Alternative Facts with Kellyanne Conway

[GreyhoundFan]

The adoring look K-Conjob is giving Agent Orange in the picture at the beginning of this article is nauseating. "Kellyanne Conway and the White House’s 100-day alternative facts"

Quote

Kellyanne Conway is back with some alternative facts.

During a conversation with Katie Couric on Wednesday, Conway made this proud claim about President Trump's first 100 days.

...Tweet where Katie writes that K-Con claims this is the first time since 1881 that POTUS has had a SCOTUS justice confirmed in the first 100 days...

Conway also said this last week on Fox News Channel: “It’s the first time a president has had a Supreme Court justice in the first 100 days since 1881. The significance should not be lost.”

But the significance should be lost, because it's basically nil — small enough to fit between the driver seat of your car and the center console, never to be seen again. This claim is somehow both true and shows a complete disdain for facts. It's a claim that sounds impressive and means next to nothing.

The problem with Conway's claim is that very few presidents are even confronted with a Supreme Court vacancy in their first 100 days — much less have the chance to fill it in that span. Trump also had the highly unusual advantage of coming into office with an existing vacancy — a result of Senate Republicans' brazen move not to even allow Merrick Garland a hearing last year — and having the full 100 days with which to fill it.

A trip down history lane shows that only three presidents since 1900 have had a vacancy to fill in their first 100 days, and that all three of them faced that vacancy late in their first 100 days.

Bill Clinton got a vacancy on March 19, 1993 — 58 days into his first term. Harry S. Truman got a vacancy on June 30, 1945 — 79 days after replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Warren G. Harding got a vacancy on May 19, 1921 — 76 days into his brief presidency.

So Trump had all 100 days to fill his vacancy in his first 100 days; Clinton had 42 days, Truman had 21 and Harding had 24. All but one other president didn't even get the chance for such an accomplishment.

That one other president was Richard Nixon, who inherited somewhat of a mess on the Supreme Court from Lyndon B. Johnson. Chief Justice Earl Warren had announced his resignation in mid-1968 but was waiting to leave the court until it was filled. His Johnson-nominated replacement, Justice Abe Fortas, was blocked by the Senate, so no vacancy was filled. Nixon was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1969, and eventually nominated a replacement for Warren as chief justice — Warren Burger — but he did so after his first 100 days were up, on May 21.

Burger was confirmed just 19 days later. And to think: Nixon could have joined the rarefied air of Trump — if only he had known it would be such an accomplishment to get it done in his first 100 days.

This, of course, isn't the only shoddy claim the White House has made about Trump's 100-day accomplishments. A memo issued Tuesday contains inaccuracies and misleading stats like this one. As Case Western Reserve University professor Peter A. Shulman catalogued on his Twitter account Tuesday:

...

The Tweets from Peter Shulman are wonderful.

[GreyhoundFan]

SNL was not particularly funny last night, but this was good: "SNL ridicules Kellyanne Conway in a remarkably short sketch"

Quote

...

"Where is Kellyanne Conway?" is a question that political journalists have asked a time or two in recent months. The Trump team's once-ubiquitous cable news talker and subject of intrigue is rarely seen these days (comparatively speaking).

She's been turned down as a guest by cable news. There have been rumors that she's been sidelined due to her (lack of) message control. And when she has appeared recently, she hasn't seemed totally in the loop and has offered some, well, alternative facts.

So "Saturday Night Live" dusted off some 1990s nostalgia this weekend and gave Conway the Carmen Sandiego treatment.

(Just a warning that you will have Rockapella coursing through your head for the rest of the day.)

The video is embedded in the article.

[candygirl200413]

Kate McKinnon is such a national treasure. I also have just assumed they locked her in a dungeon underneath the white house and throw her a pizza crust or two

[AnywhereButHere]

They can't let her back out in public, because she's become a liability on the talk show circuit, but they can't fire her either for the same reason. God knows what inner workings secrets she'd spill out of vindictiveness or just pure idiocy.

Yup, nicely furnished (to preserve the illusion) cage in the basement is probably the best bet.  

[47of74]

Ugh, now look who is going to "grace" Iowa with her presence;

kwwl.com/story/35394068/2017/05/10/kellyanne-conway-to-speak-at-iowa-leadership-summit-in-july

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Kellyanne Conway, who is the current Counselor to the President, will speak at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines on July 15. The Urbandale-based FAMiLY LEADER Foundation is putting on the all-day conference for the sixth time, and other speakers include U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and Bob Vander Plaats -- who is President and CEO of the foundation. Conway's appearance was announced on the foundation's twitter page today.

Just what Iowa needs.  Another reich wing partisan hack.

[GreyhoundFan]

2 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Ugh, now look who is going to "grace" Iowa with her presence;

kwwl.com/story/35394068/2017/05/10/kellyanne-conway-to-speak-at-iowa-leadership-summit-in-july

Just what Iowa needs.  Another reich wing partisan hack.

Are you going to go? You could take a sign with a picture of a microwave on it, so she'll think she's being spied on.

[AnywhereButHere]

Oh look, she slipped her leash. Anderson Cooper is so completely done with her too. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/05/10/politics/anderson-cooper-eyeroll/index.html

[47of74]

Even her alma mater isn't having Kellyanne's horse shit

washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/17/a-university-takes-on-one-of-its-own-alumna-kellyanne-conway

Quote

The University of Pennsylvania’s president has no comment about one of the Ivy League school’s most famous alumni, President Trump. Virginia Tech’s president has no comment about one of its most famous alumni, White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

The president of Trinity Washington University, though, has had plenty to say about one of its graduates. “Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has played a large role in facilitating the manipulation of facts and encouraging the grave injustice being perpetrated by the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants among many other issues,” Patricia McGuire wrote recently.

Because of the importance of alumni to fundraising, said Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education, “presidents tread very carefully. Losing the support of alumni is a very bad idea.”

But McGuire, the longtime president of the small women’s college in Northeast Washington, said she felt a moral imperative to speak out against the Trump administration — in particular for its policies on immigration and its lack of truthfulness — and Conway is not exempt from that.

Glad someone's speaking out.

[candygirl200413]

I have a cousin graduating at Wharton today and I asked her since when orange fuckface was at Tiffany's graduation last year, everyone from the president of Upenn to Lin Miranda kept talking how horrible he was, so I asked if he was written anywhere in Wharton and she was like absolutely not, but then again they didn't have anything really before this whole shit storm of a presidency irrupted. I guess now they're more like yeah never.

[GreyhoundFan]

Not Kellyanne, but her husband: "George Conway is the man at the center of everything". It's a lengthy article, worth a read, but the end just says it all:

Quote

...

Conway’s appeal to the president seems clear: not only one of the best civil litigators in the country, but also a man who’s fought to keep the Trump name emblazoned on the skyline and to have Bill Clinton’s dragged through the mud. He would arrive to the administration at a time when Democrats are raising alarm bells about executive overreach and even some Republicans are growing uneasy about Trump’s brazen dismissal of FBI concerns that his campaign may have illegally colluded with Russia. Some people have even raised the specter of Richard Nixon, who famously proclaimed that, “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

But that’s not true, and Conway understands this better than most. Before he was Trump’s hire, before he was Kellyanne’s husband, even before he was a right-wing co-conspirator, he was a lawyer who caught the eye of some Jones allies with a column in the Los Angeles Times. The essay methodically dismembered Bill Clinton’s argument at the time that presidents should be considered immune from litigation that could distract from their official duties.

The title?

“No Man in This Country . . . Is Above the Law.”

 

Yeah, so no man is above the law, when the main in question is Clinton, but when it's Cheeto, well, that's different. Good grief.

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess this is an alternate past: "‘I need to take a shower,’ Kellyanne Conway said after defending candidate Trump, according to ‘Morning Joe’"

Spoiler

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski dished some dirt Monday about counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, claiming that she used to complain privately about representing a man she did not always believe in.

“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion, and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say, ‘Blech. I need to take a shower,’ ” Brzezinski said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Because she disliked her candidate so much.”

Scarborough chimed in to say that Conway “also said that this is just, like, my summer in Europe. This is like my vacay — I’m just doing it for the money. I’ll be off this soon. I don’t know that she ever said, ‘I’m doing this for the money,’ but she said, ‘This is just my summer vacation, my summer in Europe.’ And, basically, ‘I’m just gonna get through this.’ ”

Conway, a pollster by trade, started the 2016 election cycle working for a super PAC that supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). After Cruz dropped out, she joined the Trump campaign on July 1 and became campaign manager the following month.

Given that Trump was not Conway’s first pick — and given the nastiness he displayed toward the candidate who was her first pick (not to mention that candidate’s wife) — it is not surprising that Conway would gripe about Trump when the cameras were off. It is also possible that her feelings have changed since then, that Trump was an acquired taste.

Still, Scarborough and Brzezinski’s account adds to existing evidence that the people who speak for Trump don’t always believe what they are asked to say on his behalf. In March, I chronicled the way that Vice President Pence, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders seem to distance themselves from certain claims but volunteer their agreement with others.

In briefings, for example, Spicer has offered his own supportive thoughts on a Republican health-care bill, Trump’s nomination of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and the president’s hard line on illegal immigration. However, he held at arm’s length Trump’s baseless charge that President Barack Obama tapped the phones in Trump Tower.

“My job is to represent the president and to talk about what he’s doing and what he wants,” Spicer said at a March 7 briefing. “I’m not here to speak for myself. I’m here to speak for the president of the United States and our government.”

Trump puts a premium on loyalty and on appearances. The “Morning Joe” anecdote about Conway is a double whammy. It creates the appearance that Conway is not (or, at least, was not) completely loyal to Trump.

 

 

[CTRLZero]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Still, Scarborough and Brzezinski’s account adds to existing evidence that the people who speak for Trump don’t always believe what they are asked to say on his behalf.

I have felt second-hand embarrassment for Spicey when untrue sentences issue from Trump's mouth to his.  He squirms so uncomfortably and obviously.

Among the worst offenders is/was Stephen Miller, who claimed as fact the incident of voter fraud (remember the busloads of illegal voters on their way to New Hampshire) -- I was shocked that he was so blatant.  The Washington Post gave him "bushels of Pinocchios for false voter-fraud claims" (WaPo article dated February 12).  Now that it's apparent that Trump lies morning, noon and night, I'm no longer as shocked, but still appalled!

I get that due to sensitivity and national security, these spokespeople can't always relay the truth, but Trump is in a league by himself when it comes to the output of daily lies, for no particular reason other than he can.

[47of74]

So she's only in it for the money?  K.  I'm not going to say the first thing that popped into my head when I read that about what she would be in that case.

[GreyhoundFan]

18 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

So she's only in it for the money?  K.  I'm not going to say the first thing that popped into my head when I read that about what she would be in that case.

I know, I thought the same thing. I was talking with a friend today and said that I couldn't imagine a sum of money that I would require to work for Agent Orange. Not only is he crazy, but it rarely ends well for anyone who works for him. As much as I despise Ted Cruz, who she was working for before switching to the toddler team, I don't think he would treat his staff like Agent Orange seems to have always treated his staff.

[GreyhoundFan]

Kellyanne has bought an expensive mansion: "Kellyanne Conway buys a spectacular D.C. mansion"

Spoiler

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, is the latest administration official to skew the District’s average single-family home price with her purchase of a Northwest mansion.

Via an LLC, Conway, the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign, and her husband, attorney George Conway, paid $7.785 million for the 15,000-square-foot home in Massachusetts Avenue Heights. The deal closed May 17, though the deed wasn’t recorded until this week.

Broker sources tell the Washington Business Journal this was a Conway buy. The home was purchased under the name Antoinette Associates LLC, and it so happens that Conway’s maternal grandmother was named Antoinette.

And it was a steal. The home was originally listed years ago for $22 million, then the price dropped to $18 million, then roughly $12 million, then $8 million. It's been on and off the market since at least 2012.

The home's most recent owner, the late Moeen Qureshi, once served as the acting prime minister of Pakistan, in addition to roles with the World Bank and EMP Global.

According to the listing, the eight-bedroom, 10 full-bath and three half-bath house sits on more than half an acre. It was built in 1927 and renovated in 2001.

Features, per the listing, include a “spacious library, a main family kitchen, a catering kitchen, an elevator, and a pool cabana suite. Ideal for family or diplomatic use. Staff area. Amenities to support any function, formal or casual.” There are four levels, three fireplaces and an in-ground pool.

The property’s 2016 assessment was just shy of $10.7 million.

While there are reports of an impending shakeup in the Trump administration, that Conway was willing to drop millions on a D.C. estate suggests she’s going nowhere.

Wow, must be nice to have that kind of money.

 

[fraurosena]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Kellyanne has bought an expensive mansion: "Kellyanne Conway buys a spectacular D.C. mansion"

  Hide contents

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, is the latest administration official to skew the District’s average single-family home price with her purchase of a Northwest mansion.

Via an LLC, Conway, the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign, and her husband, attorney George Conway, paid $7.785 million for the 15,000-square-foot home in Massachusetts Avenue Heights. The deal closed May 17, though the deed wasn’t recorded until this week.

Broker sources tell the Washington Business Journal this was a Conway buy. The home was purchased under the name Antoinette Associates LLC, and it so happens that Conway’s maternal grandmother was named Antoinette.

And it was a steal. The home was originally listed years ago for $22 million, then the price dropped to $18 million, then roughly $12 million, then $8 million. It's been on and off the market since at least 2012.

The home's most recent owner, the late Moeen Qureshi, once served as the acting prime minister of Pakistan, in addition to roles with the World Bank and EMP Global.

According to the listing, the eight-bedroom, 10 full-bath and three half-bath house sits on more than half an acre. It was built in 1927 and renovated in 2001.

Features, per the listing, include a “spacious library, a main family kitchen, a catering kitchen, an elevator, and a pool cabana suite. Ideal for family or diplomatic use. Staff area. Amenities to support any function, formal or casual.” There are four levels, three fireplaces and an in-ground pool.

The property’s 2016 assessment was just shy of $10.7 million.

While there are reports of an impending shakeup in the Trump administration, that Conway was willing to drop millions on a D.C. estate suggests she’s going nowhere.

Wow, must be nice to have that kind of money.

 

I'd be interested to know if the selling party may have had any relations to Trump/Kushner owned LLC's. I'm very suspicious of the fact that this was a so-called steal. Could this be some kind of pay-off? 

[GreyhoundFan]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I'd be interested to know if the selling party may have had any relations to Trump/Kushner owned LLC's. I'm very suspicious of the fact that this was a so-called steal. Could this be some kind of pay-off? 

Yeah, my spidey sense alerted too. We may never know, because with the high dollar properties, they are often purchased and sold in a trust or corporate name.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is interesting, especially since she just bought that mansion in DC: "Kellyanne Conway’s husband takes himself out of running for Justice Dept. job"

Spoiler

George Conway — a partner at a prominent law firm and the husband of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway — has withdrawn his name from consideration for a high-level post leading the Justice Department’s civil division.

In a statement, George Conway said that, because of the timing, he could not take the job, though he was happy to have been considered.

“I am profoundly grateful to the President and to the Attorney General for selecting me to serve in the Department of Justice. I have reluctantly concluded, however, that, for me and my family, this is not the right time for me to leave the private sector and take on a new role in the federal government,” Conway said. “Kellyanne and I continue to support the President and his Administration, and I look forward to doing so in whatever way I can from outside the government.”

President Trump was said in March to have wanted Conway for the post, which would have had him overseeing all of the federal government’s lawsuits on a variety of issues. Civil-division lawyers are the ones who defend the administration from lawsuits, and they have done so recently with the president’s travel ban and executive order on “sanctuary” cities.

A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department, which said it could not comment on personnel matters.

Conway works as a lawyer at the New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in securities litigation and other corporate issues. As a young lawyer, he was involved in a furtive effort to oppose President Bill Clinton by offering legal aid to his accusers and spreading accusations against him.

His wife, Kellyanne Conway, is one of Trump’s most high-profile aides. She appears on TV frequently to offer the administration’s position on the most controversial issues of the day.

 

[Howl]

Thanks for updating us on Kellyanne's hubs, @GreyhoundFan.  Bet it's not time to leave the private sector because it's so insanely lucrative.  AND - why willingly step into the shit-nado/sucking vortez of slime that is the Trump presidency?  Maybe George Conway knows something we don't know about the durability/longevity of the Trump presidency and what's going on at Justice?

ETA:  Will Trump take George Conway's defection as a slap in the face?  If so, Kellyanne may be on the way out.  Or maybe Kellyanne is on the way out, so why take the job? 

Edited June 5, 2017 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

@Howl -- I was thinking the same -- maybe Conway knows something we don't know AND it might diminish his wife in the toddler-in-chief's eyes. I wouldn't shed a tear if she was booted from the administration.

[GrumpyGran]

I saw that she emerged from her coffin, ups, sorry, expensive mansion this weekend. I have a question. Do we pay this woman a salary? As much as I hate to hear the sound of her voice, I'm also not happy to be paying her for what appears to be 4-6 hours of work a week.

[onekidanddone]

I ask you oh Rufus on high why does anybody need to hear what she has to say?  Silence is golden Kelly maybe you should try it sometime.

[AmazonGrace]

Is this him? 

[GreyhoundFan]

A good analysis: "Kellyanne Conway wants the media to cover a President Trump who may not exist"

Spoiler

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, would have you believe that there is another President Trump who goes unrecognized by the world: a Donald Trump who, yes, tweets, but who also is the driving force behind the sanitized statements the White House releases, who advocates for complex policy in partnership with Capitol Hill Republicans and who writes the speeches he occasionally reads at events.

What’s more, Conway seemed to suggest in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show Monday morning, that Other Trump, the presidential one, gets short shrift in favor of the guy who’s constantly railing in 140-character sound bites on Twitter.

“This obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little what he does as president …” Conway said during that interview.

“That’s his preferred method of communication with the American people,” said Craig Melvin, the show’s co-host.

“That’s not true,” Conway interjected.

“Well, he hasn’t given an interview in three weeks, so lately it has been his preferred method,” Melvin replied.

Even setting aside that three-week modification, Melvin is correct that the administration has touted Twitter as being more important than media coverage. After Trump won the presidency in November, he and his team were asked if he would stop tweeting so much as president. The answer? No — because the media can’t be trusted.

Shortly after the election, Trump spoke with CBS’s Leslie Stahl, telling her how he planned to moderate his Twitter use once he was sworn in.

“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all, I’m going to do very restrained,” he said. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication. There should be nothing you should be ashamed of. It’s — it’s where it’s at.”

By January, his description of his Twitter habit was a bit less enthusiastic.

“Look, I don’t like tweeting. I have other things I could be doing. But I get very dishonest media, very dishonest press. And it’s my only way that I can counteract,” Trump told Reuters in January. That’s the theme: The media is the enemy, so Trump will tweet to the people directly.

On ABC’s “This Week” in January, incoming press secretary Sean Spicer made that same case.

“With all due respect, I think it freaks the mainstream media out that he has this following of over 45-plus-million people that follow him on social media that he can have a direct conversation with,” Spicer said.

“The fact of the matter is that when he tweets, he gets results,” he added.

Given that Trump and his team have explicitly presented Twitter as his trusted outlet for communicating with his base, perhaps Conway is splitting the hair more finely: His tweets are reluctant, because he doesn’t get the press that he wants and that she thinks he deserves.

But, then, that undercuts her point about how Trump’s tweets shouldn’t be covered. If they’re an important workaround because of an unfair press, then it doesn’t make sense that the White House wouldn’t want the media to present them to the public. If it’s good that his tweets go directly to millions on Twitter, why is it bad if they go to millions more on television?

So what is Conway up to? She recognizes that Trump’s tweets are not actually beneficial.

Poll after poll shows that even Trump voters wish he’d stop using Twitter in the same way. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) made a similar case in a local TV interview last week, saying that Trump has “created problems for himself” with his use of Twitter.

That Trump’s tweets keep getting him into trouble both makes them more newsworthy and serves as a reminder that they should not be treated as simple social-media flotsam now that he’s president. Over the weekend, a Twitter bot launched that reformats his tweets to look like official White House statements, highlighting that, on Twitter or not, these are the words of the president of the United States.

...

What Conway wants isn’t really for the media to dig into Trump’s efforts in office, especially given that those efforts are fairly modest in scope. (Remember when Trump played down the importance of the 100-day mark of his presidency as it became clear that he wouldn’t have much to tout?) What Conway wants, instead, is for the nation to believe that Trump’s tweets are just light fluff, dinner-party conversation from a president whose rigorous workweeks are meanwhile getting short shrift.

Conway wants us to believe that the Twitter Trump is not the real president. That it’s the big Wizard of Oz surrounded by flames and smoke who’s the real deal, not the guy tapping on his iPhone behind the curtain. That’s a tough sell, because nearly every other indicator suggests that the sober, typical president that the White House tries to put forward is the one that doesn’t really exist meaningfully in substance.

Continuing with the Wizard of Oz theme -- she needs to follow the yellow brick road out of Washington and take the TT with her.

[onekidanddone]

@AmazonGrace. Looks like it might be legit.  Makes one wonder if he is trying to get his wife fired.

George Conway: President’s tweets ‘certainly won’t help’ court case over travel ban

Quote

After President Trump tweeted about his controversial travel ban Monday morning, plenty of people quickly pointed out that he probably was hurting his case. Among them: George Conway, a prominent D.C. lawyer who is married to top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway and nearly became a Trump appointee.

Quoting one of the president’s messages, George Conway wrote on his Twitter account that Trump’s tweets “may make some ppl feel better, but they certainly won’t help OSG get 5 votes in SCOTUS, which is what actually matters. Sad.”

OSG is an abbreviation for the Office of Solicitor General, and SCOTUS is an abbreviation for the Supreme Court. Conway’s account is not verified, but he confirmed it was his in an email to The Washington Post.

Last week, Conway had removed himself from consideration to head the Justice Department’s Civil Division, which defends presidential policies from lawsuits. Lawyers in the division had actually been defending the president’s travel bans, although as the legal wrangling reached the appeals courts, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall argued the cases in court.

Conway cited timing as the reason he could not take the job, and he said he was happy to have been considered.

“I am profoundly grateful to the President and to the Attorney General for selecting me to serve in the Department of Justice. I have reluctantly concluded, however, that, for me and my family, this is not the right time for me to leave the private sector and take on a new role in the federal government,” Conway said in a statement. “Kellyanne and I continue to support the President and his Administration, and I look forward to doing so in whatever way I can from outside the government.”

Kellyanne Conway is one of the Trump’s most vocal supporters, appearing on television frequently to tirelessly support the president’s policies. She told Fox News Channel earlier this year that she thought the president’s revised travel ban would “pass legal muster,” and on the “Today” show on Monday, she defended the order again, deriding what she called “this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president.” She added later: “This president, through his travel ban, is trying to do something to protect the people of this country.”

George Conway did not criticize the ban itself, instead focusing on the president’s remarks as possibly hurting the case to restore it.

Federal judges have consistently cited Trump’s public comments in ordering the travel ban frozen, determining that his statements show that his intent in signing the directive was not to protect national security, but rather to discriminate against Muslims.

The ban is now headed to the Supreme Court, where those suing are expected to file legal briefs next week.