Andy Shallal gets right to the point: Which table would you rather serve — a party of four black women, or four white men in suits and ties?
“And be honest,” he says.
The room goes silent as the eight new hires at Busboys and Poets, the Washington, D.C., restaurant-and-bookstore chain Shallal founded in 2005, look down at the table. This wasn’t employee orientation anyone expected.
WASHINGTON — North Korea threw President Trump’s planned summit meeting with its leader, Kim Jong-un, into doubt on Tuesday, threatening to call off the landmark encounter to protest a joint military exercise of the United States and South Korea.
“The South Korean authorities and the United States launched a large-scale joint air force drill against our Republic even before the ink on the historic inter-Korean declaration has dried,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. “There is a limit to our good will.”
In a 15-second television commercial, Democratic candidate Pat Davis opens with an f-bomb before he even blinks.
“F— the NRA,” Davis says, against a backdrop of the Sandia Mountains in Albuquerque. “Their pro-gun policies have resulted in dead children, dead mothers and dead fathers.”
Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.
Risk to intelligence source who aided Russia investigation at center of latest showdown between Nunes and Justice Dept.
“They are citing spurious national security concerns to evade congressional oversight while leaking information to The Washington Post ostensibly about classified meetings,” he said in a statement to The Post. “Congress has a right and a duty to get this information and we will succeed in getting this information, regardless of whatever fantastic stories the DOJ and FBI spin to the Post.”
Almost always, when I point out the difficulties of enacting some social program much desired by the left, I am met with some version of the following rejoinder: “Other countries have managed to do this. We passed Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and most recently, Obamacare. It is obviously possible to do these sorts of things, even in America. The obstructionism of people like you is the only reason we can’t have nice things.”
The administration of Donald Trump — who had a child out of wedlock after cheating on his first wife, and is in a legal battle with a porn star who says she had sex with him not long after his third wife gave birth — is promoting abstinence with a zeal perhaps never before seen from the federal government.
Mr. Rosenstein said he had been threatened, though he did not name the Republicans.
“There have been people who have been making threats, privately and publicly, against me for quite some time,” he said. “And I think they should understand by now, the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted.”
Until now, there was no left-wing equivalent to the “Flight 93” essay, no rallying cry that urged Democrats and liberals to do whatever is necessary to win. But David Faris’s new book, It’s Time to Fight Dirty, is the closest anyone has come so far.
Since the election of President Trump, certain conflicts have been inevitable for a Democratic Party asking itself how to win again: liberal or moderate candidates? Populist or pragmatist? Establishment or insurgent? But in the race between Mr. Cordray and Mr. Kucinich — one of the year’s most closely watched Democratic primaries — a more basic tension has consumed the collective left: Who has the truest claim to progressivism in 2018, when both candidates can credibly grab at the label? Is it better to be liberal on guns (Mr. Kucinich) or the bane of the banks (Mr. Cordray)?
[...]The relentless decline of “The Apprentice” reflects a splash-and-crash cycle that’s been a hallmark throughout Trump’s life—from his buildings to his casinos to even his brief stint as a sports team owner. His initial successes are often followed by reckless decisions to double down on his bet, just to keep the excitement going—with often disastrous results. “It’s true of everything he goes into,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He will hunker down and do something well—and then he thinks he’s Zeus.” And that’s when the trouble starts.
But what Comey’s actions and book reveal is a tendency toward a corrupting belief that his “higher loyalty”—which lifted him above partisan politics—somehow bestowed upon him the right to take actions that were well beyond his role as FBI director. It’s a very dangerous attitude, and one that resulted in him taking unprecedented actions in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, with devastating consequences.
Verdejo still believes Sanders’s core message about economic inequality is important, but it doesn’t capture the racial complexities of the America that he and other people of color live in — especially in the wake of police shooting after police shooting and recent news about two young black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks simply for asking to use the bathroom of without ordering anything first.
By Friday evening, when the American cruise missiles actually started flying, the vaunted attack had been reduced to a single predawn volley against three Syrian government chemical-weapons facilities, carefully chosen to avoid hitting known Russian or Iranian bases and thus escalating a war from which Trump himself had recently demanded an exit. The strike was bigger than last year’s, but hardly the sustained response with “all instruments of our national power” that the President promised in his televised address announcing the attack.
My mom’s birthday was March 25th, and I didn’t notice … she died in 2012, so while I’m sure she didn’t notice either it’s an odd feeling that the day passed for me as nothing more than another ordinary Sunday. I thought about it, and her, today when I read a wonderful piece in the New York Times titled, “Smells Like Home”. Maybe more impactful than the article itself were the multiple comments from folks who contributed their little bits of themselves and what they remembered; what prompted their emotional reactions and why. Really wonderful stuff overall, and more than worth a Sunday read.
As the results came in on Nov. 8, 2016, liberals quite reasonably felt that they had suffered an absolute cataclysm. But it’s now looking increasingly possible that the election of Donald Trump could be the best thing that has happened to the left and the Democratic Party in decades.
