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demmiblue's JournalA Major Democratic Donor Is Reconsidering Support For Senators Who Pushed For Al Franken's...
Source: BuzzFeed News
Susie Tompkins Buell has given millions to Democrats over the years — especially women politicians. But she is angered by how the push for Al Franken’s resignation was handled last month, calling it “unfair” and “cavalier.”
Posted on January 06, 2018, 15:31 GMT
Ruby Cramer
BuzzFeed News Reporter
One of the Democratic Party's biggest donors says she is reconsidering her support for the women in the U.S. Senate who called for Al Franken’s resignation following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and inappropriate touching.
The San Francisco-based donor, Susie Tompkins Buell, 75, has given millions of dollars to Democratic causes since the 1990s. She is best known as a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, but has also contributed for decades to Democratic women senators, hosting a regular spring fundraiser for the lawmakers in California called "Women on the Road to the Senate."
Buell said she is weighing whether to continue her financial support after the calls for Franken's exit last month. The charge for his resignation — led by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and followed almost immediately by a string of statements from other prominent female Democratic senators — came on Dec. 6, before the conclusion of an official Senate Ethics Committee inquiry.
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/a-major-democratic-donor-is-reconsidering-support-for
BREAKING: New CBO score on CHIP is out and news is big.
https://twitter.com/ASlavitt/status/949414887759011840BREAKING: New CBO score on CHIP is out and news is big.
$0.8B for 5 years.
Used to be $8.5B. All the excuses should be gone.
http://bit.ly/2m4modi
5:58 PM - 5 Jan 2018
Jared Kushner For Secretary Of State? Trump Told Kelly His High Hopes For Son-in-Law, New Book Claim
source: Newsweek
Shortly after taking over as White House chief of staff, John Kelly held a meeting with the president and wanted to discuss the roles Kushner and Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka would have in the administration going forward, author Michael Wolff claimed in his tome Fire and Fury: Inside The Trump White House.
Kelly reportedly sought to make changes and institute order in a White House that had been rather dysfunctional under his predecessor Reince Preibus, and wanted to control access to Trump and his office.
Kelly, according to the book, wanted to find a way to squeeze the politically inexperienced Kushner and Ivanka Trump out of the administration. Trump, instead, envisioned a much larger role for his son-in-law on the national and global political stage.
Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/kushner-secretary-state-trump-kelly-772431?utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social
World's longest glass bridge opens in Hebei, China
The country's latest -- billed as the world's longest -- opened at the end of 2017 in Hebei Province's Hongyagu Scenic Area.
And just in case the 488 meter span (1,600 feet) over a vertical drop of 218 meters (715 feet) doesn't bring visitors to their trembling knees, there's an added sway to test the nerves at this destination.
"Hongyagu glass suspension bridge marks the 2.0 era for China's glass-bottomed bridge," says Yang Minghua, the chairman of Hebei's Bailu Group, which created the span linking two peaks in the mountainous region of northeastern China.
http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/hongyagu-glass-bridge-hebei-china/index.html?sr=twCNN010518hongyagu-glass-bridge-hebei-china0950AMStoryGal
My legal team is sending a CEASE & DESIST notice to @RealDonaldTrump for him to STOP...
https://twitter.com/MMFlint/status/949441218588667904My legal team is sending a CEASE & DESIST notice to @RealDonaldTrump for him to STOP calling Steve Bannon by MY nickname. You don’t get to re-gift a nickname. Trump designated me as the original “Sloppy.” And, henceforth, Bannon will be known as "Sloppy Seconds Steve Bannon!!"
7:43 PM - 5 Jan 2018
Sloppy Seconds Steve Bannon
Ex-Obama staffer starts GoFundMe for Moore accuser whose house burned down
Source: The Hill
A former Obama staffer has set up a GoFundMe for the Roy Moore accuser whose house burned down earlier this week.
The home of Tina Johnson, who said in November that the former GOP Senate candidate groped her in the 1990s, was destroyed in a fire Tuesday that is now being investigated for arson.
Katie Jacobs Stanton, who served in the White House and State Department under former President Obama, posted the link to the online fundraiser on Twitter.
“This is really upsetting,” Stanton wrote. “I haven’t set up a GoFundMe before but inspired to do so today. If anyone knows how to reach Ms. Johnson to let her know help is on the way, let me know.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/367703-ex-obama-staffer-starts-gofundme-for-moore-accuser-whose-house
https://www.gofundme.com/helptinajohnson
Cummings hospitalized as wife suspends campaign for governor
Source: Politico
Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) is currently hospitalized, three sources told POLITICO, the latest setback in a string of health issues that have plagued the longtime lawmaker since last year.
Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, a Democratic policy consultant, suspended her bid for governor of Maryland on Friday shortly before news surfaced that her husband was in the hospital.
It is unclear whether Cummings’ hospitalization is related to heart issues that sidelined him for months last year or is due to an unrelated health issue. Cummings’ office did not respond to multiple requests for comment other than to refer questions to Rockeymoore Cummings’ campaign.
In a statement announcing plans to suspend her campaign, Rockeymoore Cummings cited personal issues but did not elaborate.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/05/elijah-cummings-hospitalized-326876
As Fire and Fury is published, Europe openly debates: Is Trump still sane?
Source: The Washington Post
BERLIN — European commentary on President Trump is rarely flattering, but the cascading revelations alleged in Michael Wolff’s tell-all book “Fire and Fury,” drew an especially fierce response from a horrified continent.
“Is Trump still sane?” asked the Friday lead headline on the site of Germany’s most respected conservative paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The piece was published under the topic “mental health.”
Meanwhile, British readers woke up to the Times of London's main front page headline that also wondered about the president’s stability: “Trump’s mental health questioned by top aide.”
“Donald Trump’s right-hand man openly questioned his fitness to serve and predicted that he would resign to avoid being removed by his own cabinet, according to a book that the US president tried to block yesterday,” wrote the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Times of London.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/01/05/as-fire-and-fury-is-published-europe-openly-debates-is-trump-still-sane/?utm_term=.91150b3b0663&tid=sm_tw&__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true
I read decades of Woody Allen's private notes. He's obsessed with teenage girls.
His 56-box archive is filled with misogynist and lecherous musings.Source: The Washington Post
I know this because I’ve seen his whole career up close — going through all of his drafts and scribblings, his psychological and physical cutting-room floor that exists in the 56-box, 57-year personal archives he has been curating since 1980 at Princeton University (which he did not attend). According to the staff at Firestone Library’s rare-books wing, I’m the first person to read Allen’s collection — the Woody Papers — from cover to cover, and from the very beginning to the very end, Allen, quite simply, drips with repetitious misogyny. Allen, who has been nominated for 24 Oscars, never needed ideas besides the lecherous man and his beautiful conquest — a concept around which he has made films about Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Manhattan, journalism, time travel, communist revolution, murder, writing novels, Thanksgiving dinner, Hollywood and many other things — because that one idea bore so much fruit for his career.
Allen’s archive is a garden of earthly deletes — decades of notes and stories and sketches that the prolific filmmaker exiled, for whatever reason, to the shadowlands in between whole-hearted commitment and half-hearted possession. His screenplays are often Freudian, and they generally feature him (or some avatar for him) sticking almost religiously to a formula: A relationship on the brink of failure is thrown into chaos by the introduction of a compelling outsider, almost always a young woman. Sometimes, this produces a gem, such as “Match Point.” Often it does not. Ellen Page, featured in 2012’s “To Rome With Love,” called working with Allen “the biggest regret of my career.”
Allen’s work is flatly boorish. Running through all of the boxes is an insistent, vivid obsession with young women and girls: There’s the “wealthy, educated, respected” male character in one short story (“By Destiny Denied: Incident at Entwhistle’s”) who lives with a 21-year-old “Indian” woman. First, Allen’s revisions reduce her to 18, then double down, literally, and turn her into two 18-year-olds. There’s the 16-year-old in an unmade television pitch described as “a flashy sexy blonde in a flaming red low cut evening gown with a long slit up the side.” There’s the 17-year-old girl in another short story, “Consider Kaplan,” whose 53-year-old neighbor falls in love with her as the two share a silent, one-floor-long elevator ride in their Park Avenue co-op. There’s the female college student in “Rainy Day” who “should not be 20 or 21, sounds more like 18 — or even 17 — but 18 seems better.” That script includes a male college student but gives no description of his age. Another of Allen’s male characters, in a draft of a 1977 New Yorker story called “The Kugelmass Episode,” is a 45-year-old fascinated by “coeds” at City College of New York. In the margin next to this character’s dialogue, Allen wrote, then crossed out, “c’est moi” — it’s me.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/i-read-decades-of-woody-allens-private-notes-hes-obsessed-with-teenage-girls/2018/01/04/f2701482-f03b-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.9210062ffffc
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