Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum, so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in your brainpan, feel free to add a comment. __________________________________________________________
All that inappropriate infidel contact, but now the scene shifts to Israel as the circus goes to another town to set up its tent in a bunker.
The closest we’ll get to a general authority for entertainment soon is the carnival of Congressional hearings since Reince Priebus is heading home “early”. He may be subject to obstruction of justice because of inappropriate contact with Comey and McCabe regarding a NY Times article.
If Kushner comes back early, then there’s more to that WaPo report about being a “person of interest”. But firing a son-in-law is probably not in the cards for Agent Orange.
More dreading… but will it end with Trump untouched by more of his staff jumping ship … as we approach a Pence administration.
The president is said to be dreading the nine-day tour, which will include stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, Belgium, and Italy.
The biker rally ended at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, where many of the kingdom’s future clerics and Shariah judges are trained. The bikers hung out on the grass, drinking Diet Pepsi and lining up to face Mecca when the call to prayer sounded.
The ride had been organized by the General Authority for Entertainment, a government body charged with planning fun, G-rated activities in a kingdom where young people often complain of boredom. The riders wore white polo shirts with “Ride for entertainment” on the front and “No to terrorism” on the back.
Clearly, the world has also noticed Trump’s obsession. The New York Times reportsforeign officials are encouraging anyone scheduled to meet with Trump to occasionally drop praise of his Electoral College results…
But according to an anonymous US diplomat stationed in the Middle East, regardless of the speech’s content, Muslim leaders aren’t likely to take anything Trump says seriously. Why? “Not many people give much weight to anything he says,”the source told Buzzfeed. A scholar at the Century Foundation went further and said that the “bar is so low Trump will be seen as a success simply by avoiding the outlandish.”
‘…Another rider, Eyad Alrumaih, surmised that Saudis found Mr. Trump’s governing style similar to that of Arab leaders.Saudi Arabia has institutions and a parliamentary body that are supposed to represent the people, he said, “but at the end of the day, the king says what goes.”
He added: “This is why some of the Americans are against him: ‘He did this, he fired the head of the F.B.I.’ But this is how we do it here.’’’
In May 2012, the head of the mutaween, Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, stated that anyone using social media sites, such as Twitter, “has lost this world and his afterlife”.[30]
Priebus is said to be leaving the traveling White House caravan early, returning this week instead of staying the full foreign trip.
So even as Kushner has become a “person of interest”, Priebus has bigger problems since he may have made a pre-emptive move repeated by Agent Orange to try to force the FBI to deny a NY Times story.
In February, CNN reported that Priebus had reached out to the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, as well as to FBI Director James Comey, and asked them to publicly refute a Feb. 14 New York Times article that said the FBI was investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials.
First of all, we know that Priebus’s public assertion that the New York Times story on contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence is simply not true. If there were no contacts, then the FBI clearly wouldn’t be investigating Trump and his aides. At the very least, Priebus lied to the American people and should apologize for doing so.
Second, Priebus’s claim that he was “approved” by the FBI to say the Times story was wrong is dubious, since Comey on Monday implicitly confirmed that the story was correct. Moreover, why would McCabe have acted so inappropriately in reaching out to Priebus to tell him the Times story was “BS” when we now know from Comey’s testimony that the story is not BS?
If all this is true, then Priebus not only violated longstanding norms that severely limit contact between the White House and the Department of Justice, but his outreach to the FBI looks very much like an implicit effort to pressure the FBI into denying the Times story. That sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.
Even if Priebus did not intend to pressure the FBI about the investigation, his contact with Comey and McCabe gives the appearance that this is exactly what he was trying to do.
In short, none of the White House’s explanations about the nature of the contact between Priebus and the FBI make any sense.
The more logical explanation is that Priebus committed a serious ethical – and potentially legal – violation.
He should resign immediately.
OTOH Priebus may just be getting back to the White House to put out a number of staff brushfires…
And princeling Kushner got the Saudis a discount from Lockheed…
The problem is whether any moles exist in the WH, if it’s all about the money, since in a Trumpian world, loyalty is difficult to buy over dinner.
In Trumpland, Comey just hadn’t got enough of the vigorish. Everyone has their price. After all, Vlad Putin is going to get a big payday when those Crimea sanctions get lifted.
It even may be too late to get The Donald’s name onto the Nobel Peace Prize shortlist. If Dylan gets the Literature Prize, who can deny the golfer-in-chief.
No one should believe anything the National Enquirer writes. The fact that the National Enquirer says Flynn is a Russian spy likely means Flynn isn’t a Russian spy. But this story matters because the man who runs the National Enquirer, David Pecker, is a huge longtime friend of Trump. The Enquirer only runs stories that help Trump. And there is no way the Enquirer would run this story unless Team Trump thought this story helped Trump.
So the real question is why the White House thinks it’s to Trump’s advantage to suddenly throw Flynn under the bus… And finally, the “best” spin the White House could come up with is that a Russian mole got inside the White House. What’s the worse spin? What possible story could the White House be trying to hide, protect if they’re using the claim “Trump hired a Russian spy in the White House” as cover?
Donald Trump wants to rehire disgraced Michael Flynn because he ‘feels bad’ https://t.co/fKzYii4CX5
Welcome to the third week of the darling bards of May (with apologies to Shakespeare). As you might expect, most of the poets are English and American, but we do have one of the most famous Italian poets, and a modern Swedish poet this week. As a group, they cover over 750 years of poetry.
Much has changed in that amount of time, including the forms of poetry, yet the content is often very much the same. Humankind has radically altered many of the externals of our existence, while the large themes that poets were concerned with in the past – Life, Death, Love, Loneliness, Joy, Despair, War, Peace, Oppression, Freedom, Eternity – are still concerns of poets now. ________________________________________________________________
May 14
Mary Biddinger (1974 – )
Mary Biddinger was born in Fremont California, author of four books of poetry. She is a professor in the English department of the University of Akron. As senior editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, she oversees preparation of three collections of poetry each year, published by the University of Akron Press. Biddinger also founded the Barn Owl Review.
Parlor Games Are For The Weak
Calligraphy was for girls with nobody to knife like a tree. Bowling
was for lives that never got lucky. By the time I had my first
apartment, I kept a lipstick in every room. There were exactly
three rooms. The garbage chute backed up seven floors.
Old ladies of ghost vaudeville paid for pints of gin with dimes
downstairs. Card games, violent hairpieces, an illegal gray
monkey dressed as a rooster clown. Certain days I swore they
boiled unpaired boots in the atrium. Some tenants were never
seen, had Polish maids with elbows like witch-handles, laundry
hampers and harp buckets. I failed to comprehend a word.
Stephens defends that hallowed ground of conservatism, neoliberal capitalism and lands few punches other than echoing the “unhinged” euphemism that has been an unfortunately normalized description of Lord Dampnut.
No RW activist can compare to the actions of the actual flight 93 passengers and it is presumptuous for them to make that analogy even if it fits the Bannonist millenarianism and its generational suicide pacts.
In case you’ve had the pleasure of forgetting, “The Flight 93 Election” was the title of a portentous essay, published last September under a Roman pseudonym in The Claremont Review of Books, that declared the stakes for the United States in 2016 thus: “Charge the cockpit or you die.”
In the lurid imagination of the author — it turned out to be Michael Anton, who now holds a senior job in the White House — the American republic was Flight 93, a plane deliberately set on a course for destruction by liberals and their accomplices in the Republican establishment and the globalist “Davoisie.” As for Donald Trump, Anton implied that he was the political equivalent of Todd Beamer, the heroic passenger who cried “Let’s Roll” in a desperate bid for salvation.
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 