Month: January 2017

Maybe new White House (-area) press room with room for talk show people and bloggers

Recognizes the reality of today’s communications.

The White House’s iconic James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, renovated a decade ago with modern lights and wiring, may soon be much quieter. White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” that, at least temporarily, the daily briefings may move “50 feet to the EEOB,” the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across West Executive Drive from the White House.

Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary tells me: “While no decisions have been made, there is enormous interest in covering Donald Trump … The current briefing room only has 49 seats so we have looked at rooms within the White House to conduct briefings that have additional capacity to accommodate members of media including talk radio, bloggers and others.

“It looks like the most likely new venue is on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, South Court — new and TV-ready, with 150 seats.

Spicer was responding to an Esquire posting by Peter Boyer, a former Fox News executive and New Yorker writer, quoting a senior Trump official as saying of the press: “They are the opposition party … I want ’em out of the building. We are taking back the press room.”

That last comment, a killer, also recognizes today’s communications.

Source: Axios AM: Mike’s Top 10

Trump Open to Shift on Russia Sanctions, ‘One China’ Policy

Getting ready for the world’s biggest poker game. Will show up the retiring boy president for the amateur he is. You have to wonder how good a community organizer he was, at that.

President-elect Donald Trump suggested he would be open to lifting sanctions on Russia and wasn’t committed to a long-standing agreement with China over Taiwan.

Keep-’em-guessing Trump, they called him. Good.

Source: Trump Open to Shift on Russia Sanctions, ‘One China’ Policy – WSJ

Who shaped cop culture laid out in DOJ report?

John Kass answers a whodunit, among a dozen other episodes listing this:

It wasn’t the police that sat on the video of Laquan McDonald, the black kid shot 16 times by a white cop until dead. It wasn’t police that refused to release the video until Emanuel was safe and had won a tough re-election.

Whodunit? The pols, Kass argues, and who are we to disagree?

Source: Who shaped cop culture laid out in DOJ report? They weren’t saints. – Chicago Tribune

Hole-digging Chicago style

The more things change . . .

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pitching Wall Street investors on the latest city borrowing plan, a $1.2 billion package that, like previous versions, pushes hundreds of millions of dollars of debt into the future at higher costs to taxpayers.

The mayor is continuing scoop-and-toss borrowing, which involves paying off old bonds with the proceeds from new ones — a practice akin to taking out another mortgage on a house to pay off the old mortgage, kicking payments down the road.

An Emanuel budget spokeswoman said this year marks the last scoop-and-toss bond issue.

And I believe her, don’t you?

via Six years after Daley, Emanuel still using high-cost borrowing practices – Chicago Tribune

Schocked, shocked at Chicago story . . .

Is Heather MacDonald allowed to say this about it?

Anti-police activists and the mainstream media are incensed at the suggestion that the Black Lives Matter movement could have influenced the behavior of the four individuals in Chicago who tortured a disabled white man for hours last week while yelling “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump.”

In one sense, the activists and media are right: The influences were broader than that. They include the reign of racial victimology, inner-city gang culture, and black anti-white animus.

The people’s court does not think so.

via A Window Into a Depraved Culture | City Journal