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brooklynite

brooklynite's Journal
brooklynite's Journal
August 29, 2019

Donny Deutsch's MSNBC show to end after less than 4 months

The Hill

Donny's Deutsch's "Saturday Night Politics" will be going off the air after just 13 episodes on MSNBC.

Deutsch, a marketing and branding expert who often appears on the network's morning program, "Morning Joe," launched his Saturday show in May.

Ratings for the show did not improve after its debut drew 919,000 viewers in early May.

"Saturday Night Politics" last aired on Aug. 17.
August 29, 2019

Mugshots show White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham after drunk driving arrests

Source: New York Daily News

Being Donald Trump’s spokeswoman can drive a person to drink, but Stephanie Grisham had a record of drunk driving long before she got the job in June.

Mugshots from 2013 and 2015 show the repeat offender after a pair of arrests in central Arizona that happened two years apart.

According to cops, Grisham also had a loose relationship with the truth before becoming White House spokesperson. During her 2013 arrest outside Phoenix, Grisham, driving on a suspended license, told police she hadn’t been drinking, then blew a .105, which earned her a DUI.

She told cops she’d earlier taken a Xanax after they reportedly pulled her over for speeding in an SUV and smelled booze on her breath, which she denied.


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/ny-stephanie-grisham-mug-shots-white-house-press-secretary-20190829-esq6ks4irjh6xk5t5no7qu3dgq-story.html



Lying to the police is certainly excellent training for her current job.
August 29, 2019

Pete Buttigieg Has Cooled Off But His Campaign Says It's Time For "Phase Three"

Buzzfeed

When Pete Buttigieg walked onstage at this month’s Iowa Democratic Wing Ding dinner, the crowd exploded into perhaps their loudest cheer for any of the 20 presidential candidates there that night.

He still commands attention, and inside that room there was real affection from voters who will matter soon.

But six months have passed since Buttigieg’s breakout moment at a CNN town hall briefly propelled him from obscurity to serious contender, and this summer, he seems stuck in fifth place. Now, after a fundraising period in which he led all rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden and several senators with national followings, his team is working to build Buttigieg into a sustainable force capable of winning the Democratic nomination.

“The first phase was just getting people to understand how to pronounce this impossible to pronounce Maltese last name,” Lis Smith, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been with Buttigieg from the start, told BuzzFeed News. “The second phase was to blow everyone out of the water on fundraising — everyone out of the fucking water. Done. Done. Now the third phase is blow them out of the water with our organization and our organizational abilities.”
August 29, 2019

Michael Bennet, Mad as Hell

The Atlantic

It’s almost a journalistic requirement to use mild-mannered to describe the 54-year-old senator from Colorado. Bennet comes off as the standard guy in a suit with the standard guy-in-a-suit haircut. He has a calm smile and a voice that creaks through conversations about provisions of bills he’s helped write. He’s sober. He’s serious.

But now, the prep-school and Yale Law graduate—and the man who is in elected office only because of a surprise appointment to the Senate—tells me,“I gotta live off the land.” He wants to be part of a revolution, he says: Make the presidency normal again.

Last Saturday, Bennet and I ducked into the coffee shop of the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. Bennet sipped tea and nibbled on a croissant. (He couldn’t believe that the two items together had run him $12.96.) The day before, he’d trashed the Democratic National Committee and what he referred to as its “stupid and self-defeating” rules about polling and online donors for qualifying for the September debates. He’s one of the 11 candidates who failed to register at 2 percent or higher in four different polls and hit 130,000 donors, thus preventing him from participating in the next debate. He likely won’t make the cutoff for the October debate either, but he says it doesn’t matter. He’s going to keep going: TV ads are in the works; hiring is under way. He’s flying to Iowa over Labor Day weekend, and in a minor coup, his wife will be campaigning with Christie Vilsack, the wife of the state’s popular former governor. He’s staying in the race, he told me, at least through the Iowa caucuses on February 3, 2020, and the New Hampshire primary a week later. “I would never have gotten in the race if I didn’t think I could win,” he said. “And when I think I can’t win, I won’t be in the race.”

This is the man whose presidential run started as an intellectual curiosity, a rolling revelation he had while finishing a book last year called The Land of Flickering Lights. He went to Iowa in February, and officially declared his candidacy in May. (In between, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer that was diagnosed at the beginning of this year.) His curiosity became a mission, and those classic politician lines about really wanting to run got sucked up into Bennet actually wanting to run.
August 29, 2019

Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro Accuses Democrats of Vast Plot to 'Replace American Citizens with Illega

Source: Mediaite

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro repeated a conspiracy theory held by some White Supremacists on Thursday while claiming that Democrats are waging a vast “plot” to “replace American citizens with illegals.”

Pirro promoted the so-called “great replacement theory” during a Thursday radio appearance with Fox Nation host Todd Starnes, who recently compared Hispanic immigrants to “Nazi” invaders two weeks after a white supremacist mass shooter targeted people of color in an El Paso, Texas Walmart.

“Their plan and their plot to remake America is to bring in the illegals, change the way the voting occurs in this country, give them licenses, they get to vote maybe once, maybe twice, maybe three times,” Pirro wildly claimed after accusing Democrats of using this plan in an attempt to “get rid of” Trump and “the people like you and me who put him into office.”

“You’ve got motor voter registration on the day of the election, we’ve got voter rolls that haven’t been purged of dead people in years, where the Democrats have resisted that,” she added. “Think about that, it is a plot to remake America. To replace American citizens with illegals.”

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/radio/fox-news-host-jeanine-pirro-accuses-democrats-of-vast-plot-to-replace-american-citizens-with-illegals/



She's going to win Trump back to Fox if it kills her...
August 29, 2019

2017: How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business

Forbes

LIKE AUTUMN LEAVES, sponsored Cadillacs, Ferraris and Maseratis descend on the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, in September for the Eric Trump Foundation golf invitational. Year after year, the formula is consistent: 18 holes of perfectly trimmed fairways with a dose of Trumpian tackiness, including Hooters waitresses and cigar spreads, followed by a clubhouse dinner, dates encouraged. The crowd leans toward real estate insiders, family friends and C-list celebrities, such as former baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry and reality housewife (and bankruptcy-fraud felon) Teresa Giudice.

The real star of the day is Eric Trump, the president's second son and now the co-head of the Trump Organization, who has hosted this event for ten years on behalf of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. He's done a ton of good: To date, he's directed more than $11 million there, the vast majority of it via this annual golf event. He has also helped raise another $5 million through events with other organizations.

The best part about all this, according to Eric Trump, is the charity's efficiency: Because he can get his family's golf course for free and have most of the other costs donated, virtually all the money contributed will go toward helping kids with cancer. "We get to use our assets 100% free of charge," Trump tells Forbes.

That's not the case. In reviewing filings from the Eric Trump Foundation and other charities, it's clear that the course wasn't free--that the Trump Organization received payments for its use, part of more than $1.2 million that has no documented recipients past the Trump Organization. Golf charity experts say the listed expenses defy any reasonable cost justification for a one-day golf tournament.

Additionally, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which has come under previous scrutiny for self-dealing and advancing the interests of its namesake rather than those of charity, apparently used the Eric Trump Foundation to funnel $100,000 in donations into revenue for the Trump Organization.

And while donors to the Eric Trump Foundation were told their money was going to help sick kids, more than $500,000 was re-donated to other charities, many of which were connected to Trump family members or interests, including at least four groups that subsequently paid to hold golf tournaments at Trump courses.
August 29, 2019

There's no 'gay gene,' but genetics are linked to same-sex behavior, new study says

Washington Post

There is no one gene that determines a person’s sexual orientation, but genetics — along with environment — play a part in shaping sexuality, a massive new study shows.

Researchers analyzed DNA from hundreds of thousands of people and found that there are a handful of genes clearly connected with same-sex sexual behavior. The researchers say that, although variations in these genes cannot predict whether a person is gay, these variants may partly influence sexual behavior.

Andrea Ganna, lead author and European Molecular Biology Laboratory group leader at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Finland, said the research reinforces the understanding that same-sex sexual behavior is simply “a natural part of our diversity as a species.”

The new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, is not the first to explore the link between genetics and same-sex behavior, but it is the largest of its kind, and experts say it provides one of the clearest pictures of genes and sexuality.
August 29, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard rules out running as an independent presidential candidate

Washington Post

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday she will not run as an independent candidate if she fails to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

"I will not," the Hawaii Democrat told CNN's Jim Sciutto on "Newsroom." "No, I have ruled that out."

"I'm going to continue to focus on moving our campaign forward, continuing this grassroots campaign, continuing to deliver our message to the American people and ask for their support," she added.

Gabbard failed to qualify for the next Democratic debate in September after making the first two debates. She reached the fundraising threshold, but did not meet the Democratic National Committee's polling minimum to qualify.
August 29, 2019

'NO EXCESSIVE BARKING': A Chevy Chase dog park divides the rich and powerful

Washington Post

Here in this community of the rich and powerful, where the average household income is $460,000, barking is the subject of a ferocious (fur-ocious?) debate — one that has divided the two-legged one-percenters for nearly a year.

The drama began last fall when the village spent $134,000 to turn a muddy triangle of land into a park where pups could run off-leash in a fenced refuge. Chase tennis balls. Sniff one another’s butts.

But after about a month, signs decrying the barking of those dogs began appearing around the park. The village police started receiving almost daily calls about the noise, mostly from one particular neighbor whose house backs up to the park. By spring, the tension had escalated so much that the Chevy Chase Village Board of Managers called a public hearing. Then another in June. And another in July.

At the center of it all is Elissa Leonard, chair of the village board and wife to Jerome H. Powell, who is also a chair — of the Federal Reserve. In recent months, her husband has been under attack from President Trump, who appointed him but blames him for the tanking stock market. “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” the president tweeted Friday.

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