Betsy DeVos dressed as Ms. Frizzle for Halloween and everyone's thrilled! No just kidding...

Source: Mashable

Climate-denying nominee for top USDA science post gets caught in Russia controversy

Source: Think Progress

Sam Clovis, one of the Trump administration’s more controversial nominees for a political appointment, was already raising eyebrows ahead of his November 9 confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee. To start, Clovis — who has been nominated to the position of undersecretary of research, education, and economics at the United States Department of Agriculture, the agency’s top science position — has no background in the the hard sciences, nor any experience with agricultural or nutritional science. Clovis is also a staunch climate science denier who accused President Barack Obama of “race baiting” and has called progressives “the real racists.”

But on Monday, Clovis’ nomination took on new meaning when it was revealed that, while working as national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, he had encouraged George Papadopoulos, a campaign foreign policy adviser, to meet with Russian nationals in a potential effort to bolster the campaign. On Monday, unsealed court documents revealed that Papadopoulos had plead guilty to lying to federal agents about his communication with Russia.

“I would encourage you” to “make the trip, if it is feasible,” Clovis wrote in an August email to Papadopoulos, in response to plans suggested by Papadopoulos to go to Russia and meet with Russian officials off the record. Clovis also praised Papadopoulos’ outreach efforts, telling him “great work” in regards to a March 2016 meeting during which Papadopoulos and a London professor, as well as a Russian woman incorrectly described as “Putin’s niece,” discussed plans for a potential meeting between the campaign and “Russian leadership.”

Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/clovis-usda-russia-connection-3e9bd33bacfd/

Fox to Offer Twenty-Four-Hour Coverage of Bill Clintons Impeachment

Guy dressed up as his dog's favorite toy for Halloween...priceless. (video tweet)

Congratulations to Katy Tur and Tony Dokoupil! ♥

ABA deems another Trump judicial nominee not qualified

Source: Politico

Another one of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees — this time, to the powerful appellate courts — has been deemed "not qualified" by the American Bar Association.

Leonard Steven Grasz was nominated in August to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and has his confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. But in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee obtained by POLITICO, the American Bar Association says members of its standing committee unanimously concluded, with one person abstaining, that he was not qualified to serve as a federal judge.

The letter did not elaborate on why.

Grasz is currently a lawyer in Omaha and served for more than 11 years as Nebraska’s chief deputy attorney general. His home-state senators — Nebraska Republicans Deb Fischer and Ben Sasse — effusively praised him when Grasz was nominated, with Fischer promoting his “sterling credentials and impressive experience” and Sasse deeming him a “by-the-book kind of guy.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/30/aba-trump-judicial-nominee-not-qualified-244327

Godless - Official Trailer [HD] - Netflix

This Spooky Snake Doesn't Need A Costume For Halloween

Trump to lunch with Sessions amid Manafort charges

Source: The Hill

President Trump on Monday is scheduled to have lunch with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, just hours after Trump's former campaign chairman was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Sessions was invited to join Trump's weekly lunch with Vice President Pence, which is closed to press coverage.

It's likely Trump will raise the indictment of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, which represents a significant escalation of the special counsel probe that has loomed over his presidency for months.

The president in the past has criticized Sessions for his handling of the Russia investigation, blaming his decision to recuse himself for Mueller's appointment.

Read more: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/357783-trump-to-lunch-with-sessions-amid-manafort-charges

The Jared bubble

“You can’t say ‘hit job’ in here.”

I was six months into my tenure as the editor of the New York Observer, and I was schooling my publisher, Jared Kushner, on why ordering up a slam of someone who had crossed his family in business didn’t pass the journalistic smell test.

Kushner, in an earlier meeting, had asked for a hit piece on an official at Bank of America, and was now in my office to check on how the story was coming together. I had spent the previous weeks trying to avoid the subject with him, knowing full well that the Observer was never going to pursue a story about an anonymous banker whose only sin was running afoul of the Kushner family.

But he was pressing the issue. Finally, in that office meeting in the spring of 2010, I told him the piece was not going to happen, that talk of a “hit job” was a textbook definition of malice, and that I considered the issue closed.

Kushner, then a 28-year-old journalism novice who had so far been deferential to my news judgment, pursed his lips, paused a beat, and ended the conversation.