Hello Dante? What Level Is This?

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I wonder if it was something else in addition to this tweet? It's not even really pro-Biden!

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I wonder if it was something else in addition to this tweet? It's not even really pro-Biden!

From what I''ve read it seems some "conservatives" objected to the tweet even though it wasn't on her professional/official NYT account. I don't know if the NYT has said anything about why that tweet would get someone fired.

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via @page88 Virginia Heffernan

During my first years at the NYT, there was Johnny Apple, & slightly later, David Carr. Both said & did wtf they wanted. They were emo & florid & funny & annoying. Apple once lied that he KILLED Viet Cong during the war. Journalism used to be way MORE emotional than it is now.

If you were trying hard to color within the lines as a Junior person, you were often encouraged to take more risks—and you have the model of Carr & Apple to know that’s where we’d end up. With freedom & the NYT having our backs.

Here’s what I think happened: after Howell Raines, Jayson Blair & Gerald Boyd were fired in an absurd & arguably racist bloodbath, most junior people got really, really scared.
Bill Keller used to get irritated with me from time to time—for saying “chills”? NO. Anytime he thought I was *losing my voice*, becoming “too Timesian.”

Most of us, esp women/POC, didn’t get anything like the leeway that say Carr got. Jayson Blair’s addiction wasn’t factored into his issues as a journalist. But Carr’s addictions (& recoveries) were his calling card. Like Apple’s excesses. They made him roguish & an idol.

But if you weren’t among the white hard-living rogue dudes you had to be very very very careful. I got pummeled by an editor once for writing that Ron Paul took money from Stormfront (when it was a personal check from Stormfront’s leader) because that suggested liberal bias.

But as usual, the paradox: the smaller you try to make yourself, the more your slips into personality or emotion stand out & get penalized.

If you’re approximating self-erasure, why can’t you go all the way?!?

So this week an excellent editorialist makes a joke abt Pence that would have been laughably tame to Johnny Apple & a brilliant reporter says she got chills, & the NYT convulses with status anxiety.

Does ANYTHING think this will make the right will stop slagging off the NYT?
• • •

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[Togtdyalttai]

One of Trump's final acts will allow former aides to profit from foreign ties

By THEODORIC MEYER

01/24/2021 07:01 AM EST

President Donald Trump’s last-minute move to scrap his administration’s own ethics rules will make it easier for his former aides to lobby on behalf of foreign interests — the same line of work behind so many Trump-era scandals.

In the final hours of his presidency, Trump revoked the ethics pledge he’d signed four years earlier, which, among other things, had barred those who’d served in his administration from lobbying for foreign governments and political parties for the rest of their lives.

With those restrictions gone, former Trump administration officials will be free to represent foreign powers — exactly the kind of swamp-like behavior Trump had promised to eradicate in his 2016 campaign.

Michael McKenna, a former lobbyist who worked in Trump’s White House legislative affairs office, said he had no intention of lobbying for foreign governments but thought other former Trump administration officials would jump at the chance.

“I’m pretty confident that a bunch of people would absolutely love to represent Monaco, France, the United Arab Emirates,” he said.

Trump’s “lifetime ban” on former officials in his administration representing foreign governments was part of his 2016 campaign pledge to “drain the swamp” in Washington. He even criticized President Bill Clinton for revoking his own ethics rules right before leaving office two decades ago, arguing Clinton had “rigged the system on his way out.”

“He is undoing really the only example of policy that was supposed to evidence his commitment to drain the swamp,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, which advocates for tougher ethics rules.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires those who lobby for foreign governments and political parties — along with some other foreign interests — to disclose their work with the Justice Department. Several prominent Trump allies failed to do so, ensnaring them in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and other federal investigations. .

Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chair, was sentenced in 2019 to 7 ½ years in prison for failing to register as a foreign agent, among other crimes.

Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, admitted to lying to investigators about his role in a lobbying campaign on behalf of Turkish interests, though Flynn wasn’t charged with violating FARA.

And Elliott Broidy, a prominent fundraiser for Trump’s 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty in October to failing to register as a foreign agent even though he knew he should’ve done so.

Trump pardoned all three men before leaving office.

There’s nothing illegal or even unethical about lobbying for foreign governments, but many lobbyists try to avoid representing countries that have tense relationships with Washington or troubled human rights records. Two lobbying firms cut ties with Turkey late last year after Turkey aided Azerbaijan in a controversial conflict with Armenia, and several prominent firms quit lobbying for Saudi Arabia in 2018 after the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

But lobbying for foreign governments is one of the most lucrative niches on K Street, and Trump-connected lobbyists who registered as foreign agents thrived in Washington during his administration, earning millions of dollars lobbying for the governments of countries such as Turkey, Zimbabwe and the Dominican Republic.

Gotham Government Relations & Communications, a New York lobbying firm that once counted Trump as a client, capitalized on the connection after Trump’s 2016 victory, opening a Washington office and signing clients including the Libyan government. Like others on K Street, the firm is now trying to reposition itself for the Biden era.

Earlier this month, the firm sent a memo to several foreign governments and other potential clients highlighting its ties to a different New York politician: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Our Washington D.C. office stands ready to advocate for you with the Senate Majority office of the Honorable Charles Schumer!” the memo reads.

Trump’s ethics rules never barred former administration officials from lobbying entirely. Those who left the administration were allowed to lobby Congress, and loopholes also let them lobby the administration in some cases. At least 84 former Trump administration officials registered as lobbyists while he was in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of disclosure filings.

But the rules did include significant limitations, prohibiting former Trump administration officials from lobbying the agencies in which they served for five years after leaving the government.

Now that Trump has revoked his ethics pledge, they’re mostly free to lobby the executive branch. (Those who’ve left within the past year are still prohibited by law from trying to influence their former agencies.)

Some on K Street have cheered Trump’s decision. “It puts a number of people who were on the sidelines [back] in the game,” said one lobbyist whose firm has hired former Trump administration officials.

But others are skeptical staffers from the previous administration will have much sway.

“I’m not sure the Biden people are going to want to be lobbied by us,” said one former Trump administration official who’s now a lobbyist, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Former Trump administration officials are also now free to lobby Republican lawmakers on behalf of foreign interests — but demand for such work will be softer with Democrats in control of Congress, said Ivan Zapien, who leads Hogan Lovells’ government relations and public affairs practice.

“There’s not many world leaders who are trying to figure out how to deal with Republicans right now,” Zapien said.

Some ethics lawyers said Trump’s lifetime ban on foreign lobbying might have been excessive. (The ethics rules Biden debuted on Wednesday only bar those who serve in his administration from representing foreign governments until Biden leaves office or for two years after they leave government, whichever is later.)

Would the contacts former Trump administration officials made in government still give them a lobbying edge in 20 or 30 years?

“It sounds really good, there’s no doubt about it,” said Tom Spulak, a Washington lawyer who’s advised clients on the Foreign Agents Registration Act and has also lobbied for foreign interests himself. “But is it really serving a purpose?”

But Paul Light, a New York University professor who has criticized lengthy lobbying bans in the past, said he couldn’t support Trump’s last-minute repeal after all the ethics scandals during his administration.

“I don’t think Donald Trump is the right person to undo any ethics rule,” he said.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/2 ... ing-461715

[ponchi101]

All I will say is: in any other country, if you are representing a foreign nation, it is usually called treason. The people that represent the interests of a foreign nation in your soil are called "The Embassy".

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Is anyone surprised?

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If you care whether Tiny is upset or not here's one of the articles floating around on Twitter.

[ponchi101]

Is anyone surprised?

And from personal experience.
A lot of BCP and immigration people in the USA are immigrants, that then go full Brown-Shirt and treat people coming in as if everybody is a potential illegal alien.
I once landed in Miami. A Cuban person started asking me questions about what I was doing there. IN SPANISH. I answered him, IN ENGLISH. Halfway through this, he basically spits at me "Why are you answering me in English?" (I really had done it without realizing). "What f****** country are we in?" was my reply.
I was really close to the little back room.
That is ICE. And the BCP.

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Yeah these two again.

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Millions earmarked for public health emergencies were used to pay for unrelated projects, inspector general says
Staff called the agency the ‘bank of BARDA’ and said research and development funds were regularly tapped for unrelated projects, including salaries and the removal of office furniture, the report finds

By
Dan Diamond and
Lisa Rein
Jan. 27, 2021 at 2:48 p.m. EST

The investigation, conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and overseen by the Office of Special Counsel, centered on hundreds of millions of dollars intended for the development of vaccines, drugs and therapies by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority or BARDA, an arm of the federal health department.

The unidentified whistleblower alleged that officials in the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, which oversaw the biomedical agency, wrongly dipped into the money set aside by Congress for development of lifesaving medicines, beginning in fiscal 2010 and continuing through at least fiscal 2019, spanning both the Obama and Trump administrations.

The inspector general substantiated some of the whistleblower’s claims, finding that staff referred to the agency as the “bank of BARDA” and told investigators that research and development funds were regularly tapped for unrelated projects, sometimes at “exorbitant” rates.

“I am deeply concerned about [the] apparent misuse of millions of dollars in funding meant for public health emergencies like the one our country is currently facing with the covid-19 pandemic,” Special Counsel Henry Kerner wrote in a letter to President Biden on Wednesday. “Equally concerning is how widespread and well-known this practice appeared to be for nearly a decade.”

The inspector general concluded that the agency violated the Purpose Statute, a cornerstone of federal law designed to ensure that funds appropriated by Congress are used for their intended purpose.

“I urge Congress and HHS to take immediate actions to ensure funding for public health emergencies can no longer be used as a slush-fund for unrelated expenses,” Kerner said in a statement to reporters.

Meanwhile, HHS is reviewing whether the spending irregularities violated the Antideficiency Act, another law governing the use of federal funds authorized by Congress. HHS also has engaged an accounting firm to conduct an audit, Kerner told Biden.

The Obama administration’s top emergency-preparedness official, who was named in the report, defended the agency’s use of BARDA funds as appropriate.

“All expenditures were done in a routine way,” said Nicole Lurie, who led the umbrella office known as ASPR and also said she wasn’t interviewed as part of the inspector general’s investigation.

“BARDA was part of ASPR and had a shared mission and used common resources,” Lurie added, noting that the inspector general faulted spending decisions — such as using BARDA funds to pay for ASPR contracting officers — that she said helped the agency expedite dozens of medical products to help fight public health emergencies.

HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

BARDA received national attention in May 2020 after then-Director Rick Bright was abruptly removed from his post, alleging that it was because he resisted the Trump administration’s pressure to expedite unproven anti-malaria drugs as a covid-19 treatment. Colleagues said that Bright’s ouster was more complicated and that Trump administration officials had sought to remove him before the pandemic. The inspector general’s investigation, which began in 2018 after a whistleblower tip, mostly focuses on BARDA before Bright’s leadership and on funding decisions made during the Obama administration. The Office of Special Counsel is involved because it receives complaints from whistleblowers and protects them from reprisal as it investigates their underlying allegations of misconduct.

The report does not specify a total amount of funding that was misappropriated, although a spokesperson for the Office of Special Counsel said investigators are “confident” the assistant secretary’s office wrongly repurposed millions of dollars intended for biomedical research and development.

For instance, the inspector general flagged the assistant secretary’s office for not providing adequate details to Congress on how BARDA spent $517 million in “management and administrative” costs over a decade.

“Because there were no specific details outlining what the M&A costs supported, we cannot determine whether the expenditures supported the BARDA mission,” the inspector general concluded.

Investigators also signaled their skepticism that all of the management and administrative funds went to their intended purpose, writing that the assistant secretary’s office “would likely fail” to adequately justify how the money was used.

The inspector general further found that between fiscal 2013 and 2017, BARDA paid $897,491 for the salaries of staffers who did not actually work for the agency. Investigators also said the biomedical arm wrongly covered millions of dollars in other administrative costs, such as having furniture removed from other parts of the building where its office was housed.

“That should not have been done using [research and development] funds as BARDA did not have their furniture removed,” one HHS staffer acknowledged to an investigator, according to notes in the inspector general report, which does not specify a dollar amount for the furniture removal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2 ... propiated/

[ponchi101]

If you had a time machine and could bring Torquemada back to life, and tell him to get these bastards and design a proper form of torture or punishment that would fit the crimes, he would scratch his chin and say. "Nope. Can't think of anything appropriate enough for that crime."
Dropping them naked in the middle of the Sahara with nothing more than a bag of extra hot chips would not even be the beginning.

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