Friday Morning Open Thread: Take What You Want, And Pay for It, Says God

Blech

A new report that a White House official appointed by Donald Trump overruled the advice of two specialist adjudicators to award top security clearance to the president’s son-in-law has raised fresh questions about the way the White House is conducting top security matters.

Jared Kushner was awarded top security clearance giving him access to highly sensitive national security intelligence last May after a prolonged delay in his FBI background checks. Kushner had lost his full clearance a few months before, after it emerged that he had failed to disclose adequate information.

The NBC News report, published on Thursday night, suggests new intrigue within the White House over the clearance process. Two career White House officials specializing in assessing individuals for their security risk turned Kushner down for the sensitive “top secret” category, the report states.
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The NBC News report is likely to generate fury over the way the White House is conducted because it suggests a drastic reduction in security standards in order to benefit members of Trump’s entourage. NBC News reports that not only did Kline grant Kushner a top secret pass, he also overruled security specialists and approved clearance for other Trump appointees in at least another 30 cases – vastly more than the norm in recent presidencies.

Nobody was blaming the president because they are afraid of the tweet.

The GOP has become the Soviet party -Catherine Rampell

@OzarkHillbilly: Will it really matter?

Trump White House’s plan for Venezuela regime change far from clear They don’t have a plan. They don’t even have a clue.

@OzarkHillbilly:

Trump White House’s plan for Venezuela regime change far from clear They don’t have a plan. They don’t even have a clue.

I take it the Russian translator has been furloughed.

@Waldo: I’m sure Vlad will be more than happy to provide one.

Roger Stone has been arrested. Mueller got him.

Obstruction, false statements and witness tampering.

Up the lazy river, up the hazy lazy river. . .

@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:

Norm left the building when Trump arrived.

And is sitting at the end of the bar.

@OzarkHillbilly: re Venezuela….
What if Pelosi declared herself the real President and took the oath of office. Would leaders of the world rush to support her as the real government leader?

Asking for my friend Angela.

PS. Venezuela will end in blood, probably including that of Americans.

@raven:
“God knows justice, but waits.”

Oooh ooooh oooooh!!! This day is off to a fine start!

@raven: Infrastructure Week seems to be ending with a bang.

@SiubhanDuinne:
I love me some FBI pre-dawn raid.

Good morning, Schlemazel, you are in my thoughts.

Midnight knock. Karma, you motherfucker.

@Plato: haha

“This is your fault,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

This is the list of Republican Senators who voted to re-open the government:
Lamar Alexander, Sen. Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, Johnny Isakson, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney

Ron Johnson’s name is not on it. He’s not wrong to blame McConnell, but he and the rest of the Republicans who complain quietly about the shutdown could have ended this before it even started.

This is what you get when you have a cabinet full of grifters and buffoons.

Catherine Rampell on CNN

@raven:
I love it when the Gentry get treated to what the rest of the proles face.

@rikyrah: Good morning.

Good indictment morning! May there be many more.

And love to Schlemazel and family.

@raven: Yes!

@Immanentize:

Yep! I just realised I’ve been grinning since I heard the news.

@Kay: Carter Page?

Between Stone’s arrest and hearing an interview where Ben Carson sounded positively humane, Friday is starting out great!

@Jinchi:

Ron Johnson’s name is not on it. He’s not wrong to blame McConnell, but he and the rest of the Republicans who complain quietly about the shutdown could have ended this before it even started.

They’re not mad that McConnell won’t open the government. They’re mad that McConnell made them vote on something.

They don’t want to do anything– they’re now literally afraid to vote. On anything. The plan was no one would blame them because no one would even know they were there.

@David 🎅🎄Merry Christmas🎄🎅 Koch:

Bezos must have made her say that. //

@Kay: isn’t it that journalist that stone was trying to persuade to take the fall as the cut out for the hacked files? I forget the name, but this is the guy that stone wanted to claim had supplied assagne with the files. and If my suspicions are correct, the actual cut out is Nigel Farage.

David fucking gregory on cnn. Ugh.

@Jinchi:

That to me is part of what’s so extraordinary about what Pelosi has done here- she’s become THE congressional leader. She took it on. She’s just really under-rated as a leader, in general. I mean, NOW she looks like a genius but that wasn’t guaranteed! If it had gone bad w/Trump she would have taken all the blame, just because there IS no one else.

@Kay:

She has always been extraordinary. Why else would the GOP so revile her? They have done everything they could to diminish her and defeat her, and yet, here she is.

FWIW, traffic in DC seems noticeably lighter…

We are so fortunate that my wife’s job comes under the larger DOD umbrella (and I am not a govie or contractor)

Randy Credico… that’s the witness he was tampering with.

@SiubhanDuinne:
I like how Mueller is taking pieces off the board. It may feel slow, but for every Roger Stone there are probably ten witnesses that have given truthful testimony even against their interests. We will learn later, but I guess the witness tampering goes to Stone’s aid who fought his subpoena — and ultimately lost.

@OzarkHillbilly:
Love that picture! I like the way Andre Igoudala is leaning in.

@TS (the original):

Take that, Tim Ryan, you bastard!

America’s most expensive home sells for $238m to hedge fund boss

The hedge fund founder Ken Griffin’s new home offers a prestigious address on New York’s Billionaire’s Row, dreamy Central Park views and 34 times the square footage of a typical Manhattan apartment.
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“New York is known for extraordinary deals, but this deal is extraordinary in every measure,” said the real estate investment expert Daniel Levy, chief executive at New York’s CityRealty. He said the previous record for the highest-priced home sale in New York City was the $100m spent by Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, in a new high rise on west 57th Street. “This blows everything else away.”

“Wow, I hope he got a lot of bathrooms for that price,” said Philip Mangano, who served as the US homelessness czar under George W Bush and now heads the American Roundtable to Abolish Homelessness. (Details of the interior layout are in fact scant.)

Mangano said the new record was emblematic of the disparity between the rich and the poor in America, which has been growing for decades. When times boom, he said, the good prosperity doesn’t trickle down to the poor; it merely drives the price of housing up further and creates more homelessness. The latest homeless count for New York City found 78,676 people.

“There is a lot of housing being built for those who are making a lot of money,” said Mangano. “There is very little housing being constructed for those who earn less than 30% of the US median income.”

Griffin’s purchase of the approximately 24,000-sq-ft unit in a newly constructed, super high rise at 220 Central Park South comes days after he spent $122m on a London mansion near Buckingham Palace, Bloomberg reported.

Griffin, who founded the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel, is said to have made a string of super-high-priced real estate purchases in the last few years, including spending hundreds of millions of dollars on properties in Chicago, Miami Beach and Palm Beach Florida.

2 Ways Hedge Funds Avoid Paying Taxes

Stay! Really nice picture.

@Immanentize:

Indeed. There’s plenty of room in that boat of despair!

@Kay: Yeah, what I don’t understand is why she faced any leadership challenge at all when Chuck Schumer just pretty much takes up space as the Senate minority leader. I know the leadership in the Senate didn’t change but has anyone asked whether Chuck might want to pull out any trick in the books to stop the judicial appointments and other shenanigans? Mitch used every trick in the book and Schumer should be paying him back in kind. Yet he doesn’t seem willing to go to the mattresses over anything. I can’t think of a single piece of major legislation with his name on it.

The smartest, and only useful, thing he’s done as the Dem leader of the Senate is just go along with whatever Pelosi wants to do now that she’s speaker again. He was nowhere to be seen on the Kavanaugh hearings. Seems like we could find someone more useful to be our top dog in the Senate. I mean, he’s in a rock solid blue State and could be taking risks to push the Overton window back towards the left but he is completely risk averse.

@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: I saw an interview with Gillibrand between the election and the start of the new term wherein she backed Schumer for minority leader 100%. The Senate is full of ambitious people. If the D senators want him to lead them, they probably have their reasons.

@Chris Johnson:

We do need better, even if he’s not a traitor actually working for the Republicans/Russia.

Maybe it’s still to early for me, but what?