. Carroll’s memoir, said Elisabeth Dyssegaard, executive editor at St. Martin’s.
Pogo
Yeah, I think I agree at least tonight. I swear I got a contact high from it. And haven’t rolled one in 35 years.
Jack
NEW THREAD