He’s a lot tougher than he looks.
.. It was Kushner who reportedly pushed for the firing of FBI Director James Comey over the objections of Bannon. And it was Kushner who was the lone voice urging for a counterattack after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the appointment of a special prosecutor, according to the New York Times.
.. Because he is soft-spoken, slim and handsome, with degrees from Harvard and NYU and a family that donates to Democrats, he couldn’t possibly be the same guy knifing his West Wing rivals and urging the president to go to war with the Justice Department and the FBI.
.. He’s tough. In an exceedingly polite way, he is as tough as anyone is in New York City real estate.”
.. it turned him into a person who was determined to operate in much the same way but just be quieter about it,”
.. He would compensate his lack of knowledge by saying stuff like, ‘Let’s just blow up the whole concept of digital.’ It would sort of sound interesting for a second and then you would just forget about it and get on with the work.”
.. At the end of the year, when she went to collect her performance bonus at his real estate office for meeting agreed upon metrics on page views and audience growth, Kushner told her that they couldn’t pay, citing financial concerns, and asked her to “take one for the team.”
.. Kahlon described her former boss on Facebook thusly: “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father), who is deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the NYO, marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’), and who is basically a shithead.”
.. In February 2014, when New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began an investigation into Trump University, he was treated to a front-page hit piece in the Observer in which he was caricatured as a sociopath from “A Clockwork Orange.”
.. Wildstein faces up to 27 months in federal prison for his role in shutting down Fort Lee traffic as part of Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal .. he received a note from Kushner, telling him, “I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass.”
.. It has always been part of the Kushner Way: unfailingly polite and urbane on the surface while searching for the soft underbelly to stick the knife in.
.. “He is obsessed with this notion that the whole New York City real estate world is antiquated. He wants to do things differently,”
.. It is hard to do any deal in New York because you are in this sea of hyper-aggressive people. He is like alkaline in that sea of aggressive people.”
.. nearly going into foreclosure in 2011 and now with only 70 percent of the property occupied—far below the Manhattan average of the low 90s—and after losing $10 million in 2015 after debt payments. The Kushners now face a looming $1.2 billion debt payment on the building that has sent them scrambling to find other investors. Real estate experts remain mystified by the purchase, doubting the building will ever be profitable for the amount that Kushner paid.
.. One appraiser pointed out that you would often hear of Kushner making deals in the real estate press, but rarely read about those deals panning out with rental income or occupancy rates that exceed expectations.
.. As for the Observer, rather than use a storied journalistic institution for an entryway into the right rooms of Manhattan, Kushner wanted to see the paper turn profitable—something that had never occurred in its previous decades of existence.
l Plenty of tough talk for Erdogan guards, but action is unlikely, experts say
police handled the disturbance smartly by separating the antagonists and leaving it to others to sort out culpability and criminality. He said even if the officers didn’t immediately grasp that the guards were potentially immune from arrest, they would have known that a fight outside an ambassador’s residence was more complex than a simple dispute.
“The officers in D.C. are well trained,” Ramsey said. “They are very familiar with these unique kind of circumstances. This is not your typical city.”
.. “Diplomatic immunity can’t be a license to attack people at will. The cops see people beating others into submission, and I think they’re convinced it was above their pay grade to act.”
.. Turkey’s semiofficial news agency cast the melee as a failure of D.C. police, saying they did not stop the anti-Erdogan protest. The government later alleged that its guards had “responded in self-defense” to terrorists it said had joined the protesters.
Obama Lied About Removing All Chemical Weapons from Syria
I mean, the way they did this story was Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction. We went to war and people died!
.. There are people who think that this attack in Syria using chemical weapons on Syrian citizens is a setup designed to draw President Trump into military action in Syria, just as Bush was drawn into action in Iraq.
.. But the upshot is that there are people now thinking that these intelligence people…
There were many Clinton holdovers just like there are now Obama holdovers, and that many people ran a scam on Bush. They knew that there were not mass quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and they let Bush go in there on purpose to embarrass himself. And there are people who think, “Look, that happened once, it can happen again. Mr. President,” they’re saying to Trump, “please being very careful before you make a move on Syria, ’cause you could be in the process of being entrapped again, just like Bush was.”
.. the British media think got sucked into a trick. There weren’t weapons of mass destruction and he was lied to and he bought the lie, and so people are afraid. People who support Trump are afraid that he may be falling prey to the same kind of trick
.. The Democrats want you to believe that Putin helped Trump win the election by somehow screwing Hillary and the whole Democrat effort. They colluded. They don’t have any evidence for it, but they’re convinced it happened, right? So Trump and Putin are buddy-buddy. Trump doesn’t ever criticize Putin.
What in the world, then, would Trump be talking about going into Syria for?
.. Trump attacking Syria undercuts the entire narrative that Trump and Putin are buddies
Borders Reopen to Banned Visa Holders; Trump Attacks Judge
On another day of chaotic developments over the week-old order, the State Department reversed its cancellation of visas for people from the affected countries and began efforts to resettle refugees, small numbers of travelers began venturing to airports to try to fly to the United States, and Mr. Trump mounted a harsh personal attack on the judge.
.. Judge Robart, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, declared in his ruling that “there’s no support” for the administration’s argument that “we have to protect the U.S. from individuals” from the affected countries, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Libya.
.. The White House appeared determined to have Judge Robart’s ruling struck down swiftly. In his first statement on the matter on Friday evening, the press secretary, Sean Spicer, described the judge’s action as “outrageous.” Minutes later, the White House issued a new statement deleting the word outrageous.
.. It recalled the attacks he made during the presidential campaign on a federal district judge in California who was presiding over a class-action lawsuit involving Trump University.
.. Democrats said the president’s criticism of Judge Robart was a dangerous development. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Trump seemed “intent on precipitating a constitutional crisis.” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, whose state filed the suit that led to the injunction, said the attack was “beneath the dignity” of the presidency and could “lead America to calamity.”
.. And in a third message, he asserted, without evidence, that some Middle Eastern countries supported the immigration order. “Interesting that certain Middle-Eastern countries agree with the ban,” he wrote. “They know that if certain people are allowed in it’s death & destruction!”
.. “The executive order adversely affects the states’ residents in areas of employment, education, business, family relations and freedom to travel,” Judge Robart wrote. He said the states had been hurt because the order affected their public universities and their tax base.
.. The judge also barred the administration from enforcing its limits on accepting refugees, including “any action that prioritizes the refugee claims of certain religious minorities.”
.. The next question at the trial court level will be whether Judge Robart will make the temporary restraining order more permanent by issuing a preliminary injunction.