Category: News

Mueller pursues new collusion leads despite talk of probe winding down… (Third column, 2nd story, link) Related stories:Dems call for FBI investigation into ‘massage parlor’ owner…AG Barr tries to restore confidence in Justice Dept… Advertise here

The Fox News Channel has suspended Jeanine Pirro’s weekly program — Justice with Judge Jeanine — in response to the conservative host’s recent remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) use of a hijab, according to a report. 

Monday on CNN’s “Right Now With Brianna Keilar,” during a discussion with the network’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta about President Donald Trump’s weekend tweets, the network briefly had a chyron which read, “Trump goes on rambling tweet binge while running the country.” Keilar opened the show by saying, “After a 24-hour tweet binge,…

What We’re Following Today

It’s Monday, March 18.

‣ Historic floods are engulfing midwestern states, including Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, after a bomb cyclone and high levels of melting snow and ice caused rivers to overflow their banks.

Here’s what else we’re watching:

On the Campaign Trail: At Beto O’Rourke’s latest events, the candidate’s celebrity status seemed to make up for his inability to answer attendees’ specific policy questions, Edward-Isaac Dovere reports from Iowa, where he has been chasing around the many 2020 presidential-primary candidates. (O’Rourke hauled in $6.1 million in donations within the first 24 hours of his announcement, his campaign said today.) Meanwhile, on Sunday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand officially launched her presidential campaign, although to many it might have felt like she’s been running for months.

Here’s the full cheat sheet on who else is in the race.

All the Wrong Nuclear Options: Since his candidacy, one of President Donald Trump’s primary foreign-policy planks has been dismantling the Iran nuclear deal. And when he withdrew the United States from the deal last year, he seemed to have succeeded. But with State Department officials fighting among themselves over how strictly to sanction Iranian oil, the Trump administration might be sabotaging itself: Its attempts to undermine the Iran deal might end up preserving it in the long run. And as the administration tries to avoid saving the nuclear deal it wants to kill, it’s also losing a handle on the nuclear negotiations it hoped would be successful. North Korea is threatening to completely withdraw from denuclearization negotiations with the U.S.

Formative Moments: “Young Muslims are scared and grieving over what happened in New Zealand. But they’re also ready to get political,” writes Emma Green. Green attended Friday prayers with students at the Islamic Center at New York University after the white-supremacist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Many of these students were born after 9/11, or are too young to remember it—“their formative moment is happening now, in the shadow of ascendant white nationalism.”

— Olivia Paschal and Madeleine Carlisle

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Snapshot

An interfaith gathering is held in Philadelphia on March 16, 2019, to mourn the Muslim worshippers killed during the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Jacqueline Larma / AP)

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Ideas From The Atlantic

A Racial Pattern So Obvious, Even the Supreme Court Might See It (Garrett Epps)
“Even amid law’s cratered landscape, sometimes a specific case presents facts simply beyond belief; sometimes the ‘system’ stands revealed as nothing more than one human being tormenting another because he can. For me, such a case is Flowers v. Mississippi, a death-penalty appeal to be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.”→ Read on.

Trump’s Continuing Attacks on John McCain Reveal a Worrisome State of Mind (Peter Wehner)
“These grotesque attacks once again force us to grapple with a perennial question of the Trump era: How much attention should we pay to his tweets; and what exactly do they reveal about America’s 45th president?”→ Read on.

How Hate Groups’ Secret Sound System Works (Joan Donovan)
“The extra attention that these ideas gain in the aftermath of a violent attack isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of news coverage. It’s the sound system by which extremist movements transmit their ideas to a broader public, and they are using it with more and more skill.”→ Read on.

It Could Happen in the U.S. (Talal Ansari)
“The president seems incapable of denouncing violence against Muslims with energy or sincerity. In this way, he is profoundly American. Muslims here are regularly dehumanized. Even their religion is delegitimized as not a religion, and some have gone so far as to state that adherence to the Muslim faith may be incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.” → Read on.

Bernie Sanders Thinks He Can Vanquish Health Insurers. He’s Wrong. (Ezekiel J. Emanuel)
“At least four different approaches to health reform could truthfully carry the Medicare for all label. Sanders’s plan is the best known, but it’s also the most politically impractical. It ignores the brutal history of repeated defeats for all Democratic health reform proposals that try to abolish private health insurers.” → Read on.

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What Else We’re Reading

‣ ‘Middle-Class Joe’ Rakes in Millions (Holly Otterbein and Marc Caputo, Politico)
‣ Flawed Analysis, Failed Oversight: How Boeing, FAA Certified the Suspect 737 Max Flight Control System (Dominic Gates, Seattle Times) (🔒 Paywall)
‣ Ta-Nehisi Coates Is an Optimist Now (Eric Levitz, New York) (🔒 Paywall)
‣ A DNA Test Might Help Exonerate This Man. A Judge Won’t Allow It. (Joseph Neff, The Marshall Project)
‣ Schools Do a Terrible Job Teaching About Slavery (Arika Herron, Indianapolis Star) (🔒 Paywall)

And One More Thing …

Space Bud: What would it be like for dogs to go to Mars? New art from NASA imagines astronauts and their best friends standing atop the planet’s red dunes. Marina Koren explores what sending a dog into space might look like—and it’s probably not what you think.

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Long before he got into politics, Donald Trump relished the power and reach of his Twitter feed. And not long after he took office aides recognized the damage that unvetted tweets could inflict, with the president using them to set policy, settle scores, and steer the national conversation.

Worried about misfires, aides have implored him to use social media more sparingly. At times, they’ve given Trump menus of pre-vetted tweets from which to choose. And they’ve held what some describe as interventions in the White House residence, with friends and family encouraging him to stop tweeting and praising him on days he’s shown restraint.

The push-and-pull has played out behind the scenes for the past two years. But if the last 72 hours have shown anything, it’s that staff still hasn’t figured out how to corral his social-media habit, and that as legal and political pressures mount, Trump is likely to turn more to Twitter to vent displeasure and discredit foes.

On Friday, Trump sent out a tweet similar to one any of his predecessors might have written: a note expressing sorrow over the gun massacre at a pair of mosques in New Zealand. He offered his “warmest sympathy” while pledging America’s unstinting support for a grieving ally. “God bless all!” he concluded.

But that spirit soon faded. Through the weekend and spilling into Monday, Trump spooled out dozens of tweets that amounted to a dark catalogue of grievances and frustrations that preoccupy him midway through the term, with the results of the Russia probe looming. Pausing to attend a church service Sunday near the White House, he took seemingly gratuitous swipes at longtime Arizona Senator John McCain, who died of cancer seven months ago. He suggested that federal agencies led by his political appointees should examine NBC’s Saturday Night Live, a comedy show that has satirized politicians for decades. He touted his poll numbers, skewered anchors at Fox News, disparaged Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, and denounced once-and-possibly future campaign rivals. Hillary Clinton, he wrote, is “Crooked Hillary;” former Vice President Joe Biden, a “low-I.Q. individual.”

One of the president’s outside confidants on Monday likened the tweetstorm to Trump’s free-wheeling speech earlier this month at CPAC. That’s no accident, said this person, who like other Trump associates I talked to spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Inside Trump’s 2020 campaign, two factions are emerging. One wants Trump to act “presidential” and deploy the formal trappings of the White House to his advantage. The other camp wants Trump to reprise the unscripted approach he used to secure his 2016 election victory. That’s the political persona Trump intuitively embraces—and it’s the one voters are most likely to see going into the next election, this person said.

[Peter Wehner: A damaged soul and a disordered personality]

Many of Trump’s tweets came with no clarifying context or connecting thread. It’s easy for a reader to get lost—or at least pine for some sort of annotated guide. When Trump tweeted Sunday morning, for example, that the Democrats had tried to “steal” the 2016 presidential race through an “Insurance Policy,” he was apparently referencing a text-message exchange between FBI officials who privately expressed opposition to his election.

In one instance, Trump risked undercutting the consoling message he delivered after the mosque killings. Again focused on Fox News’s lineup, the president called for the network to “bring back” Jeanine Pirro, whose show did not air on Saturday after she faced criticism for alleging that Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s “adherence to … Islamic doctrine” might conflict with the Constitution.

As Trump and his staff have sparred over his Twitter practices, the president has contended that they’re part of an authentic image. But some aides have worried his tweets are a form of self-sabotage. In his book Fear, the journalist Bob Woodward described a scene in the Oval Office in 2017 after Trump tweeted that Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski had been “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw her at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “I know what you are going to say,” Trump told his then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, according to Woodward’s reporting. “It’s not presidential. And guess what? I know it. But I had to do it anyway.”

The president has shown little indication that his instincts have changed. Amid record-setting staff churn, Trump is more and more untethered to the conventions and norms that past presidents observed, and he has steadily purged the senior officials with the stature to tell him hard truths. John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, came in as chief of staff in 2017 with a mandate to bring more discipline to White House operations. But Kelly’s clout eroded as Trump made plain he didn’t want a gatekeeper. In December, Kelly was replaced by budget chief Mick Mulvaney. But Mulvaney is serving in an acting capacity, meaning he is still auditioning for the permanent job and may be less empowered to tell Trump he’s wrong.

Asked about the president’s weekend flurry of tweets, Trump advisers say he is acting partly out of frustration, lashing out a Russia investigation he sees as illegitimate. In one tweet on Sunday, Trump blamed McCain for giving the FBI a “dossier” compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele alleging ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. “He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual),” Trump tweeted. (That got the attention of McCain’s daughter, Meghan, who said Monday: “He spends his weekend obsessing over great men, because he knows it, and I know it, and all of you know it, he will never be a great man.”) Taking an optimistic view, one former White House official told me Monday that Trump’s tweets by now have lost their power to shock—and that voters in the 2020 presidential race won’t be swayed by what Trump chooses to tweet.

“Is a single person in the universe going to vote against Trump now because he sent out a tweet about Judge Jeanine?” the former official asked. “We know the answer to that question is likely no.” Put another way, as another person close to the president said: “This is who he is.”

Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of legendary British rock band, The Who, has compared the European Union to the “f**cking mafia,” after being asked whether Brexit would be “bad for British rock music.”
Read Full Article at RT.com