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Simon Maloy
Jeanine Pirro Wants to Destroy Jeff Sessions So She Can Have His Job
The key to understanding how Fox News' Jeanine Pirro operates is to realize that she is single-minded in her personal ambition while completely unencumbered by anything resembling shame, dignity, or professional integrity. As it stands, Pirro is one of the more influential pundits in the country by virtue of her close relationship with President Donald Trump. She uses her awful Fox News program, Justice with Judge Jeanine, to propagandize on Trump's behalf, for which she is granted access to the president, interviews with key administration officials, etc.

But that's not enough for Pirro, who turned to televised punditry only after her once-promising political and legal career was left in smoldering ruin by her personal scandals and widely mocked campaign ineptitude. According to Politico, Pirro aspires to the lofty office of attorney general of the United States and has been telling the president's advisers that "she's interested in taking over as the nation's top law enforcement official."

Ordinarily, it would seem ridiculous that a cable pundit would have any chance of serving as attorney general, but that was before the reality TV star president tapped two cable pundits to be his chief economic and national security advisers and nominated his doctor to run the Department of Veterans Affairs because he gave a good press conference.

There are, however, some major obstacles to Pirro landing her dream job: chief among them, the guy currently holding it. She can't be attorney general while Jeff Sessions is still in office. So Pirro is taking matters into her own hands and using her cable news program to undermine her supposed rival and publicly call for his resignation (or ouster).

Here's Pirro on June 2 saying, "If Jeff Sessions can't do his job because he's too scared or recusing himself, maybe he ought to resign himself. But that's just me."

And here she is one week before that calling Sessions an "absentee attorney general" and asking White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, "Isn't it time to get a working attorney general on staff?"

And here she is one week before that calling Sessions "the most dangerous man in America" because he refuses to use the awesome powers of his office to protect Donald Trump and arrest the senior staff of the Justice Department (seriously):

This is all quite insane and grotesquely unethical and fatally shot through with toxic self-interest. All those characteristics should, under normal circumstances, prevent Pirro from having her name even briefly considered for any government position, let alone attorney general. But these are strange times in which a televised authoritarian harangue in support of turning the Justice Department into a weapon against the president's political enemies can win you plaudits in the Oval Office. "Attorney general nominee Jeanine Pirro" would be a sad, surreal joke, but there's absolutely no guarantee that it won't happen.

Is Sean Hannity Coordinating with the White House?
Every episode of Fox News' Hannity follows a fairly basic formula these days: pugnacious cube-headed goon Sean Hannity serves up a monologue devoted almost entirely to the vituperative (and frequently incoherent) slander of President Donald Trump's political adversaries, and then he lards out the hour with panel discussions featuring a small, rotating cast of like-minded Trump sycophants and the odd sacrificial liberal.

As Donald Trump's many scandals have mushroomed, Hannity has been forced to get louder and crazier. Last night's episode was an especially psychotic exercise in Hannity-brand demonization as he attempted to counterpunch former FBI Director James Comey, who is ramping up a book tour for his forthcoming memoir. You can watch Hannity's monologue below, in which the host places Comey, the Clintons, and special counsel Robert Mueller as the heads of their respective "crime families."

It's insane, but it's what Sean Hannity does. What was interesting about last night's show, however, was the tweet that President Trump posted at 8:48 p.m. EST, 12 minutes before Hannity started:

Big show tonight on @seanhannity! 9:00 P.M. on @FoxNews
 — Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump)1523494119.0

Big show! How would Trump know that last night's Hannity would be a big show? Why would he want everyone to watch this specific episode of Hannity, which featured some of his favorite pundits calling for the heads of top Justice Department officials alongside an elaborate, acid-burned harangue against James Comey and Robert Mueller? What possible explanation could there be?

Well, the obvious and extremely satisfying one is that Trump knew it was coming and this was all one big coordinated attack on the credibility of the Russia investigation. That, at least, was the explanation put forth by well-sourced Trumpworld reporters. We know that Trump is in regular contact with his favorite Fox News hosts/propagandists (some of whom are old friends) and even solicits their input on policy matters. And given that Fox News is absolutely critical to the White House's PR war against the Russia investigation, it's not crazy to assume some level of coordination.

Hannity, however, is aghast and insulted that anyone would ever accuse him of such corruption.

"No collusion," as it were. One should take a moment to note the specificity of Hannity's denial -- Trump had no advance knowledge of the monologue. What about the rest of the show? If Trump had no idea what was coming, then why was he boosting the program before it aired?

Also, Hannity's angry denials are not worth the flung spittle that accompanies them. He is so thoroughly compromised by his feral Trump advocacy that nothing he says can be taken at face value. Hannity has admitted to giving Trump advice on strategy and messaging in 2016 and described himself as "a little bit of a liaison" between the Trump campaign and Fox News. He has dinner with Trump frequently. Hannity has no core, no animating philosophy, and nothing of substance to say -- his job is to yell louder than the president's critics.

But Hannity would have us believe that he comes by his maniacal Trump boosterism honestly, that he is beyond official influence in his straight-shooting mission to cover the president as an infallible sun god molested by foul heretics and despicable blasphemers. So, I guess denying or admitting coordination doesn't really matter because his end product is already functionally indistinct from official propaganda. Hannity's either giving us the official White House line or the line the White House just happens to agree with entirely.

Jeanine Pirro Is Discovering New Ways to Debase Herself for Donald Trump
If you were to ask me who Jeanine Pirro works for, I'm not sure I could give you a straight answer. On paper, at least, she is an employee of Fox News, which pays her money to host a weekly show called Justice with Judge Jeanine. It's a terrible program that exploits the well-worn cable news trope of using a crackpot pundit's career in law enforcement to give unearned credibility to their howlingly stupid opinions. In theory, Justice with Judge Jeanine is a platform for Pirro (a former judge, former district attorney, failed Senate candidate, and speed-limit scofflaw) to give her take on the week's top legal stories.

In practice, however, Pirro serves as a combative and vocal propagandist for President Donald Trump. Pirro makes it her business to be the loudest pro-Trump voice in whatever room she happens to find herself in, and she moonlights as an informal adviser to Trump, who reportedly seeks her out for her counsel. Pirro's advocacy for the president is so aggressive that it often borders on insane -- some of her commentary would be at home in an authoritarian state media apparatus. And she has enthusiastically sold out the cause she built her career in public life on -- advocating for women who were victims of abuse -- to become a sneering and poisonous sycophant to the most powerful elected official in the country.

An ambitious rise and embarrassing fall

Jeanine Pirro does not lack for ambition. Her career in public life saw her score a series of firsts: She helped create and lead what was then called the Domestic Violence and Child Abuse Bureau for Westchester County, New York; she was the first woman to be elected as a judge on the Westchester County court; and she was the first woman to serve as the county's district attorney. Her ex-husband, Al Pirro, was a well-connected real estate lawyer and GOP fundraiser who knew all the power players in New York -- one of his biggest clients in the late 1990s was Donald Trump, back when he was still in the real estate game.

She had a talent for drawing media attention and relentlessly marketed herself as a hard-charging prosecutor who brought legal hell down upon sex offenders and domestic abusers. Pirro positioned herself as an advocate for women at a time when victims of domestic abuse were an afterthought in the criminal justice system. Her political ascent was durable enough to survive Al Pirro's 2000 conviction on charges of tax fraud and conspiracy.

All this success and exposure made her a star within the New York GOP, which, in the mid-2000s, was desperately looking for someone to derail the re-election of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. Pirro, the crusading, media-savvy district attorney, seemed like an obvious choice, and in August 2005, she announced her campaign for the U.S. Senate. She came into the race with a ton of hype and lofty expectations, and almost immediately Pirro proved she was completely out of her depth.

Pirro's campaign was an unalloyed fiasco from the start. Her speech announcing her candidacy became a nationwide joke after she spent half a minute silently fumbling for a missing page of her prepared remarks (The Daily Show's Jon Stewart cracked that she observed "32 seconds of silence in memory of the premature death of her campaign"). Her first campaign ad didn't directly state that she was running for a seat in Congress, and she showed up at the wrong location for a press conference announcing the ad buy. Pirro was also a fantastically inept fundraiser. Her campaign pulled in just $438,555 in its first fundraising quarter, compared to Clinton's $5.3 million. (Amusingly, $900 of Clinton's haul that quarter came from Donald J. Trump, according to campaign finance records.)

With no money, no traction, and almost exclusively negative press attention, Pirro came under pressure from New York Republicans who wanted her to get out of the race so another candidate could take on Hillary. Among the high-profile Republicans plotting against Pirro's ambition was her own husband, who reportedly urged state GOP officials to convince her to end the campaign.

Pirro quit the Senate race after just four months and opted instead to run for New York attorney general. She won the Republican nomination running unopposed. But whatever slim hope Pirro might have nurtured for a comeback was crushed in September 2006 when she herself came under federal investigation for conspiring to wiretap her husband, who she suspected was cheating on her.

No charges ended up being filed, Pirro lost the race to future New York governor Andrew Cuomo by 20 points, and she and her husband separated a year later. With her political career left a smoldering ruin, Pirro made the move to television. After a short run as host of a low-rated Judge Judy-like courtroom reality program, Pirro jumped to Fox News and started hosting Justice with Judge Jeanine in 2011.

Pirro enthusiastically sells out for Trump

Pirro's affinity for Trump makes sense in a lot of ways: They've been friends for decades, they're both Republicans, they're both combative New Yorkers who crave media attention. But in one very important aspect, Pirro and Trump should -- at least in theory -- be irreconcilably opposed.

Remember that Pirro's entire public image was built around her work on behalf of victims of abuse: women who had been cowed into silence by their abusers and left unrepresented by the law and the courts. Her career as a politician was rooted in the idea that she was a tireless and hellacious enemy of sexual predators, wife beaters, and perpetrators of domestic violence. A 2005 profile of Pirro in the New York Observer described her as "half crusading cop, half crusading mom" and said her career was defined by "work with victims of spousal abuse and sexual abuse, murder, stalking, rape, [and] torture."

As a pundit, however, she has fanatically aligned herself with the nation's most prominent accused sexual assaulter. Donald Trump has faced too many credible allegations of assault against women to simply wave off, but Pirro has done exactly that, making every excuse for him, even when Trump got caught describing his own sexual misconduct.

"The comments are shameful and cringeworthy. The words are disgusting, devastating, and embarrassing. It's the kind of locker room and frat house talk that personally infuriates me," Pirro said on her program following the release of the Access Hollywood tapes in which Trump boasted of groping women by their genitalia. "But guess what: I still without a doubt support Donald Trump." Her rationale aligned perfectly with the excuse offered by Trump: that his comments were just "words" and not to be taken as an admission of sexual assault. And regardless of what Trump said, she argued, he was still better than "double-talking woman" Hillary Clinton.

Pirro mortgaged her own reputation to defend Trump from his own self-incrimination. "He has always been a gentleman," Pirro said on Fox & Friends in October 2016. "I know the man, and I can speak as a woman who has fought for battered women, I have crusaded for women my whole career to level the playing field for women who are victims of crime." When multiple women came forward with their stories about Trump's sexual assault, Pirro dismissed them as not credible and perhaps part of an anti-Trump conspiracy. "It's a little too convenient. All of the sudden all of these people on one day on the day when WikiLeaks starts coming out," she said.

Last month, during one of the "Opening Statements" that she starts each show with, Pirro lashed out at former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned from the White House amid allegations that he'd physically abused his ex-wives. Pirro called Porter a "batterer" and lamented that "he doesn't walk around with a scarlet letter or a sign on his forehead that says 'I beat women.'" But she also went out of her way to exculpate the people in the White House who protected Porter for months, like chief of staff John Kelly, casting them as victims of anti-Trump hysteria. "You want to stop a four-star general who is running the White House, who believes in chain of command, who makes a decision within 40 minutes because you hate Donald Trump?" she asked before absurdly suggesting that the Rob Porter scandal was actually Barack Obama's fault somehow. "Find another scapegoat. You might want to look at the last president."

The reason Pirro has so enthusiastically set fire to her reputation like this is that Trump is her avenue to power and influence. She protects and champions Trump in the face of all the damning evidence because he's her friend, and because he's the president of the United States and he gives her access.

Softballs and poison

Jeanine Pirro's access to Trump comes in several different forms. She's not just a pro-Trump pundit -- she's also an adviser whom the president routinely seeks out. The New York Times reported in November 2017 that Pirro had once interviewed to be Trump's deputy attorney general and that she had met with Trump in the Oval Office to "excoriate" Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Daily Beast reported that Trump regularly consults Pirro "privately for advice on political and policy matters." Pirro was the keynote speaker at a January event at Mar-a-Lago put on by a pro-Trump political group, and she's reportedly discussed with Trump the possibility of writing a rebuttal book to Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury.

As a media figure, Pirro has scored two interviews with Trump since his inauguration; both were embarrassing spectacles that set new boundaries for the definition of "softball."

Her most recent sit-down with Trump was on February 24. The "questions" she asked him were, in several instances, just direct invitations for Trump to praise himself. This, for example, is an actual question posed to the president of the United States by Jeanine Pirro:

Mr. President, your approval rating is soaring. And we can talk about the economy and the low unemployment and the stock market and all of the great things that have been happening with the economy. But you have accomplished all of this -- and, by the way, there's a poll that put you at 50 percent, and at CPAC you were at 93 percent approval rating -- you did all this in one year with the economy. To what do you attribute these incredible advances?

"I know that you support the military and you're giving them the resources they need -- are we going to have a parade?" she asked at another point. The parade (one of Trump's favorite pet issues) elicited a follow-up from Pirro: "When do you think we can have this parade? Because I want to go to the parade!"

Her previous interview with Trump, on May 13, 2017, came in the immediate aftermath of his massively controversial firing of former FBI Director James Comey. Pirro used the opportunity to soothe Trump's ego. "The media's in a frenzy, and so given that some of these congresspeople thought he should have been fired … doesn't it suggest to you that it isn't even about Comey, it's about anything that you, as president, do?" (Trump, of course, agreed.) That question wasn't nearly as sycophantic as Pirro's take on the messaging disarray within the administration. "Are you moving so quickly that your communications department can't keep up with you?" Pirro asked. "Yes, that's true," Trump responded.

I'd like to think that any media personality bearing even the spindliest shred of professional integrity would choke on the idea of being so exuberantly obsequious to the most powerful politician in the country. Pirro, however, is not so encumbered.

The obverse side to Pirro's gross deference to Trump is the noxious vitriol she spits at anyone who crosses the president, be they political adversaries or government officials who've drawn Trump's ire.

Like her Fox Business Network colleague (and fellow presidential propagandist) Lou Dobbs, Pirro is a staunch advocate of arresting and prosecuting Trump's perceived enemies for the crime of opposing Trump. On December 9, 2017, she caused a stir by calling for a "cleansing" of the FBI and the Justice Department (DOJ), which she said were full "of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs" and whose "corruption and lawlessness" require that they made into "examples." Her fervor for "cleansing" the DOJ was undercut by her difficulty in identifying any actual crimes committed by the people she wanted purged -- special counsel Robert Mueller's arrestable infraction, for example, was that "in a year, with a team dedicated to destroying Donald Trump, he can't come up with one piece of evidence."

That insane harangue caused a media backlash driven largely by the fact that Pirro herself was a former law enforcement official calling for a purge of law enforcement. The following week she responded with an escalating series of attacks on the DOJ, grandiosely declaring: "I hereby double down." She said there is "a criminal cabal in our FBI and the Department of Justice who think they know better than we do who our president should be," describing it as "a crime family like in the movies except this time the FBI is the crime family."

Hillary Clinton also features prominently in Pirro's weekly diatribes, likely due to Trump's ongoing obsession with his former rival and Pirro's own history as a failed Clinton foil. Last week saw huge stories break on guns, trade, and White House staffers, but Pirro's "Opening Statement" on Saturday's show focused on a tweet by Clinton about Trump and Russia. "The woman is even dumber than I thought," she said as the starting point for a six-minute screed aimed at a candidate who lost an election 16 months ago.

Earlier this year, Pirro filmed a "Street Justice" segment in which she wandered around Chappaqua, NY, pestering locals with inane questions about the Clintons. "Does Hillary Clinton drop off her pantsuits here?" she yelled through the open door of a dry cleaner (the employee inside ignored her). Then she tromped through the local woods "looking for Hillary," apparently because Clinton was spotted hiking there after the election. The segment was confusing and pointless but extremely amusing to Pirro. "You think she's home writing another book? Or maybe she's still reading 'What Happened' because she can't figure out what happened!" she said, taking obvious delight in what she believed to be a joke.

The wages of propaganda

Like other pro-Trump propagandists in the Fox News family, Jeanine Pirro understands that the way to attract and maintain the president's attention is through grandiose, inflammatory demonstrations of dog-like loyalty. Trump watches a disgusting amount of cable news and loves pundits who posture as fighters and scrappers. Pirro markets herself precisely that way: a brawler who brings the principled, no-nonsense sensibility of a crusading judge to her weekly program. But Pirro has no principles and her only crusade is deifying Trump. And for her service, she is rewarded with access to the White House and the president.

Corrupt arrangements like these have a baleful influence on how media figures behave. The most unethical and least principled actors in the media ecosystem are the ones who enjoy the best access and benefit from the exposure granted by their proximity to the president. This perverse incentive structure makes flagrant toadyism and barking lunacy desirable attributes (or, at the very least, it makes them less intolerable as trade-offs for access). The rise of unscrupulous pro-Trump whack jobs like Jeffrey Lord and Ed Martin speaks to this dynamic: inflammatory, manifestly untrustworthy voices given positions of prominence by media outlets because their slavish devotion to the president.

This rotten dynamic puts a sycophant and sellout like Jeanine Pirro on the inside track, and it makes the Trump worship and scalding venom of Justice with Judge Jeanine a formula to be emulated.

Why Are the Media Letting Republicans Off the Hook for America's Mass Shootings?
The horrific mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, yesterday has once again touched off a discussion about what can be done to stop the escalating series of bloody massacres that only happen with this regularity in our country. The preordained answer, of course, is nothing. The Republican Party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, and its commitment to the National Rifle Association's maximalist position on gun rights cannot be shaken -- not by dead schoolchildren, not by the fact that two members of Congress have been gunned down in the last decade, not by anything.

Opposition to strengthening gun laws emanates from the GOP, which has collectively made the political calculation that shot-up schools and ever-increasing body counts are an acceptable alternative to angering the gun lobby and pro-gun activists within its own base. This is not an exotic political argument: it's a plain, uncontroversial truth that anyone who's paid a moment's attention to the politics of gun regulation can attest to.

And yet, in this morning's First Read newsletter by NBC News, blame for the sclerotic toxicity of this situation was laid at the feet of "Washington," which, the authors argue, is "fundamentally broken." Here's how the authors described the state of gun politics:

And what has Washington done to respond to this mass violence? Absolutely nothing. America's political system has been incapable of coming up with ANY federal public policy to address mass shootings. In 2013, after the Newtown shooting, the U.S. Senate blocked a measure to require background checks for gun purchases. In 2017, after Las Vegas, Congress talked about banning bump stocks – accessories that makes rifles fire more rapidly – but ultimately did nothing.

As I noted on Twitter, this paragraph (and the rest of the piece) goes well out of its way to avoid placing blame for the dysfunction where it belongs: on the GOP. By framing the issue as one of "Washington" gridlock, NBC News is actually doing the real culprits a favor by obscuring the ghastly political game the GOP plays to maintain its grip on power while allowing more and more Americans to be cut down by bullets fired from legally obtained military-style weaponry. Calling this a "Washington" problem is horrendously misleading and needlessly seeks to remove partisanship from what is an absolutely partisan issue.

One of First Read's authors, NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray, responded to my tweet and, in the process, accidentally helped underscore just how awful the piece's framing is:

@SimonMaloy Just asking, but you want us to ignore that 4 Dem senators voted against background checks in 2013, whi… https://t.co/EN7iTBwXsZ
 — Mark Murray (@Mark Murray)1518707059.0

First of all, the vote tally on the 2013 background check filibuster wasn't mentioned in his piece, so they did ignore it. Had they included that vote tally, it would have undermined their lazy framing. Yes, four Democratic senators voted against background checks in 2013 (as did then-majority leader Harry Reid, who supported the bill but voted no for procedural reasons). But those four Democratic senators stood alongside forty-oneRepublicans who voted down the measure. So the filibuster would have been sustained regardless of how those Democrats voted, which demonstrates that meaningful gun safety legislation is impossible to pass at the federal level so long as Republicans maintain any measure of control.

That gets us back to the original, uncontroversial point: Republicans are the problem when it comes to legislation addressing mass shootings. There is no reason to avoid stating it plainly.

The Trump Administration Wants to Make a Decades-Old Right-Wing Fantasy a Reality
The Trump White House's newly proposed budget is (like all White House budget proposals) more of a political document than anything else. It has no actual bearing on how the government will spend its money, and Congress will almost certainly ignore it. But that's not to say it is entirely devoid of value -- the White House uses the annual budget proposal to act out its fantasies and give us a little glimpse at the ideologies motivating the administration's policy preferences.

One of those ideologies, as conveyed by the White House's vision for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, expresses insane and horrifying contempt for low-income Americans. And while the policy the administration has proposed is extreme, it fits in squarely with longstanding conservative efforts to stigmatize and shame recipients of government assistance.

One of the administration's supposed cost-saving measures is "a bold new approach to administering SNAP." The way the program currently works, SNAP-eligible households are provided a monthly benefit based on income level in the form of a debit card, which can be used to purchase grocery items. Some restrictions apply (no alcohol, tobacco, or pet food, for example), but SNAP recipients have wide latitude in what foods they can purchase and where they can shop.

The Trump administration wants to change all of this by forcing most SNAP recipients to receive half their monthly benefit in the form of "a USDA Foods package, which would include items such as shelf-stable milk, ready to eat cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned fruit, vegetables, and meat, poultry or fish." The Republican White House wants to choose which foods SNAP recipients eat, and it wants to control how they receive their food each month -- so much for "small government" conservatism abolishing the "nanny state." Through means left utterly unexplained, the Trump administration argues that this new system (which will require massive bureaucratic build-up alongside the establishment of food-delivery infrastructure) will somehow be cheaper and more efficient than simply transferring money to a debit card. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney laughably spun this proposal to send low-income Americans a monthly box of canned goods and peanut butter as "a Blue Apron-type program where you actually receive the food instead of receive the cash."

This idea is so absurd, impractical, and wildly paternalistic that people can't really believe that the White House is actually proposing it. Politico reports this morning that "the idea that USDA would provide millions of low-income people packages of food on a national scale has not been floated by conservative think tanks, promoted by industry, or sought by previous administrations." It was "so out of left field," Politico notes, "that some anti-hunger advocates initially thought it was a joke."

The proposal didn't come out of nowhere, though. It's an escalation of existing right-wing efforts to use SNAP as a means to control the behavior of its recipients. These efforts are rooted in a mythology -- eagerly promoted and disseminated by conservative media -- that SNAP is rife with fraud and that SNAP beneficiaries, by virtue of their status as welfare recipients, lack the moral character to make good decisions on their own.

Right-wing demonization of welfare recipients stretches back decades, from Newt Gingrich's high-profile efforts in the 1990s to shame low-income teen mothers to Ronald Reagan popularizing the "welfare queen" slur back in 1976. The running theme of these attacks on the poor is that there exists an epidemic of undeserving welfare recipients who abuse their benefits. That's a myth, but it carries a potent political message that blends racial and economic resentment with small-government agitation.

When it comes to SNAP, the most common complaint made by conservatives is that recipients are using their benefit to purchase inappropriate foods: "luxury" comestibles like seafood and steak, or junk food like candy bars and energy drinks. This line of attack got a huge boost in 2013 when Fox News put together a special news report called "The Great Food Stamp Binge." The program -- hosted by Special Report anchor Bret Baier -- spotlighted an unemployed surfer in California who proudly used his SNAP benefit to buy sushi and lobster. Baier dubbed him "the new face of food stamps," and the program pointedly asked why there isn't "at least some stigma" attached to SNAP recipients, who used to be called "losers."

It was a farcical piece of propaganda that actively shunned any sort of data or reporting in order to create a caricature of SNAP recipients as lazy, undeserving parasites on the public. SNAP actually has extremely low rates of fraud and abuse, and "the overwhelming majority of SNAP recipients who can work do so," according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The news program was wildly popular with Republicans. Fox News distributed tapes of the "The Great Food Stamp Binge" on Capitol Hill, and the SNAP-abusing unemployed surfer became the mascot for the congressional GOP's efforts to gut funding for nutritional assistance programs. Since then, various state governments have taken up measures intended to restrict which foods SNAP recipients can purchase.

In 2015, Wisconsin Republicans passed a bill banning SNAP recipients from purchasing crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish, citing "anecdotal and perceived abuses." A Republican state senator from New York proposed legislation to cut off SNAP users from "luxury food items" like lobster and steak, while the Missouri GOP sought to ban "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak." The reality that all of these proposals ignore is that SNAP recipients are not blowing their benefits on "luxury" foods.

The Trump administration's proposal derives from the same idea that SNAP recipients can't be trusted and will necessarily misuse their benefit. Rather than banning certain foods, the White House is proposing to force SNAP beneficiaries to eat an approved list of low-cost foods while simultaneously limiting the amount of benefit they have to spend. It's gross paternalism lightly disguised with absurd promises about efficiency and cost-savings. And it fits right in with the broader right-wing argument that receipt of government assistance is morally suspect and recipients should be penalized through stigma and controlled through loss of choice.

Is Lou Dobbs Quietly Trump's Most Sinister Propagandist?
At his New Year's Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump grabbed a microphone and gave thanks to the guests who paid him several hundred dollars each for the privilege of attending. As he spoke, the president singled out one attendee for some especially fulsome praise: Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. "The great Lou Dobbs is here, by the way," Trump said. "Boy, I tell you, I've loved him for years, but now I really love him. And you know what? It's not about me. It's about -- he is saying what he believes." To applause and cheers, the president heaped his admiration on the cable news personality: "I just want to tell you, you are fantastic, and we appreciate it. Everybody in this room appreciates it."

If you know anything about Donald Trump then you can probably guess why he loves and appreciates Lou Dobbs so much: Dobbs is a committed and shameless sycophant to the president. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and the other pro-Trump mercenaries who turn Fox News into de facto state television get the lion's share of attention and criticism, but Dobbs' Fox Business show is a bluntly propagandistic farce that treats Trump less as a president than a cult leader.

The running theme of Lou Dobbs Tonight is easy to suss out: Trump is single-handedly restoring American glory despite the subversive opposition of his many internal enemies. The president's adversaries include Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Republican congressional leaders, the "deep state," the left-wing media, and countless other supposed malefactors. For Dobbs, one critical word aimed at the president is enough to make you a "subversive" and an enemy of the American people.

There are a wealth of examples one could choose from to illustrate this dynamic, but Dobbs' reaction to Trump's reported denigration of Haiti and "shithole" African nations offers an apt data point. Dobbs kicked off his January 12 show with a defense of the president's "colorful language" and a swipe at "duplicitous Dems" who were "claiming offense." Without actually describing what the president is supposed to have said, Dobbs explained Trump's "fundamental point" in insulting poorer nations and their citizens: something about the misuse of international aid.

"What has happened to all of the aid that the U.S. government has sent to Haiti over the past quarter century?" Dobbs demanded. "Why should any president, but particularly this one, have to put up with the self-serving ignorance of the Dems and the left who call Mr. Trump a racist because he questioned why all that aid hasn't been enough to diminish if not eliminate horribly persistent poverty?"

No reporting anywhere has linked Trump's remarks to international aid or poverty alleviation. Not even the White House has tried floating that defense. Dobbs just conjured it up on his own and presented it as an obvious truth that the president, in his serene majesty, stated plainly only to be viciously and unjustly attacked. "President Trump shouldn't put up with that disrespect, that ignorance, in my opinion," Dobbs added.

It was insane, counterfactual propaganda delivered with maximum outrage and designed to portray Donald Trump as a near-infallible demigod.

Every episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight is pretty much exactly like this.

Loved by Lou

By Lou Dobbs' reckoning, Trump is owed undiluted respect and deference at all times, and even the slightest hint of insolence should not be tolerated.

This goes for everyone, including people who praise Trump but don't do it quite hard enough to satisfy Dobbs. On December 19, Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union lauded the president for his "good gut" in negotiating the tax cut package. For Dobbs, celebrating Trump's "gut" was almost an insult. "You said 'a good gut.' I understand the praise of intuitive success," Dobbs said, "but I think it's time for people to start talking about the man's intellect, about his judgment, and suggesting he's intuiting all of this, I think, is a disservice to him."

Dobbs also expects Trump's judicial nominees to maintain unfailing respect for the president or face harsh consequences. Back in February, then-Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) that Trump's relentless attacks on the judiciary were "disheartening" and "demoralizing." For this mild rebuke of the president, Dobbs demanded Gorsuch withdraw his own nomination immediately. "Gorsuch has really demonstrated a lack of honor," Dobbs said on February 9, 2017, "and if he has honor, he should withdraw his name out of just the pure disrespect he's shown our president, his lack of grace."

It's all about "respect," and Dobbs throws as much as he can at the president regardless of what Trump says or does. Since the first days of the Trump administration, he's demonstrated a talent for lyrical suck-uppery, using florid language to describe everything Trump does as a history-making success.

On January 25, 2017, while speaking to White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, Dobbs marveled at "a presidency that is moving at breakneck speed. … I don't think anyone's has seen the like of this certainly in modern history." At that point, the Trump administration had burned two days -- roughly half its existence -- fighting with reporters about the size of the president's inaugural crowd and his loss of the popular vote. But Dobbs was incredulous that anyone could see anything but success. "Those who find darkness in this explosion of light in Washington, D.C., have to be in a far corner of the left, I think, to be making that -- coming to that conclusion."

On May 22, 2017, as he was providing live coverage of a suicide bomb attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, Dobbs offered his gratitude to Trump for running for office. "I have to tell you, I am so thrilled that this man decided to run for president," he said. "He could have done lots of other things with his time that would have taken far less of his stomach lining and his patience ... no matter how strong -- and he is plenty strong."

Then Dobbs offered his theory for why the Manchester attack happened: Terrorists worldwide were cowering in fear of Trump following his brief trip through the Middle East. "I really believe that it is an expression tonight that we're watching, that they -- the Islamic State and radical Islamists at large -- so fear this president with what he's achieved," Dobbs ventured. "I think they're so afraid of him that they don't know what to do and this was the best that they could do to take attention away from what has been an immensely successful period of negotiation and success on the part of this president in so many ways, in such short order."

Dobbs has reaped rewards from his cringe-inducing obsequiousness in the form of White House access. Top-level White House staffers are regular guests on his program, where they are given free license to spout the administration line, often with the host's encouragement and participation. Dobbs also managed to snag an interview with Trump himself in October 2017 and was savagely mocked for his sycophantic questioning. The president rhetorically wandered throughout the interview and was unable to coherently answer even the softest of questions, but Dobbs was there to either supply the answer for him or redirect the interview to another topic.

Since then, Dobbs' adulation of Trump has only grown more fervent. "This president and his family have sacrificed so much to serve this nation, and for their trouble they are attacked from all sides," Dobbs said on January 3, his first show since Trump's Mar-a-Lago shout-out. The attacks on Trump are "unprecedented, utterly unfair, and wrong according to every American value and standard," he said, because "this president has worked wonders, and he's worked hard, tirelessly, and more than anyone else in Washington."

Enemies of the state

Over-the-top hosannas to the massively unpopular president aren't enough to fill an entire hour of programming. Nor do they adequately stimulate the overdeveloped rage centers of your average cable news viewer's brain. So, to complement his fawning adoration of the president, Dobbs sprays hot venom at anyone and everyone who he believes has committed the figurative -- or, as we'll see in a moment, literal -- crime of showing insufficient deference to Donald Trump.

There are a lot of people Dobbs wants to see sanctioned by law enforcement and/or thrown in prison, and the most prominent among them is former President Barack Obama. Last November, Obama went on an overseas trip and, while in Paris, obliquely criticized Trump for backing out of the international climate accord that bears that city's name. Dobbs, as you might imagine, was not happy about this.

"This is just bad manners. It's boorish, it's absurd. He doesn't realize how foolish he looks," Dobbs observed on December 1, 2017. "I think the U.S. Marshals should follow [Obama]," he added. "He should be brought back by the Marshals. Isn't there some law that says presidents shouldn't be attacking sitting presidents?"

There is no law preventing former presidents from being rude, even when they're in France. Nor is there a law against presidents making foreign policy decisions that cable news hosts disagree with, but Dobbs thinks there should be. "I think we've got some pretty clear criminal acts, or at least apparent criminal acts," Dobbs opined on December 1, referring to "an administration, in this instance, that waits until it has less than a month left in office before President Obama decides to retaliate against the Russians for their intervention in our elections." Obama did "absolutely nothing about Crimea -- what would you call that?" Dobbs angrily asked, adding: "Shouldn't there be a statute that covers that kind of wrong-headedness and absolutely absurd actions in the foreign policy?"

A few days prior to that, Dobbs tore into Richard Cordray, former director of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for designating Deputy Director Leandra English as acting head of the agency prior to his resignation. Shortly after Cordray elevated English, the Trump administration moved to install White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney as director, and English took the matter to court in an attempt to block Mulvaney's appointment. A federal judge ruled in the White House's favor, but Dobbs felt more stringent measures were warranted for "lowlifes" Cordray and English. "Why didn't that judge throw them both in jail for being frivolous and actually subversive," Dobbs wondered on November 28.

As special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump campaign activities started producing more indictments and guilty pleas, Dobbs became more adamant that pretty much everyone involved with the investigation be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned. "A call for the firing of Robert Mueller no longer really truly satisfies any call for accountability," Dobbs said on December 4, arguing that Mueller, FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI Director James Comey "should be the subjects of criminal investigations and held fully accountable for crimes against the sitting president and the voters who supported them."

On December 13, Dobbs called for a grand jury to investigate Strzok's text messages, saying he was "really very tired of political accountability" and "I much prefer to see jail sentences for violating the trust of the American people, and working against the constitution and yes, the president of the United States." On December 14, Dobbs said the Russia investigation showed that the Justice Department is "rancid" and the FBI is "riddled with corruption" that "has to be rooted out, people have to go to jail." On December 15, while discussing the Russia investigation with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Dobbs said "I think it's time to think about who should be put in jail for dishonoring their oath of office, for violating our constitution and subverting this president and subverting this government."

On January 22, Dobbs once again called for the U.S. Marshals to spring into action and "take into custody the top people" at the Justice Department and the FBI over some missing text messages between Stzrok and attorney Lisa Page. The following day, Dobbs allowed himself a little more hyperbolic flourish, declaring that "it may be time to declare war outright against the deep state, and clear out the rot in the upper levels of the FBI and the Justice Department."

All these arrests and jail sentences would be for "crimes" that either don't actually exist or which Dobbs can't demonstrate proof of beyond asserting that they happened. The only consistent theme in all this is that each person Dobbs wants to have prosecuted and locked up is, in his mind, a political enemy of President Trump's.

Creepy propaganda

There's no complicated secret to understanding why Dobbs is such a Trump devotee. He's been a hardline anti-immigration agitator for years: In the mid-2000s, he started injecting anti-immigrant commentary into his CNN program, and he famously (and wrongly) blamed a non-existent spike in leprosy on undocumented immigrants. His televised persona evolved from well-heeled, stentorian headline reader to self-made populist hero and perpetually aggrieved scourge of "elites" -- a conversion that, coupled with his increasingly inflammatory and inaccurate opinion segments, precipitated his departure from CNN in 2009. Dobbs pegged the market for Trumpism long before Trumpism had Trump.

It's easy to laugh at a perpetually overwrought fanatic like Dobbs as he loses himself nightly to the imagined glory of a widely disliked demagogue. But it's important to remember that Dobbs represents a broader corruption of conservative media in the age of Trump. Much of Fox News' programming is similarly devoted to glorifying the president and whipping up as much anger as possible at his opponents. What sets Lou Dobbs Tonight apart from the rest is how intensely and creepily propagandistic the show is.

This propaganda gets frequent endorsements from the president, who regularly tweets his gratitude for Dobbs' histrionic coverage of his administration. This feedback loop creates an impenetrable sphere of disinformation -- a bizarre unreality in which the beneficent and virtuous president does not fail but is consistently frustrated by criminals and subversives in his self-sacrificial quest to save the country. It's all scummy and bizarre and dangerous, and it happens every evening on Lou Dobbs Tonight.

The Long, Public Humiliation of Steve Bannon Is Now Complete
It's been quite a news day for Steve Bannon. The Breitbart.com chairman and former White House strategist made headlines this morning when excerpts from author Michael Wolff's new book on the Trump administration quoted him disparaging Trump campaign officials for the now-infamous June 2016 Russia meeting. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately," Bannon told Wolff.

Those are some pointy words for a former top official in both the Trump campaign and White House to state on the record, even if they don't add anything to our understanding of what the Trump campaign was up to. Given the sensitivity the president harbors toward the Russia investigation and his insistence on slavish loyalty from his underlings, it was only a matter of time before Trump responded to Bannon's remarks. In characteristically Trumpian fashion, the White House turned a flamethrower on its erstwhile ally.

"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind," the delightfully petty statement from the president of the United States begins. "Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well."

What are we to make of all this? Well, once again we're seeing that Steve Bannon isn't the diabolical master of the political dark arts that he insists he is.

In the months since he departed the White House, Bannon has done little but absorb punishment and defeat. He staked his own reputation (and, he insisted, the future of the Trumpian political movement) on Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, whose candidacy caved in on itself amid numerous reports of sexual misconduct, handing the Democrats their first Senate victory in the state in decades.

As he was taking the blame for Moore's loss, Bannon was also forced to make a show of cutting ties with another fringe whacko he'd been trying to get elected to federal office: Paul Nehlen, a "pro-white" primary challenger of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) who recently took up anti-Semitic tweeting as a hobby.

On top of all that, Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow publicly admitted that he believed Roy Moore's accusers and thought the reports against him were credible, but the website rallied to Moore's defense regardless in order to protect Trump from having to answer for his own multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

So Bannon was already losing allies and credibility while struggling to convince people that he was politically useful. Then these book excerpts come out and suddenly the president for whom he once proudly described himself as a "wingman" is publicly calling him a hack, a failure, and a fraud.

I suppose it's possible that Bannon is executing some sort of elaborate rope-a-dope or 46-dimensional chess strategy in which he's merely feigning to be a laughingstock in the eyes of everyone in power, but that feels overly generous. The more satisfying explanation is that Bannon is an incautious and ineffective extremist whose relevance depends on convincing people against all evidence that he's a master tactician and dangerous "revolutionary."

Steve Bannon Is Self-Immolating Before Our Very Eyes
Steve Bannon, we're told, is a "street fighter." That's what Bannon told us, anyway, when he went on 60 Minutes earlier this year shortly after his brief tenure in the Trump administration came to an end. "I think I'm a street fighter," Bannon said, adding that he was also going to be President Donald Trump's "wingman outside for the entire time." And as the president's street-fighting outside wingman, Bannon said he and Breitbart.com were going to protect the administration. "Our purpose is to support Donald Trump," he explained, and "to make sure his enemies know that there's no free shot on goal."

Already we're lost in lazy metaphors here, but if we apply each discrete self-applied sobriquet to Bannon and his role in the Alabama special Senate election, we find that the "street fighter" got KOed, the "wingman" got Goosed, and the keeper notched a spectacular own goal.

Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeated Republican Roy Moore to take over the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this year, and Jones' upset victory was a stinging slap for Bannon and his Breitbart lackeys. Moore's candidacy was an obvious disaster from the start -- he is a howling extremist, virulently anti-gay, and he'd twice been booted off the state supreme court for refusing to adhere to higher court rulings. But for Bannon, this unstable and politically toxic yahoo was precisely the sort of "populist" candidate who could be counted on to support Trump's (and Bannon's) agenda.

Bannon had such faith in Moore that he broke with Trump, who endorsed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange in the Republican primary, and hit the campaign trail on Moore's behalf. "I think Roy Moore is the guy that's going to represent Donald Trump and fight the establishment," Bannon told Sean Hannity in September.

When the Washington Post broke the news that multiple women were accusing Moore of sexual misconduct -- including one woman who said Moore assaulted her when she was 14 -- Bannon was faced with a decision: abandon his candidate and risk ceding the seat to the Democrats, or stand alongside Moore as he faced credible reports of sexual assault. Bannon opted to stick doggedly with Moore and began concocting fanciful allegations of a conspiracy (stretching all the way to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) to discredit his candidate. Breitbart.com took up the cause with laughable attempts to undermine the Post's reporting and construct a separate reality in which the reports about Moore had been debunked.

Bannon poured everything he had into trying to keep Moore viable and gave little worry to the obvious signs that his candidacy was falling apart. Moore's campaign shifted its focus to attacking the media while the candidate himself vanished from the trail, emerging only to spin elaborate, conspiratorial attacks on the many left-wing phantoms he claimed were aligning to damage his candidacy. Moore's surrogates gave a series of shambolic and absurd interviews to cable news channels as they ineptly sought to defend their candidate's extreme record. Bannon spoke at Moore's final rally on Monday night -- a rally that also featured Moore's wife address charges of anti-semitism by proudly declaring that "one of our attorneys is a Jew."

Bannon coasts on a reputation as a master political strategist and presents himself to the world as a sort of frumpy modern-day Machiavelli. But throughout the entire Moore campaign, he's demonstrated little in the way of political intelligence. Aligning with Moore was liable to backfire from the get-go -- he was a weak and vulnerable candidate even before reports surfaced that he was a serial sexual abuser. The only messages Moore had to offer voters were relentless grievance, vacant flag-waving nationalism, and whacked-out conspiracy theories.

The same was true for Bannon, whose campaign speeches for Moore digressed into lengthy harangues aimed at Mitt Romney and the "opposition party" media. His best effort at knocking down the sexual misconduct reports against Moore involved asserting the existence of an anti-Moore plot and just assuming partisanship and anti-media sentiment would overcome his lack of evidence. "The whole thing was a setup. This whole thing was weaponized right?" he said at a December 5 rally. "You know that. Folks down here in Alabama know that."

Well, it turns out they didn't know that. And now Bannon, after all that feeble and unsteady "street fighting," is left having to explain how a political strategist of such self-proclaimed insight and deviousness managed to help lose a Senate seat that the GOP should have had little difficulty holding onto. The easiest explanation is that Bannon's reputation as a "street fighter" and master of the political dark arts is oversold nonsense, and the proof of that resides with senator-elect Doug Jones.

Frustration with Trump Down South: The Changing Politics of Reliably Republican Congressional District Propels Jon Ossoff
Looking at just the history, the case for a Democratic victory in the special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District is thin. The district has voted for Republicans stretching all the way back to 1978, when Newt Gingrich first won the seat. In the years since Republicans have won re-election in the district by large margins. Tom Price, who vacated the seat to become President Donald Trump's secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, first won the district in 2004 running unopposed. And he has brushed off all Democratic challengers since then, never once having less than 60 percent of the vote.

But with Price gone and Democrats looking to take out some political frustration with Trump, the race in Georgia's 6th Congressional District has taken on national significance. Democrat Jon Ossoff, buoyed by local activism and a flood of outside money, is working to pull off an upset on April 18. If Ossoff can take home more than 50 percent of the vote as he faces a fractured Republican field, he'll win the seat outright. If he falls short of that figure, he'll have to make it through a June runoff against a single Republican opponent.

Where the Democrats see their opportunity is in the yawning disparity between Tom Price's 2016 margin of victory in the district and Trump's. Price was re-elected in November with a 23-point spread, but Trump carried the district only by 1.5 percentage points over his rival Hillary Clinton. In the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney won the district with 61 percent of the vote to Barack Obama's 37 percent.

So why did the 2016 race in Georgia's 6th Congressional District result in so much ticket splitting in what has historically been extremely favorable territory for the GOP? The answer is complicated, but the abridged version is because demographics in the district are changing and certain flavors of Republican voters despise Donald Trump.

"That area has changed; it's changing," said Dante Chinni, director of the American Communities Project at George Washington University. "Increasingly it is the kind of district that looks like a bad fit for the Trump Republican Party." Georgia's 6th Congressional District is largely white but becoming more diverse. And it's full of wealthier, more educated voters who just aren't that receptive to Trumpism or actively recoil from it.

"I loved George W. [Bush], but I could not vote for Donald Trump," Vicki Ingram, a retiree in the district told me. Ingram was one of the people who split their ticket in 2016; she voted against Trump but for Tom Price. Most of the Republican candidates running to replace Price had alienated her with negative campaigning, so this week she attended a Jon Ossoff event at the encouragement of her husband. "I'm sick to death of both parties," she said, before mentioning that she liked Ossoff's positivity. When I asked if she could see herself voting for the Democrat, she said, "Absolutely."

On Thursday morning I tagged along on a canvasing trip with Jim Lester, a gregarious 66-year-old Ossoff volunteer who manages rental properties. (He spent the trip doing on-the-spot housing inspections of the exteriors of the homes we visited; most of them failed.) Lester told me he was drawn to Ossoff because the candidate "is very Kennedy-esque," adding, "I perceive him to be a moderate." A Democrat, Lester voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election but had cast a vote for John Kasich in Georgia's Republican primary. That was a strategic vote, he said, to try to deny Trump a win in the state. But Lester added, "I could be very happy with John Kasich as president."

As Lester and I tromped through a neighborhood called Chateau Woods, we stopped to chat with Bob Wolford, an independent who had voted for Republicans in the past but had cast an early ballot for Ossoff the previous day. "We are practically in a one-party state," Wolford explained to me when I asked why he had voted for the Democrat. With Republicans controlling Congress, the White House and a majority of state legislatures, Wolford explained, "I'm only going to vote for a Democrat because that's the only way to get opposition in the government."

Republicans' recent attacks against Ossoff also seem to have had a negative impact — on Republicans. Wolford said that he was turned off by the GOP's attack ads about Ossoff. "I've seen one positive ad on the Republican side," he said. "All the other ads say if you're voting for Ossoff, you're voting for ISIS."

The running theme I encountered when talking to voters in Georgia's 6th Congressional District was frustration — with Trump, partisan rigidity and negative politicking. Ossoff has positioned himself to capitalize on that frustration and the shifting demographics, but he's still a Democrat running in a historically Republican district. The politics of Georgia's sixth district are changing and Trump seems to be catalyzing that political shift. We'll know soon whether the district has changed enough to elect its first Democratic representative in nearly four decades.

Russia Scandal Looms Big: White House Is Badly Compromised After Comey's Testimony
The big news out of Monday's hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was that FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the Justice Department is actively investigating connections between Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government. As Comey put it in his prepared remarks, the bureau is looking into "whether there was any coordination between the [Trump] campaign and Russia's efforts" to interfere in the 2016 election.

The other news to emerge from the House committee's hearing is that President Trump's allegation that former President Barack Obama had "wiretapped" Trump Tower has now been refuted by pretty much every agency and entity that can possibly refute it. Comey testified that the Department of Justice had not found any evidence to support Trump's claim, which comports with what the House and Senate intelligence committees have determined. No one can seem to unearth any proof for the president's accusation.

On top of that, the National Security Agency director, Admiral Mike Rogers, flatly rejected the idea that Obama had outsourced surveillance of Trump Tower to a British intelligence agency (an accusation referenced by White House press secretary Sean Spicer during one of his press briefings). Asked by committee ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., whether he agreed with comments from British officials describing that allegation as "nonsense" and "utterly ridiculous," Rogers replied, "Yes, sir."

The immediate takeaway from all this is that the White House is badly compromised politically, and administration officials know it. Spicer, appearing before reporters as the House Intelligence Committee hearing was still taking place, struggled to downplay the more damning aspects of Comey's testimony. Pressed on which Trump associates the FBI's investigation could be targeting, Spicer tried to argue that Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn had barely played any role in helping Trump get elected. The record indicates otherwise: Manafort served as Trump campaign chairman until he left amid growing controversy surrounding his financial links to Russia, and Flynn was a key campaign adviser who served briefly as Trump's national security adviser — until he resigned after lying about his contacts with Russia.

Flynn "was a volunteer of the campaign," Spicer insisted, and Manafort "played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time." Even for a White House that is known for flamboyant dishonesty, those are egregious lies and show that the people around Trump understand how bad this investigation looks.

The White House's position is made all the worse by the utter lack of credibility it labors under as a consequence of the president's gaudy disregard for the truth. The White House's refusal to back down from Trump's obviously false allegations about Obama having "wiretapped" him completely undermines its parallel insistence that there's nothing to the FBI investigation of Russia and the campaign. On the one hand, Trump and his aides argue that just because no evidence has surfaced to support Trump's accusation doesn't mean that it's been disproven. On the other hand, they're also insisting that a lack of evidence showing coordination between the campaign and Russia means the ongoing FBI investigation isn't a big deal.

Faced with this political buzz saw, the White House is doing the only thing it seems to know how to do: deploying innuendos and leaning into allegations of anti-Trump conspiracy theories. The president's official Twitter account spent the day of the hearing all but accusing former Obama administration officials of leaking information to undermine Trump.

As bad as this all looks for the administration, it's important to note that Trump still has the backing of Republicans in Congress. House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and other Republicans on the committee dutifully spent Comey's hearing ignoring Russia and the president's false attacks on Obama. Instead, they pursued the White House's preferred lines of inquiry by asking pointed questions about the illegality of leaking classified information and rhapsodizing about how leaks harm national security.

Republicans need Trump to ram through their health bill, tax legislation and various other agenda items. Trump also remains popular among Republican voters, so for now GOP lawmakers are happy to go to bat for an aggressively dishonest administration that finds itself mired in scandal after only two months in power. Those Republicans just have to hope that the White House is correct and there really is nothing to this Russia inquiry. But as we've all come to learn, trusting the Trump White House is a risky bet.


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This entry was posted in Music by llcoolbreeze. Bookmark the permalink.


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Home • Resources • Business • Limited companies • Companies Act 2006 • Do you need an audit?
The turnover threshold which currently exempts most companies and limited liability partnerships (LLPs) from a statutory audit is £6.5 million.
In the past, audits were seen as the 'cost' companies had to pay for the privilege of limited liability. Audits provide reassurance to shareholders, lenders and creditors that the annual accounts are reliable. Companies House confirms that 93% of the complaints it receives are about the credibility of filed accounts from audit-exempt companies.
However, small companies still have to produce full statutory accounts, so there remains scope for cutting more 'red tape'.
Not all companies with turnover under £6.5 million come within the audit exemption provisions, because there are criteria other than turnover; since 1 October 2012 small firms have been able to obtain an audit exemption if they meet two of three criteria relating to balance sheet total, turnover and number of employees. Public companies and those carrying on particular types of business, such as insurance broking and financial services are also subject to an audit.
Shareholders can require that an audit is carried out, for example if they are not involved in the day-to-day running of the business and require reassurance that their investment is being properly looked after.
Audit exemption thresholds
From 1 January 2016 the definition of a small company eligible for exemption will normally be one that meets two or more of the following criteria for the current and previous year:
Turnover not more than £6.5 million
Balance sheet total not more than £3.26 million
Not more than 50 employees (on average)
For periods before 1 January 2016 the following exepmtions apply:
Turnover not more than £10.2million
Balance sheet total not more than £5.1 million
The existence of audit exemption makes it more attractive for sole traders and partnerships to consider setting up a company to gain the protection of limited liability. However, there are tax consequences of such a change and it is important to seek our advice on these matters.
Audit exemptions for subsidiaries
Subsidiaries are exempt from audit provided they fulfil all the following conditions:
Its parent undertaking is established under the law of an EEA state
The company's shareholders must unanimously agree to dispense with an audit in the financial year in question
The parent must give a statutory guarantee of all the outstanding liabilities to which the subsidiary is subject at the end of the financial year
The company must be included in the consolidated accounts drawn up by the parent undertaking, which must be prepared in accordance with Directive 83/349/EEC (the Seventh Company Law Directive)
The use of the exemption by the subsidiary must be disclosed in the notes on the consolidated accounts drawn up by the parent
The following documents must be filed by the directors of the subsidiary at Companies House on or before the date that they file the subsidiary's accounts:
i. written notice of the agreement in (2)
ii. a statement by the parent that it guarantees the subsidiary company under the particular section of the Act
iii. a copy of the consolidated report and accounts referred to in (4) and the auditor's report on those accounts
The company is not quoted within s385(2) of the Companies Act
It is not an authorised insurance company, a banking company, an e-Money issuer, a MiFID investment firm or a UCITS management company, or carries on insurance market activity
It is not a trade union or an employer's association
Do call us if you would like further help or advice on this subject.
Essential record-keeping
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Nicholas Peters & Co. © 2021

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Being a host is simple.
and enjoy earning extra income.
All you need to do is to let us know your availibility and enjoy earning extra income.
Our Properties are all well selected. We closely pay attention to each and every property which shows how close we are with our hosts and how well we treat your home.
will be protected under our insurance policy.
Our priority is to keep your home safe. We do a careful profile check on each guest to ensure that they treat your home with the love that it deserves. Your property will be protected under our insurance policy.
Plus, our team will ensure that the insurance we that have fits for your home and covers any damage should it occur.
well managed and maintained for you.
Like we said, all you need to do is to let us know your availability and enjoy your extra income. From preparing your home with toiletries, towels and our bed linen, to cleaning before and after the rent. We take care of everything so that you don't have to.
We always make sure your home is professionally cleaned, well managed and maintained for you.
The easiest way to earn extra income.
the extra income on your trip away from home.
We'll do all the hard work for you so that you can be sure that there will be no additional work for you to handle. You could even spend the extra income on your trip away from home.
Be a part of Lovelydays.
Lovelydays host, Let us know about you.
We are really close to our guests...... as well as our hosts. We always love to hear from you and to know what you want. If you are interested to be a part of Lovelydays host, Let us know about you.
Be a host is simple.
Our Properties are all well selected. We closely pay attention on each property which represents how close we are with our hosts and how well we treat your home.
Like we said, all you need to do is to let us know your availability and enjoy your extra income. From preparing your home with toiletries, towels and our bed linen, to cleaning before and after the rent, we take care of everything, so you don't have to.


Florida is synonymous with fantastic golf courses, and some of the best are right here in and around Daytona Beach. Famous fairways designed by sports legends offer world-class golfing experiences, and Florida's balmy weather means that you can tee off practically year-round.
LPGA International: Featuring a gorgeous natural setting and two amazing courses, this popular golfing destination ranks high for variety and playability - and it's conveniently located right off I-95.
Indigo Lakes Golf Club - Find lush landscaping and challenging greens at this course, which is designed by renowned architect Lloyd Clifton.
Daytona Beach Golf Club - Since 1921, this course has offered an appealing combination of demanding approaches and forgiving tee shots. You'll also find a 10,000-foot putting green and new lighted driving range.
Pelican Bay Golf Course - Situated in an upscale country club community, Pelican Bay features two relaxing courses, with glistening waterways and lush greenery.
These courses are just the beginning. Learn more about Daytona Beach golf courses and plan a golfing getaway at our beachfront resort. We're ideally situated to explore the best golf courses, entertainment, and things to do in Daytona Beach. Contact us to make your booking today!


text:
require 'coveralls'
Coveralls.wear_merged! unless ENV["FASTLANE_SKIP_UPDATE_CHECK"]

# This module is only used to check the environment is currently a testing env
# Needs to be above the `require 'deliver'`
module SpecHelper
end

require 'deliver'
require 'webmock/rspec'

ENV["DELIVER_USER"] = "DELIVERUSER"
ENV["DELIVER_PASSWORD"] = "DELIVERPASS"

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:each) do
    allow(Spaceship::Tunes).to receive(:login).and_return(nil)
  end
end

WebMock.disable_net_connect!(allow: 'coveralls.io')

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
De Sabam Jazz Awards zijn jaarlijkse prijzen die sinds 2010 uitgereikt worden door Sabam voor jazzmuzikanten in België.

Aan de prijs in de categorie 'gevestigde waarde' is anno 2016 een geldprijs van 10.000 euro verbonden. De winnaar in de categorie 'jong talent' ontvangt 5.000 euro.

Winnaars in de categorie 'gevestigde waarde'
winnaars voor 2016: Kris Defoort, Fred Van Hove, Bart Maris, David Linx, Laurent Blondiau en Fabrice Alleman
2016 Peter Vermeersch (andere genomineerden: Jozef Dumoulin, Ben Sluijs, Teun Verbruggen en Tuur Florizoone)
2017 Manu Hermia

Winnaars in de categorie 'jong talent'
voor 2016: Janos Bruneel, Seppe Gebruers, Lander Gyselinck, Guillaume Vierset, Igor Gehenot en Antoine Pierre
2016 Bram De Looze (andere genomineerden: Thijs Troch, Niels Van Heertum, Mattias De Craene en Artan Buleshkaj)
2017 Felix Zurstrassen

Belgische muziekprijs
Jazzprijs

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
The Importance of Learning Asian Languages
Published: September 16th, 2021 Author: admin_asaa	Categories: Events, Events from our networks, Latest News
You are warmly invited to attend a webinar marking the latest edition of the Melbourne Asia Review:
Presented by the Asia Institute at The University of Melbourne
Thursday 23 September at 5:00-6:00pm Melbourne time.
Where do we need to be by 2030 and how do we get there? This webinar is focused on the challenges for language education in Australia, and the importance of learning Asian Languages in our region. Led by Hamish Curry, the panel discussion will explore the issues faced at all levels of education, from Primary and Secondary through to tertiary closures and teacher education. It will also examine emerging technologies and the value of face-to-face vs online learning. The audience will be able to interact with a live Q&A session with the speakers, with the discussion aiming to address the need for a long-term vision. Speakers will also explore a proposed strategy and ideas for what we can do to advocate for support and resources as a National Level.
Kate McGregor, Associate Professor in Southeast Asian History, Historical and Philosophical Studies and President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia
Ikuko Nakane, Associate Professor in Japanese Studies, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne.
Sabrina Li, Chinese Language Teacher and International Student's Coordinator, St Margaret's and Berwick Grammar School
Hamish Curry, Executive Director of the Asia Education Foundation (AEF), Asialink, University of Melbourne
To register for this free webinar, just click the link below:
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/asia-institute/event/11958-1
Please forward to colleagues, students and contacts that might find the topic of interest.


text:
Caching: Your Worst Best Friend
A cache is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it helps make things faster. On the other, it can become a crutch, or worse, an excuse. Furthermore, caches can deceive us in two ways. First, they can easily hide a system's true performance characteristics, masking poor design until things start to fail. Secondly, while a cache might exposes a simple interface, getting the most of it requires that you pay close attention to details and have a thorough understand of how your system works.
Defining a Cache
To me, what defines something as a cache is the possibility of a miss. If you write code assuming that data is in the cache, then it isn't a cache, it's a database. The most tragic abuse of this I've seen are applications that won't even start unless they can connect to the cache.
We can rephrase this by defining what a cache isn't. A cache is not the reason your system can handle its current load. If you unplug your cache and system resources become exhausted, it isn't a cache. A cache isn't how you make your site fast, or handle concurrency. All it does is help.
Of course, that's a generalization. In fact, the goal of this post is to help you take a small step away from this generalization; to help you use caching as a integral part of a good design instead of just a bandaid.
Stats Or It Didn't Happen
To get the most out of a cache, you need to collect statistics. If you can't answer the question "What's your cache hit ratio?", you aren't caching, you're guessing. But a cache hit ratio is just the start of what you need to know.
For the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that you're using a cache to store a variety of objects with different characteristics. I'm talking about things like object size, cache duration, cost of a miss and so on.
When we look at our cache, there are 4 high-level statistics that we want to track, per object type:
cache hit ratio,
number of gets,
cost of a miss, and
size of the data
All of these help paint a clear picture of the health and effectiveness of your cache.
Since our cache sits as a proxy on top of a RESTful API, we can use the URL to figure out the object type. For example /users/50u.json and /videos/99v/recommendations map to the show user and list video recommnedation object types. Normally you should be able to use the object's cache key to figure out its type.
We collect our statistics via a custom nginx log format. Something like:
# defined in the http section
# our caching proxy sets the X-Cache header to hit or miss
log_format cache '$request_method $uri $sent_http_x_cache $bytes_sent $upstream_response_time';
# defined in the specific location that proxies to our cache
access_log /var/log/apiproxy/cache.log cache buffer=128K;
This gives us a file that looks like:
GET /v4/videos/75028v.json hit 2384 0.000
GET /v4/videos/176660v.json miss 2287 0.002
GET /v4/episodes.json hit 372 0.001
GET /v4/videos/222741v/timed_comments/en.json hit 36747 0.001
GET /v4/roles.json miss 511 0.012
GET /v4/containers/20186c.json hit 1561 0.000
GET /v4/containers/20186c/episodes.json miss 426 0.002
GET /v4/containers/20186c/people.json miss 425 0.09
GET /v4/containers/20186c/recommendations.json miss 5376 0.002
GET /v4/containers/6784c/covers/en.json hit 9653 0.001
GET /v4/containers/20186c/contributions.json miss 441 0.016
GET /v4/users/51351u/subscriptions.json hit 360 0.001
We don't need a huge amount of data. Just enough to get a good representation. It doesn't take much to parse this. Here's a snapshot of the first time we analyzed our cache:
route                       |  total hits  |  ratio  |  size  |  miss time  |
show videos                 |    758112    |  42.4   |  2114  |      4      |
list videos/recommendations |    406792    |  38     |  4529  |      6      |
show containers             |    393084    |  53.1   |  4577  |      4      |
show sessions               |    390095    |  72.9   |   988  |     11      |
show videos/subtitles       |    288032    |  89.6   | 19233  |     20      |
list containers/people      |    266975    |  91.1   |  1232  |     17      |
list videos/streams         |    228886    |  18.9   |   716  |      5      |
show users                  |    221952    |  0      |   997  |     11      |
Pretty horrible, eh? Our global cache hit ratio, hovering around a not-great 50%, wasn't very accurate. As an average, the routes with a good hit ratio masked just how bad things really were (not the mention the fact that something was obviously broken with the user's endpoint).
From the above, there's 1 core statistic that we aren't measuring: reason for evictions. Specifically, it would be helpful to know if items are being evicted because they are stale, or because the system is under pressure. Our solution for now, which is far from ideal due to the lack of granularity, is to measure the number of times we need to prune our cache due to memory pressure. Since we aren't currently under memory pressure (more on why later), we aren't seeing many prunes, and thus haven't looked very deeply into it.
If your cache isn't a proxy sitting near the top of your stack, you'll likely have to jump through more hoops to extract this data. You could also opt to log some or all of it in real-time using Statsd (or something similar). Finally, although it's always better to measure than assume, there's a good chance that you'll already have an idea about the size and load time of these objects relative to each other (still, measure and expect and be delighted at surprises!).
Master Your Keys
Few of our objects use a simple cache key, such as video:4349v. At best, some types have a handful of permutations. At worse, thousands. Many of our objects vary based on the user's country, platform (web, mobile, tv, ...), user's role and query string parameters (to name a few). This is the reason we had to move beyond Varnish: we needed to generate cache keys that were application-aware. Many object types, for example, treat our iOS and Android applications as the same platform, but a few don't.
This ends up being application specific. The important thing to know is that there'll come a point where a single cache key format just won't scale (because you'll have to pick the one with the most permutations for all routes). It might seem like you're violating some type of design rule, but coupling your keys to your data and system behavior becomes critical if you want to keep things under control.
I will say that we did spend some time normalizing our cache keys. For example, a page=1 is the same as no page parameter, and a per_page=10 is the same no per_page parameter. It's trivial to do and it can cover some rather common cases (these two are particularly good example of common cases).
Speaking of paging, early on, we had the capability to serve small per_page request from a larger one. For example, if we had a per_page=25 cached, we'd be able to server any requests where per_page was <= 25. We'd actually over-fetch and overlap pages to minimize the impact of various paging inputs. Ultimately this proved incompatible with other design goals, but it's a decent example of how your cache keys don't have to be dumb.
Key permutations is one of those things that can easily cause your caching to fall apart. It's pretty easy to miss the impact on your cache that new features will have. A seemingly isolated feature might force you to add new permutations across the system (we're currently facing this), which can easily cause a cascade. It isn't just that more permutations lead to more misses, but also that more variation -> more memory usage -> more evictions -> more misses.
Dump and examine your cache keys. Looks for patterns and duplications. Most importantly, make sure you're using the most granular key possible.
Own Your Values
We've taken two steps to minimize the size of our cache, thus minimizing the number of misses due to premature eviction. The first and simplest is to store compressed values. As a proxy cache, this makes a lot of sense since decompression is distributed to clients. For an internal application cache, you'll likely get much less value from it. We use Nginx's relatively new gunzip module to take care of decompressing the content should the client not support compression.
The other feature that we've recently added is deduplication. The number of possible values is far smaller than the total number of possible keys. For example, even though we need to query them separately, a Canadian user is likely to get the same video details as an American user. This was one of the many projects our amazing intern accomplished. The first thing he did was analyze the cache for duplicates. At 45% duplication after only a day's worth of uptime, we felt the feature was worth adding.
Despite everything we've talked about so far, ultimately the best way to improve the effectiveness of your cache is to increase the duration items can stay in the cache. The downside to this is that users will get stale data.
I'm aware of two solutions to this problem. The first is to use object versions to bust the cache. 37signals has a good explanation of this approach.
The approach that we're using is to purge the cache whenever there's an update. This worked well for us because we were already using a queue to communicate changes between system (as a side note, I strongly recommend that you do this, you'll end up using it more than you can imagine). So it was really just a matter of creating a new listener and sending an HTTP purge to each data center. Most items are purged within 2 seconds of an update.
This approach did require that we design our cache so that we could purge an object, say video 10 and purge all variations (json, xml, country us, country ca, ....). If you're using Varnish, it already supports purging all variations.
But Wait, There's More
Varnish has two neat features that we adopted into our own cache which can be quite useful: grace mode and saint mode. Grace mode is about serving up a slightly stale value while a fresh value is fetched in the background. This solves two problems. First, everyone gets a fast cache response. Secondly, when a lot of people ask for the same object at the same time (called a thundering herd), only a single fetch is made.
Saint mode is about serving up stale values when a fresh value isn't available.
Here's what the flow looks like:
cached, is_cached := cache.Get(key)
if is_cached {
if c.Fresh() {
return cached
// it's ok to serve something that's aged, but not stale
if cached.Aged() {
go grace(req)
//not cached
response := getResponse(req)
//we got an error, might as well serve the cached object
//no matter its age
if response.Status() >= 500 && is_cached {
Caching isn't a trivial problem to solve. For us, the solution was to collect data and increase our coupling between the cache and the rest of the systems. We've introduced some cases where changes to the business logic will need to be reflected in the cache. We also spent time removing a lot of inefficiency that come from trying to use it as a generic get/set mechanism. Deduplication was a huge win, which for the time being has resolved our memory constraint. Cleaning up our keys is an ongoing effort as new features are introduced which add new permutations.
Today, our cache hit ratio is looking much better. Within the next couple days we hope to bring the top 10 resources up above 80% (we're almost there). The most important thing though is that all the systems which sit behind our caching layer can survive without it. Some considerably better than others, true. But we aren't driving our cache hit ratio up because our system won't work otherwise. We're driving it up because it results in a better user experience.
/g,">").replace(/&(?![\w\#]+;)/g, "&"),b,c)}function o(a,b,c){if(b


series | Mr Perfect's Apprentice.
So I have a new website..
Yes sir ye-bob! Click here to view it!
A more professional website for the series; a place where you can view all the trailers/parts that are available and of course the latest news on the series.


text:
Aldi is recruiting managers - and the pay is out of this world
We've got all the details about how and where to apply in Cambridgeshire
Abigail Rabbett
Updated 17:46, 7 SEP 2019
Aldi is hiring and the pay is phenomenal (Image: Sean Aidan)
Budget supermarket giant Aldi is recruiting - and the pay is out of this world.
Probably a headline you've seen once or twice right?
Well, it's not wrong, and if you're thinking about changing careers Aldi could be the perfect place to do it.
It helps that the pay is incredible too, with many jobs offering a hearty pay packet.
The budget European supermarket is hunting for permanent store managers at stores across the South East of England, and in this role, you'll be earning between £44,890 and £58,540 per year.
The supermarket chain, is also hiring area managers (experienced and career change) who can earn betwenn £52,540 - £76,495 a year.
There are vacancies available in the Cambridgeshire area, with stores in Cambridge, Chatteris, Ely, Huntingdon and St Neots and if there isn't a vacancy available at your chosen store, you can register your interest here .
You can also currently apply for a plethora of assistant store manager vacancies at Aldi branches across the region. In this role, you can earn up to £38,170 a year.
At the bottom of the food chain is the store assistant, which might be the most desired job for those looking for an entry level retail position. At Aldi, you can earn up to £10.41 an hour helping stack the shelves and manning the tills.
There are currently vacancies at Cambridge, Royston, Ely, Chatteris, Huntingdon, St Neots and Haverhill.
To browse all the vacancies at Aldi stores across the region, click here.
What it's like to be a sugar baby
40 of the most brilliant women in Cambs
What it's like to be a pilot
A former Morrisons employee


text:
Look out for fall sports
Used from bpcraddock with permission.
Reo Lee
Even with the recent pandemic bringing many difficulties and extra responsibilities, the Wolfpack family has yet to let go of school spirit. Although only 50% of maximum capacity will be allowed to cheer on the teams from the bleachers, the athletics department is making sure that all precautions are taken so that sports season will not be canceled.
Football kicked off the year with their first game taking place September 24, at Clark Stadium. The first home game of the season will be against Wylie High School, a longtime competitor of the school.
The Plano West Volleyball team had their first game September 14, away from home against Southlake High School. The lady wolves have a steady list of matches that are consistent until the end of November.
The Plano West Swimming and Diving team started practice from September 9. The first team meet was the week after on September 18.
Further information on what safety measures taken by PISD district can be found on their website under the athletics department tab. https://www.pisd.edu/domain/13964
Reo Lee, Editor
Reo Lee is one of the senior co-editors this year for Plano West Blueprints. Being on staff was one of the most valuable experiences she had during her...
Wolfpack Tennis
Lady Wolves
How Are Athletes Balancing Practices and Their Schoolwork?
NBA Eastern Conference Finals: Boston Celtics Versus Miami Heat
Swimming Team Makes a Splash
After Week One Loss, Plano West Prepares for Next Week Against Flower Mound
Plano West Varsity Wresting Coming off Stellar Season
Varsity Head Coaching Hire Tyler Soukup Ready to Begin New Era of Plano West Football
Varsity Baseball Squad Aims for a Successful Season in 2019