October 1, 2017

Paul Ryan: Trump's 'Heart's in the Right Place' on Race

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Sunday defended President Trump from allegations of racism amid his criticisms of NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. “I know his heart's in the right place,” Ryan said on CBS’ Face the Nation, referencing his displeasure with the president’s reaction to the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies. “I’ve had some candid conversations with him about this.” Last year, Ryan rebuked Trump for his attacks on a Mexican-American federal judge, calling the attacks the “textbook” definition of racist remarks.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/paul-ryan-trumps-hearts-in-the-right-place-on-race

October 1, 2017

Mnuchin on Trump Going After San Juan Mayor: 'When the President Gets Attacked, He Attacks Back'

Source: Mediaite




by Josh Feldman | 9:58 am, October 1st, 2017

On Meet the Press this morning, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin defended President Trump over questions about his combative Puerto Rico tweets. Chuck Todd opened by asking why the President seemed “so angry in his tweets” yesterday.

Mnuchin reviewed how much the administration has done so far in the response efforts, calling it a “very big focus” of President Trump and his Cabinet.

Trump in particular blasted San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, and Todd asked Mnuchin why Trump wasn’t showing more “empathy” for her situation. Mnuchin said, “When the President gets attacked, he attacks back. And I think the mayor’s comments were unfair, given what the federal government has done.”

He did add that he understands the frustration on the ground there.

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Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/mnuchin-on-trump-going-after-san-juan-mayor-when-the-president-gets-attacked-he-attacks-back/

October 1, 2017

Trump Undermines Tillerson via Twitter: 'Wasting His Time' Trying to Negotiate with 'Little Rocket..

Source: Mediaite



Trump Undermines Tillerson via Twitter: ‘Wasting His Time’ Trying to Negotiate with ‘Little Rocket Man’

by Josh Feldman | 10:44 am, October 1st, 2017

President Trump is tweeting about North Korea and “little Rocket Man” again.

This time it’s apparently in response to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talking about having “lines of communications to Pyongyang” yesterday:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914497877543735296
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914497947517227008

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Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/online/trump-undermines-tillerson-via-twitter-wasting-his-time-trying-to-negotiate-with-little-rocket-man/

October 1, 2017

Trump signed presidential directive ordering actions to pressure North Korea

By Karen DeYoung, Ellen Nakashima and Emily Rauhala September 30 at 6:51 PM

Early in his administration, President Trump signed a directive outlining a strategy of pressure against North Korea that involved actions across a broad spectrum of government agencies and led to the use of military cyber-capabilities, according to U.S. officials.

As part of the campaign, U.S. Cyber Command targeted hackers in North Korea’s military spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, by barraging their computer servers with traffic that choked off Internet access.

Trump’s directive, a senior administration official said, also included instructions to diplomats and officials to bring up North Korea in virtually every conversation with foreign interlocutors and urge them to sever all ties with Pyongyang. Those conversations have had significant success, particularly in recent weeks as North Korea has tested another nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles, officials said.

So pervasive is the diplomatic campaign that some governments have found themselves scrambling to find any ties with North Korea. When Vice President Pence called on one country to break relations during a recent overseas visit, officials there reminded him that they never had relations with Pyongyang. Pence then told them, to their own surprise, that they had $2 million in trade with North Korea. Foreign officials, who asked that their country not be identified, described the exchange.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-signed-presidential-directive-ordering-actions-to-pressure-north-korea/2017/09/30/97c6722a-a620-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html

October 1, 2017

FEMA Administrator Swipes At San Juan Mayor, Those Who 'Spout Off' About Aid

Source: Talking Points Memo




By ESME CRIBB Published OCTOBER 1, 2017 9:56 AM

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long on Sunday swiped at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz and others he claimed “spout off” about relief efforts in Puerto Rico after the island was devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

“What I don’t have patience for is the fact that what we’re trying to do and what we have successfully done is we have established a joint field office within San Juan,” Long " target="_blank">said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He said the agency is “having daily conversations with all of the mayors” and “working with the governor and his leadership to be able to create unified objectives.”

“If mayors decide not to be a part of that, then the response is fragmented,” Long said. “And the bottom line is, is that we’re pushing everybody, we’re trying to push her, in there.”

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/fema-administrator-brock-long-puerto-rico-relief-efforts

October 1, 2017

S.I. Newhouse Jr., Publishing Icon Who Ran Conde' Nast, Dies at 89

Source: New York Times



By JONATHAN KANDELLOCT. 1, 2017

S.I. Newhouse Jr., who as the owner of The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and other magazines wielded vast influence over American culture, fashion and social taste, died on Sunday at his home, a family spokesman said. He was 89.

Mr. Newhouse, known as Si, and his younger brother, Donald, inherited an impressive publishing empire from their father, Solomon I. (“Sam”) Newhouse, and built it into one of the largest privately held fortunes in the United States, with estimates of the family wealth running over $12 billion at the turn of the 21st century. While Donald led the more profitable newspaper and cable television operations, Si took charge of the more glamorous magazine division.

Much of that glamour was created under Si Newhouse’s direction. Though himself a shy man often painfully awkward in public, Mr. Newhouse hired some of the most charismatic magazine editors of the late 20th century, among them Tina Brown at Vanity Fair and Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour at Vogue, and encouraged them to behave like the celebrities they extolled in his publications. It helped that he rewarded them with salaries, expense accounts, clothing allowances and housing loans that were the envy of their peers. Newhouse editors also enjoyed spectacularly generous budgets at their magazines, which often ran deep in the red for years before turning profits.

“I am not an editor,” Mr. Newhouse told The New York Times in 1989. “I flounder when people ask me, ‘What would you do?’” His philosophy, he said, was to let his editors run free. “We feel almost that whichever way it goes, as long as it doesn’t do something absolutely screwy, you can build a magazine around the direction an editor takes.” But when Mr. Newhouse deemed a magazine’s direction “screwy,” he didn’t hesitate to fire editors, sometimes so maladroitly that they first found out about their dismissals on television or in the gossip columns.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/obituaries/si-newhouse-dead.html

October 1, 2017

Kasich: I can't support the GOP if it doesn't reform

Source: The Hill




BY MALLORY SHELBOURNE - 10/01/17 10:06 AM EDT

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) on Sunday said if the GOP does not fix itself, he won’t be able to continue supporting his own party.

“If the party can’t be fixed, Jake, then I’m not going to be able to support the party. Period. That’s the end of it,” Kasich told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I mean, I’m worried about our country and my kids’ future. But have I given up? Of course not," he continued. Kasich shut down the suggestion that he is planning to become an Independent, but emphasized the need for the GOP to reform.

“No, not at this – what I’m saying to you is we need to fix it,” he said when asked about becoming an Independent. “If the Republican Party is going to be anti-immigration, if it’s not going to be worried about debt, if it’s going to be anti-trade, this is not where our party can be.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/353308-kasich-i-cant-support-the-gop-if-it-doesnt-reform

October 1, 2017

UPDATED: Sanders slams GOP tax plan as 'really bad policy'

Source: The Hill


BY REBECCA SAVRANSKY - 10/01/17 09:57 AM EDT

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday blasted President Trump's tax proposal, calling it "really bad policy."

"This is not a tax break for the rich? Well I don't know what a tax break for the rich is," Sanders said during an interview on ABC's "This Week."

"What this is is a massive transfer of wealth." Sanders said he hopes Democrats will fight the Republican proposal. "This is not politics," he said.

"This is just really bad policy and I'm not clear why anybody would support a proposal which is massive amounts of tax breaks to the people who don't need it."




Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/353307-sanders-on-tax-plan-this-isnt-politics-its-just-really-bad-policy

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UPDATE:

Sanders: Trump's Puerto Rico rhetoric 'unspeakable'

BY MALLORY SHELBOURNE - 10/01/17 09:50 AM EDT

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that President Trump’s rhetoric about Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria is “unspeakable.”

“It is unspeakable and I don’t know what world Trump is living in. People in Puerto Rico are suffering one of the one disasters in the history of that island,” Sanders told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Sanders’s comments come after Trump on Saturday criticized San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz for “poor leadership,” and urged the island’s citizens not to “believe the fake news.”

-snip-

Sanders in the interview on Sunday said people “have a right to be suspect” that race may be a factor in how Trump has handled the United States territory, which has been devastated by storms this hurricane season.

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http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/353306-sanders-trumps-puerto-rico-rhetoric-unspeakable

October 1, 2017

Trump's upbeat Puerto Rico rhetoric clashes with reality on the ground

By MATTHEW NUSSBAUM and MARC CAPUTO 09/29/2017 07:47 PM EDT

President Donald Trump says his administration is deftly responding to the devastating hurricane that leveled Puerto Rico, but the jarring gap between his rhetoric and the dramatic reports about dire conditions there is raising fresh questions about the effectiveness of recovery efforts on the island.

As his administration grapples with the third hurricane to hit the United States in a matter of weeks, and as the relief operation in Puerto Rico kicks into gear, Trump has repeatedly said he’s getting positive reviews. "Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello just stated: 'The Administration and the President, every time we've spoken, they've delivered,'” Trump tweeted Friday. But nine days after Hurricane Maria knocked out the island’s power, communications system and some roadways, Americans there are still struggling to get supplies and phone service.

“There’s always a danger whenever you start responding in a way that says, ‘Hey we’ve done a great job,’ and there are still people in need,” said Thomas Atkin, a former Coast Guard admiral and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense under President Barack Obama. “It’s kind of like a football coach at halftime saying, ‘Hey, we’re winning.’ You still have half a game to play.”

Publicly, Trump and Gov. Ricardo Rosselló have praised each other, with the president claiming Friday morning on Twitter, “FEMA and First Responders are amazing. Governor said ‘great job!’” But while Rosselló has repeatedly expressed gratitude for the federal help, he told MSNBC on Friday that the federal “response still is not where it needs to be.”

more
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/29/trump-puerto-rico-rhetoric-reality-243325

October 1, 2017

Could America's Socialists Become the Tea Party of the Left?

No longer happy to languish in principled irrelevance, socialists are plotting a Sanders-like insurgency inside the Democratic party.

By ANDREW HANNA and TAYLOR GEE October 01, 2017

If America’s democratic socialists learned anything from watching Bernie Sanders’ deep run in the Democratic primary last year, it’s that they don’t have to be losers any more.

Inspired by the Vermont senator’s success at forcing leftwing ideas into the nomination battle, the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, has watched its dues-paying membership, which historically has hovered around 5,000, swell to 25,000. The DSA is still nowhere near the levels of the Socialist Party in 1920 when nearly a million people voted for Eugene Debs, but its members, too young to remember the Cold War much less the “red scares” of the 1910s and 1950s, aren’t content to sit quietly on the political sidelines, perennially irrelevant in a system built to sustain two major parties.

They want to win. And to do it, socialists are dispensing with their penchant for symbolic protest votes and their principled disdain for an electoral process they believe can’t deliver meaningful change. Sanders’ ability to run well in primaries across the country, say new DSA members, proved that democratic socialism isn’t destined for the kind of third-party tokenism that bedevils the Green Party and World Workers Party among others. And it has opened their minds to an electoral strategy that was until very recently considered heretical.

“The only viable electoral strategy is to work with the Democratic Party,” says Michael Kazin, the editor of leftist magazine Dissent. “There is no viable third party.”

The consequence of this willingness to play in the main arena is that a loose confederacy of splinter groups—socialists, anarchists, communists and leftists, all spearheaded by the DSA—are more willing than ever to sacrifice ideological purity for a chance to work as insurgent coalition inside the Democratic Party. The DSA leadership insists that it feels no loyalty to the Democratic National Committee, but it is eager to challenge Democrats on their own turf.

more
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/01/could-americas-socialists-become-the-tea-party-of-the-left-215661