Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

According to this, Nixon liked smoking pipes. LBJ was a heavy smoker who quit in 1955, but there's a fun anecdote about that at the end of the story.


Obama's tobacco habit hardly a White House first

 

True provincial New Yorker that he is, Trump realizes he's back on home turf, and is focusing on New York rather than national media.

 

"Thanks for your help, Barack. Now stop it!"

Obama’s “Worst Mistake” Could Be Bad News for Clinton

 

In 2011, The Times was celebrating the Libyan operation, and giving the credit to Clinton, along with Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, for convincing Obama to act, in the face of opposition from the SecDef.

Hillary owns Libya. We didn't have a "day after" plan because we weren't planning on doing anything in Libya, until Clinton intervened.

Obama Takes Hard Line With Libya After Shift by Clinton
By HELENE COOPER and STEVEN LEE MYERS

In a Paris hotel room on Monday night, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton found herself juggling the inconsistencies of American foreign policy in a turbulent Middle East. She criticized the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates for sending troops to quash protests in Bahrain even as she pressed him to send planes to intervene in Libya.

Only the day before, Mrs. Clinton — along with her boss, President Obama — was a skeptic on whether the United States should take military action in Libya. But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention.

Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day. On Thursday, during an hour-and-a -half meeting, Mr. Obama signed off on allowing American pilots to join Europeans and Arabs in military strikes against the Libyan government.

The president had a caveat, though. The American involvement in military action in Libya should be limited — no ground troops — and finite. “Days, not weeks,” a senior White House official recalled him saying.

The shift in the administration’s position — from strong words against Libya to action — was forced largely by the events beyond its control: the crumbling of the uprising raised the prospect that Colonel Qaddafi would remain in power to kill “many thousands,” as Mr. Obama said at the White House on Friday.

The change became possible, though, only after Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity. Ms. Power is a former journalist and human rights advocate; Ms. Rice was an Africa adviser to President Clinton when the United States failed to intervene to stop the Rwanda genocide, which Mr. Clinton has called his biggest regret.

Now, the three women were pushing for American intervention to stop a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Libya.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, one of the early advocates for military action in Libya, described the debate within the administration as “healthy.” He said that “the memory of Rwanda, alongside Iraq in ’91, made it clear” that the United States needed to act but needed international support.

In joining Ms. Rice and Ms. Power, Mrs. Clinton made an unusual break with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who, along with the national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and the counterterrorism chief, John O. Brennan, had urged caution. Libya was not vital to American national security interests, the men argued, and Mr. Brennan worried that the Libyan rebels remained largely unknown to American officials, and could have ties to Al Qaeda.

The administration’s shift also became possible only after the United States won not just the support of Arab countries but their active participation in military operations against one of their own.

“Hillary and Susan Rice were key parts of this story because Hillary got the Arab buy-in and Susan worked the U.N. to get a 10-to-5 vote, which is no easy thing,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress, a liberal group with close ties to the administration. This “puts the United States in a much stronger position because they’ve got the international support that makes this more like the 1991 gulf war than the 2003 Iraq war.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/africa/19policy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

Yes, she owns an attempt to send in air support to avoid a "looming humanitarian catastrophe."

4,497-4

 

#TrumpWorld

School officials to discipline students over racial slurs at soccer game

 

So, is equal pay for women no longer about women getting equal pay as men for the same job, and now become about the average woman making the same as the average man?

How is that supposed to work?

Does Hillary have a detailed plan to accomplish this?

And does the average woman on her campaign make as much as the average man? What about during her time at the State Department?

 

Paul Ryan is out. No white knight for you, GOP!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/1...s.html?smid=tw-nytpolitics&smtyp=cur&referer=

 

Smart thing to do. He'd have to spend so much time conciliating the various factions that supported Trump and Cruz he'd have about five minutes a day left to campaign on his own platform and no time left to attack Hillary.

 

Negotiate for better pay?

No, that won't work. We'll have to do something else.

 

Like his statements that he didn't want to be Speaker of the House? Yeah, I really believe Ryan this time.

 

He made it as clear as he possible could. Said he didn't want the nomination and wouldn't accept it if offered.

But, yeah, he could always change his mind.

A three month sprint to the general election is a hell of a lot better deal than running for 18 months or more.

And, he wouldn't need to raise a dime.