Patti Davis, the daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, has torn into Republicans who remain silent about President Donald Trump in a stinging open letter published in The Washington Post.
Davis noted in the blistering missive — titled “Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump” — how Republicans have claimed her father’s legacy and “exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment.”
Regardless of whether Attorney General William Barr was ever a “respectable” political figure, plenty of powerful people seem to have held him in such regard.
If Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) was one of those people, she’s not anymore. On Wednesday, she lamented the degree to which the attorney general has allowed himself to be co-opted by President Trump. “The American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office,” she told Barr during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Hirono spent most of her allotted time reviewing the extent of Barr’s “deep involvement” in covering for the president, from misrepresenting Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings to lying to Congress about Mueller’s objections to the “principal conclusions” of the investigation Barr released last month. Hirono’s monologue lasted more than five minutes. There was a lot of ground to cover. She attempted to close with a few questions for Barr, but committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) interrupted her, accusing her of slandering Barr. “I do not think that I’m slandering anyone,” Hirono replied. “Mr. Chairman, I am done. Thank you very much.”
When the Bellamy Creek correctional facility’s longtime kitchen officer decided to leave in 2014, David Angel requested the position. Angel, who was nearing retirement, had worked at prisons all over Michigan, including stints at three maximum-security facilities. “I wanted a permanent position for my last few years in the department. I had a lot of respect among the prisoner and officer staff, and I thought I could do the job and keep people safe,” he said. “Um… I was wrong.”
The Bellamy Creek kitchen is typical for a Michigan prison. Sixty incarcerated men staff it, doing everything from slicing potatoes with tethered knives to working the dish tank. Angel’s job was to provide security while six or seven outside employees oversaw the operations. The employees were new hires by Aramark, a food-service company recently contracted by the state to run its prison kitchens.
“It was a constant daily struggle,” Angel recalled. At first, it was the little things: Food was spilled but never cleaned up. Meals were served late, or the kitchen would run out of food and the staff would have to swap ingredients. “I saw peanut butter substituted for a hamburger patty more times than I care to count.”
A few months ago, William Barr was a well-respected former top federal law enforcement official, semi-retired from a white-shoe law firm after a lucrative career in corporate litigation. This week, 76 days after the Senate confirmed him as the United States’ 85th attorney general, the man that many political observers previously viewed as a Justice Department institutionalist is facing calls for resignation from Democrats who see him as little more than President Donald Trump’s cover-up man.
Weeks after writing a misleading summary of the findings of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report and giving a Trump-friendly press conference on the investigation ahead of the report’s public release, Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to address questions about his handling of the Mueller probe examining the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Barr, who served as attorney general during the first Bush administration at the height of “tough on crime” politics, told senators in prepared remarks that he believed it “is vitally important for the Department of Justice to stand apart from the political process and not to become an adjunct of it.”
one evening not long after he was appointed Fox Corp. C.E.O., Lachlan Murdoch invited Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan for dinner at Giorgio’s, in Santa Monica. Murdoch was trying to quell a nascent rebellion. Levitan, whose Emmy Award-winning sitcom is produced by Fox’s entertainment division and has been the longest-running comedy series on ABC, had joined Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane and Ghostbusters director Paul Feig in publicly denouncing Fox News’s cheerleading of Trump’s immigration policies. “I’m disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with @FoxNews. This bullshit is the opposite of what #ModernFamily stands for,” Levitan wrote on June 18, in response to Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s calling migrant-children detention facilities along the Mexican border “essentially summer camps.”
Like many in the media business, Levitan hoped that the ascension of the younger generation of Murdochs would usher in more moderate politics at Fox News—glasnost, at long last. Levitan told Lachlan that Fox News was destroying America and implored him to control Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson, a person briefed on the conversation told me. But Lachlan quickly dashed that dream. According to the source, Lachlan told Levitan that he wasn’t embarrassed by Fox News. He reminded Levitan that the Murdochs had never censored shows like his or The Simpsons or Family Guy, so why couldn’t Levitan live with a few conservative voices on one cable-news network?
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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William Barr
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Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.
James' World 2 