Alternative Facts with Kellyanne Conway

[Penny]

I just watched K-Con on Good Morning America. George ask her about the Morning Joe tweets several different ways. The last one he ask if she endorsed the tweets, each time she avoided the question all together. She talked about being a mother of 4. I wonder if we are seeing her true colors as a person. Does she lie to her kids? I would think it would be hard for her to separate her personal and professional life.  We have seen her lie and deceive time and time again. Can she tell anyone the truth? 

Can you imagine her conversation with a doctor for her children or herself? How dangerous those lies could be?

Why in the hell do any of the networks have her on anyway?

[candygirl200413]

I always wondered @Penny! Like imagine going to school and other students asking Kellyanne's kids why their mom lies all the time. She has twins and two other kids, so I really wonder why goes on in her eldest kids minds.

She also said this morning how she orange fuckface treats women well. I'm entertained in the sense on how all these people really sold their souls to the devil.

[GrumpyGran]

4 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

I always wondered @Penny! Like imagine going to school and other students asking Kellyanne's kids why their mom lies all the time. She has twins and two other kids, so I really wonder why goes on in her eldest kids minds.

She also said this morning how she orange fuckface treats women well. I'm entertained in the sense on how all these people really sold their souls to the devil.

I'd be surprised if her kids don't go to one of those expensive "Christian" private schools. No time for gossip there, they're all on their knees praying for a Godly husband or a joyfully available wife. And a high-paying career garnered through crony-ism.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Kellyanne Conway would like to question the media’s patriotism — because Mika Brzezinski questioned President Trump’s"

Spoiler

It hasn't gotten a ton of attention yet, but Kellyanne Conway may have offered the White House's most controversial and dangerous statement of the week on Friday — up to and including President Trump's tweets about MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski.

While defending those tweets on ABC's “Good Morning America,” Conway went so far as to question the news media's patriotism.

“If you go back and you look at what is said about this president, a lack of policy coverage, there are personal attacks about his physicalities, about his fitness for office, he's called a goon, a thug, mentally ill, talking about dementia, armchair psychologists all over television every single day,” Conway said. “George, it doesn't help the American people to have a president covered in this light. I'm sorry, it's neither productive nor patriotic. The toxicity is over the top.”

I think I know what Conway is up to here. During a segment on her show last month, Brzezinski was the one questioning the president's patriotism. “I know it is a terrible thing to question someone's patriotism, but you wonder what he cares about,” Brzezinski said on May 24. She added that previous presidents have been “inspired to perhaps really dig deep and be driven by patriotism; I haven't seen it.”

It's not difficult to see the media raising a fuss about Conway's quote about being “patriotic,” only to have Conway throw Brzezinski's May 24 comments right back in its face. Boom, double standard from the media.

But here's the thing — and it's something that ABC host George Stephanopoulos rightly pressed Conway on in their interview: Each president faces criticism, sometimes extremely full-throated and even over-the-line, from pundits and journalists whose job it is to give their opinions. Brzezinski's questioning of Trump's patriotism was something an old version of Brzezinski herself said was over that line. “I question the patriotism of someone who questions the president’s patriotism,” she said back in 2015, when Trump ally Rudolph W. Giuliani questioned President Barack Obama's patriotism.

The question for voters to decide is whether each individual journalist's potentially overzealous critiques of Trump give the White House license to undermine the entire news media.

And the greatest irony here is that Trump is hardly a stranger to the nastiest of innuendo-laden political smears. Trump spent years questioning Obama's birth certificate, after all. That's going beyond questioning one's patriotism; it was about Obama's very legitimacy.

Without that track record, it might be a little easier to take the White House's complaints about the “toxicity” and “viciousness” of politics seriously. And without that history, it might be in a better position to argue that over-the-top criticism of a president isn't patriotic.

Yeah, Kellyanne really is one the most hypocritical people ever.

[mamallama]

I don't know about the school Kelly Ann's kids go to in DC but when in NJ they went to one that sent their grads to the high school I went to.  While everyone there is super rich all my high school friends grew to be liberals.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

41 minutes ago, mamallama said:

  While everyone there is super rich all my high school friends grew to be liberals.

Oooh, Kellyanne would probably have a conniption if her kids ended up liberal!

[mamallama]

In a strange coincidence I just read that Mika Brzezinski also went to my high school.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Kellyanne Conway went on CNN. Then she wouldn’t get off."

Spoiler

President Trump calls CNN “fake news,” and White House press secretary Sean Spicer seldom takes questions from the network's journalists, but counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway could not get enough of CNN on Monday.

For 35 minutes, Conway sparred with anchor Chris Cuomo, mostly over press coverage. A standard TV appearance lasts five to 10 minutes, and Cuomo tried several times to wrap up the interview, saying that producers were telling him through an earpiece that the White House wanted to end it.

But Conway kept going, and CNN blew past one commercial break after another to let her spirited exchange with Cuomo play out.

“Your people say you have to go, by the way,” Cuomo told Conway at the 28-minute mark. “So you make sure that the White House press office doesn't yell at me. … I've got people yelling in my ear that you have to go.”

The whole episode made for riveting TV, largely because of the interpersonal dynamic. Cuomo told viewers after the interview finally concluded that he and Conway have known each other for many years, and it showed. Although each grew heated at times, neither became nasty; their mutual respect was apparent.

Conway's chief argument, which she has articulated before, is that the media devotes too much time to Russia-related developments and not enough time to other stories that she says are more important.

Here's one brief but representative back-and-forth:

CONWAY: You want to talk about Russia. I want to talk about the opioid crisis in this country.

CUOMO: We talked about it on this show. I have a documentary coming out this fall.

So it went. Conway would criticize the media; Cuomo would reject the premise.

Coverage priorities are somewhat subjective, of course, and the White House and the press are unlikely to agree on them — under a Trump administration or any other.

What has distinguished the Trump White House from others has been the intensity of its anti-media rhetoric. As I noted when comparing CNN's Jim Acosta to Sam Donaldson recently, previous administrations have restricted press access in various ways but also have attempted to show some regard for reporters' basic integrity.

Trump, on the other hand, has referred to CNN and other major news outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

Conway has broken from the president, in this regard. Besides ignoring the White House's urging to get off the air on Monday, she also has publicly refused to adopt Trump's language.

“As somebody who doesn't say 'fake news' or 'enemy of the people' or 'opposition party,' my grievance is the incomplete coverage,” she said on Fox News radio last week.

Unlikely as it might seem, Conway appears to be trying to find some middle ground between the White House and the media.

To that last sentence, I disagree. I think she just likes to hear herself talk.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“Your people say you have to go, by the way,” Cuomo told Conway at the 28-minute mark. “So you make sure that the White House press office doesn't yell at me. … I've got people yelling in my ear that you have to go.”

No, Chris, it's not the White House in your ear, it's all of America! Has she gone rogue or something?

[GreyhoundFan]

WTAF: "Conway: Hillary Clinton ‘one of the only people’ who believes in Russia collusion"

Spoiler

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Friday that “the goalposts have been moved” when it comes to proving cooperation between the campaign of President Donald Trump and the Russian government.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Conway said, is among the small handful still clinging to theories of collusion.

“I mean, we were promised systemic, hard evidence of systemic, sustained, furtive collusion that not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome,” Conway said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.” “And one of the only people who says that seriously these days is still Hillary Clinton and nobody believes it. We know why she lost. It's obvious.”

Conway’s assertion that collusion allegations amount to little more than a conspiracy theory comes days after news broke that the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., met last summer with a Russian attorney who had had been led to believe possessed incriminating information about Clinton sourced from the Kremlin. Trump Jr. admitted to taking the meeting, which was also attended by then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and top adviser Jared Kushner, but said no useful information came of it.

The meeting contradicts months of assertions from President Donald Trump’s team that nobody from his campaign had coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to hinder Clinton’s campaign and aid Trump’s. But Conway, who managed Trump’s campaign through its final few months, said Friday that she was never short of opposition research on Clinton and did not need to seek it out from any unscrupulous source.

“You know, when I needed negative information about Hillary Clinton, I didn't have to go very far. I looked at Hillary Clinton. She was a treasure trove,” she said. “She was like a treasure box of negative Hillary information with arms and legs.”

Conway conceded a point the president himself had made earlier in the week, that campaigns are often on the receiving end of offers of opposition research, although she seemed to suggest that she would turn down such offers. “Many meetings end up as a bust that aren't particularly meaningful, consequential or helpful,” she said.

Coverage of Trump Jr.’s meeting, as well as general coverage of the ongoing investigations into Russia’s campaign of election interference, has shifted media attention away from ongoing work at the White House, Conway said, depriving Americans of news on what the Trump administration is working on to improve their lives.

“So, again, what kind of money are we going to spend by the taxpayers having these infinite investigations, and there are many of them. If we’re going to do that, fine, I suppose,” she said. “But we really need to spend our time, also, telling people what's being done here for them.”

Um, we have to spend the money on the infinite investigations because your boss and all his minions are crooked, ya dumb hack.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

WTAF: "Conway: Hillary Clinton ‘one of the only people’ who believes in Russia collusion"

  Hide contents

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Friday that “the goalposts have been moved” when it comes to proving cooperation between the campaign of President Donald Trump and the Russian government.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Conway said, is among the small handful still clinging to theories of collusion.

“I mean, we were promised systemic, hard evidence of systemic, sustained, furtive collusion that not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome,” Conway said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.” “And one of the only people who says that seriously these days is still Hillary Clinton and nobody believes it. We know why she lost. It's obvious.”

Conway’s assertion that collusion allegations amount to little more than a conspiracy theory comes days after news broke that the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., met last summer with a Russian attorney who had had been led to believe possessed incriminating information about Clinton sourced from the Kremlin. Trump Jr. admitted to taking the meeting, which was also attended by then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and top adviser Jared Kushner, but said no useful information came of it.

The meeting contradicts months of assertions from President Donald Trump’s team that nobody from his campaign had coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to hinder Clinton’s campaign and aid Trump’s. But Conway, who managed Trump’s campaign through its final few months, said Friday that she was never short of opposition research on Clinton and did not need to seek it out from any unscrupulous source.

“You know, when I needed negative information about Hillary Clinton, I didn't have to go very far. I looked at Hillary Clinton. She was a treasure trove,” she said. “She was like a treasure box of negative Hillary information with arms and legs.”

Conway conceded a point the president himself had made earlier in the week, that campaigns are often on the receiving end of offers of opposition research, although she seemed to suggest that she would turn down such offers. “Many meetings end up as a bust that aren't particularly meaningful, consequential or helpful,” she said.

Coverage of Trump Jr.’s meeting, as well as general coverage of the ongoing investigations into Russia’s campaign of election interference, has shifted media attention away from ongoing work at the White House, Conway said, depriving Americans of news on what the Trump administration is working on to improve their lives.

“So, again, what kind of money are we going to spend by the taxpayers having these infinite investigations, and there are many of them. If we’re going to do that, fine, I suppose,” she said. “But we really need to spend our time, also, telling people what's being done here for them.”

Um, we have to spend the money on the infinite investigations because your boss and all his minions are crooked, ya dumb hack.

And she had flash cards! I wonder if she is confusing her personal life with her professional life. Just imagine if she were your mommy. You'd beg to go to boarding school.

"These infinite investigations"...? Did you just move to this country a year ago?

Kellyanne, you're a treasure trove. A treasure trove of lies, obfuscation, obstruction, inane babble and flat-out theft. You're stealing my money and I want it stopped. 

[fraurosena]

9 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

And she had flash cards! I wonder if she is confusing her personal life with her professional life. Just imagine if she were your mommy. You'd beg to go to boarding school.

"These infinite investigations"...? Did you just move to this country a year ago?

Kellyanne, you're a treasure trove. A treasure trove of lies, obfuscation, obstruction, inane babble and flat-out theft. You're stealing my money and I want it stopped. 

The internet is awash with memes about those silly flash cards!

Here are a few:

 

 

 

 

 

There are loads more out there (apparently Stephen Colbert has joined in the fray), but I think the last one is the best I've seen yet.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good analysis of the vapid one: "Kellyanne Conway just set the modern record for political spin"

Spoiler

Credit where credit is due: At least Kellyanne Conway was transparent about admitting she just moved the goal posts on Russia and collusion. And, boy, did she move them.

Here's what Conway said on “Fox and Friends” on Friday morning:

Even the goal posts have been moved. We were promised systemic — hard evidence of systemic, sustained, furtive collusion that not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome.

Yes, I know: Conway was actually accusing others of moving the goal posts. But these two sentences, in truth, represent her own effort to do just that. If this is truly the White House's stance going forward — and I remain unconvinced that Conway is truly leading the White House's messaging here or elsewhere — it's tantamount to an admission of guilt for Donald Trump Jr. but a promise that it wasn't part of a larger effort.

Conway seems to be suggesting a little bit of collusion or attempted collusion might have been okay. She is setting the standard at “hard evidence of systemic, sustained, furtive collusion.” But this is quite a bit different from the White House's repeated promises that there was no collusion, period — dozens of them in total, according to some counts. This is a statement that has been made over and over again, and never qualified in the way Conway just did. A sampling:

• “There is no collusion — certainly myself and my campaign — but I can always speak for myself and the Russians — zero.” — Trump in May
• “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” — Trump tweet in May
• “There has been no collusion. There has been leaking by Comey. But there’s been no collusion, no obstruction and virtually everybody agrees to that.” — Trump last month
• “Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election.” Trump tweet in May
• “There was simply no collusion that they keep trying to create that there was” — Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday

“Zero collusion” and “simply no collusion” is apparently creeping into “no systemic or sustained collusion.” Conway seems to be saying, yes, this meeting was yucky and probably a bad idea, but it wasn't part of anything bigger.

The second part of her statement is equally brazen. She says those looking into collusion have said this effort “not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome.”

Conway's standard now apparently isn't just a concerted collusion effort; it's now a concerted collusion effort that was the determining factor between having a President Clinton and a President Trump. In other words, it has to have actually made the difference.

This just isn't true. Nobody who is seriously looking at this can say with any certainty that this Russian interference or alleged collusion truly made the difference, and the intelligence community has explicitly said it wouldn't weigh in on that question.

There may be some people who believe the collusion was systemic and sustained and that it changed the outcome. But the media and the intelligence community have been much more circumspect about all of this. This is laughable spin from Kellyanne Conway, and it suggests just how much trouble Donald Trump Jr. and the White House are in.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Conway praises Trump for getting all-girl Afghan robotics team to United States. Critics disagree."

Spoiler

President Trump's last-minute intervention allowed an all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan to come to the United States. More important, it enabled the high schoolers to achieve what few female Afghans are able to: represent their country on an international stage.

“I feel so happy that I can’t describe in words,” team member Fatemah Qaderyan told The Post at Washington Dulles International Airport Saturday.

“We felt so disappointed (when we were denied visa) because our team members had worked very hard for six months,” the 14-year-old added.

Trump's involvement drew praise from White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who said in a tweet Saturday morning that while others talk, the president acts. But critics pointed out that selectively allowing a small group of people to come to the United States, while denying many others, is not deserving of credit.

...

In response to Conway's tweet, Paul Musgrave, an international relations expert who teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said, “Selective enforcement of laws and displays of 'mercy' are monarchical, not democratic, tendencies.”

...

He told The Washington Post that while Trump did the right thing, “making an exception here and there for people who are particularly charismatic and particularly visible” is indicative of an administration that takes action because popular opinion, not rational policy, necessitates doing so.

“Think about all the other charismatic groups that we haven't had this kind of mobilization about. Conway's tweet is in this vein of the good president saving innocent people from the government. Well, if he cares that much about these young women, what is he doing to make sure that we have a just process in place for all the many thousands of people affected by his other policies?” Musgrave said, referring to the Trump administration's travel ban, which places restrictions on people from six predominantly Muslim countries. Afghanistan is not among those countries.

Conway is traveling and is unavailable to comment, her chief of staff said.

The story of the high school girls from the city of Herat in western Afghanistan — and their uphill battle in trying to come to the United States — first attracted worldwide sympathy a few weeks ago.

They scrambled for months to build a ball-sorting robot that will compete in the FIRST Global Challenge, an international robotics competition in Washington. The team was supposed to receive equipment from the United States, but it was held up for months amid terrorism concerns. So the team members improvised and built motorized machines out of household materials, The Post reported.

To be able to come to the United States, they twice made the dangerous 500-mile journey to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to apply for their visas.

But their applications were denied.

The hurdles — punctuated by the fact that nearly all teams, including those from countries barred under Trump's travel ban, were allowed to come — drew criticism from human rights activists and questions about whether U.S. agencies were pulling back efforts to advocate for young women in Afghanistan, The Post reported.

“Today, many Afghan women feel betrayed. The Trump administration is formulating a new Afghanistan strategy, but the talk is all about troop numbers, not school books — and certainly not girls,” Heather Barr, senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch's women's rights division, wrote last week.

On Wednesday, days before the competition was scheduled to start, Politico broke the news of Trump's intervention. The Department of Homeland Security had granted the Afghan team members and their chaperon a “parole,” which allows them a one-time, temporary entry into the country for humanitarian reasons or “significant public benefit,” The Post reported.

...

The reason the girls' visas were initially denied is unclear.

The State Department has cited privacy laws in declining to explain the decision. A spokesman told the Associated Press this week that visa applications are “adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.”

Critics on Twitter pointed to the administration's travel ban, saying it's the reason the team was barred in the first place and suggesting that the president shouldn't take credit for reversing the consequences of his own policies.

...

But the ban is not the reason the girls' visas were denied. The latest version of the ban affects Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — three of which have robotics teams that weren't blocked from coming to the United States. Another team, from Gambia, Africa, also was previously denied but has since been granted visas.

Others defended Trump and questioned why critics weren't as outraged when the African team's visas were denied.

...

Musgrave said tying the travel ban to the Afghan team's difficulty in entering the country is a misplaced criticism and is probably because of confusion over the administration's policies on Muslim countries.

Still, he maintains there's a connection — at least indirectly.

Although Afghanistan is not among the restricted countries, the obstacles the team faced in coming to the United States are “reflective of the kind of policy errors you get from the administration that imposes the travel ban,” Musgrave said. Praising the president for intervening is akin to “snatching victory from the jaws of your defeat,” he added.

“It wasn't a surprise to anybody that a team like this one coming from a country like Afghanistan would be caught up in this,” Musgrave said, adding later: “You don't get credit for cleaning this up when you foster this kind of atmosphere.”

Had the girls not been allowed to come to the United States, they would've had to participate in the competition via Skype.

They landed at Washington Dulles International Airport early Saturday. The three-day robotics competition, which involves participants from nearly 160 countries, starts Sunday.

“Seventeen years ago, this would not have been possible at all. They represent our aspirations and resilience despite having been brought up in perpetual conflict. These girls will be proving to the world and the nation that nothing will prevent us from being an equal and active member of the international community,” Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib told the AP after the girls arrived.

 

[Childless]

On 7/15/2017 at 8:14 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Conway praises Trump for getting all-girl Afghan robotics team to United States. Critics disagree."

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump's last-minute intervention allowed an all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan to come to the United States. More important, it enabled the high schoolers to achieve what few female Afghans are able to: represent their country on an international stage.

“I feel so happy that I can’t describe in words,” team member Fatemah Qaderyan told The Post at Washington Dulles International Airport Saturday.

“We felt so disappointed (when we were denied visa) because our team members had worked very hard for six months,” the 14-year-old added.

Trump's involvement drew praise from White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who said in a tweet Saturday morning that while others talk, the president acts. But critics pointed out that selectively allowing a small group of people to come to the United States, while denying many others, is not deserving of credit.

...

In response to Conway's tweet, Paul Musgrave, an international relations expert who teaches political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said, “Selective enforcement of laws and displays of 'mercy' are monarchical, not democratic, tendencies.”

...

He told The Washington Post that while Trump did the right thing, “making an exception here and there for people who are particularly charismatic and particularly visible” is indicative of an administration that takes action because popular opinion, not rational policy, necessitates doing so.

“Think about all the other charismatic groups that we haven't had this kind of mobilization about. Conway's tweet is in this vein of the good president saving innocent people from the government. Well, if he cares that much about these young women, what is he doing to make sure that we have a just process in place for all the many thousands of people affected by his other policies?” Musgrave said, referring to the Trump administration's travel ban, which places restrictions on people from six predominantly Muslim countries. Afghanistan is not among those countries.

Conway is traveling and is unavailable to comment, her chief of staff said.

The story of the high school girls from the city of Herat in western Afghanistan — and their uphill battle in trying to come to the United States — first attracted worldwide sympathy a few weeks ago.

They scrambled for months to build a ball-sorting robot that will compete in the FIRST Global Challenge, an international robotics competition in Washington. The team was supposed to receive equipment from the United States, but it was held up for months amid terrorism concerns. So the team members improvised and built motorized machines out of household materials, The Post reported.

To be able to come to the United States, they twice made the dangerous 500-mile journey to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul to apply for their visas.

But their applications were denied.

The hurdles — punctuated by the fact that nearly all teams, including those from countries barred under Trump's travel ban, were allowed to come — drew criticism from human rights activists and questions about whether U.S. agencies were pulling back efforts to advocate for young women in Afghanistan, The Post reported.

“Today, many Afghan women feel betrayed. The Trump administration is formulating a new Afghanistan strategy, but the talk is all about troop numbers, not school books — and certainly not girls,” Heather Barr, senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch's women's rights division, wrote last week.

On Wednesday, days before the competition was scheduled to start, Politico broke the news of Trump's intervention. The Department of Homeland Security had granted the Afghan team members and their chaperon a “parole,” which allows them a one-time, temporary entry into the country for humanitarian reasons or “significant public benefit,” The Post reported.

...

The reason the girls' visas were initially denied is unclear.

The State Department has cited privacy laws in declining to explain the decision. A spokesman told the Associated Press this week that visa applications are “adjudicated on a case-by-case basis.”

Critics on Twitter pointed to the administration's travel ban, saying it's the reason the team was barred in the first place and suggesting that the president shouldn't take credit for reversing the consequences of his own policies.

...

But the ban is not the reason the girls' visas were denied. The latest version of the ban affects Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — three of which have robotics teams that weren't blocked from coming to the United States. Another team, from Gambia, Africa, also was previously denied but has since been granted visas.

Others defended Trump and questioned why critics weren't as outraged when the African team's visas were denied.

...

Musgrave said tying the travel ban to the Afghan team's difficulty in entering the country is a misplaced criticism and is probably because of confusion over the administration's policies on Muslim countries.

Still, he maintains there's a connection — at least indirectly.

Although Afghanistan is not among the restricted countries, the obstacles the team faced in coming to the United States are “reflective of the kind of policy errors you get from the administration that imposes the travel ban,” Musgrave said. Praising the president for intervening is akin to “snatching victory from the jaws of your defeat,” he added.

“It wasn't a surprise to anybody that a team like this one coming from a country like Afghanistan would be caught up in this,” Musgrave said, adding later: “You don't get credit for cleaning this up when you foster this kind of atmosphere.”

Had the girls not been allowed to come to the United States, they would've had to participate in the competition via Skype.

They landed at Washington Dulles International Airport early Saturday. The three-day robotics competition, which involves participants from nearly 160 countries, starts Sunday.

“Seventeen years ago, this would not have been possible at all. They represent our aspirations and resilience despite having been brought up in perpetual conflict. These girls will be proving to the world and the nation that nothing will prevent us from being an equal and active member of the international community,” Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib told the AP after the girls arrived.

 

If the U.S. keeps going like this, the international community is going to stop holding shit in this country. 

[GreyhoundFan]

She's baaaack: "Conway: Examining Mueller’s team is about transparency and accountability"

Spoiler

Far from criticizing the legal team assembled by special prosecutor Robert Mueller to investigate President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Friday that questions raised by the White House and other Trump defenders about the independence of Mueller’s legal team are intended only to lend the proceedings some transparency.

Such transparency, Conway said, is within the spirit of the Trump administration, which has refused to release the president’s tax returns and has closed visitor logs to the public.

“Donald Trump went to Washington to disrupt and expose the system. Just to blow that secret door off of its hinges and have more accountability and transparency in a system that thrives on the opposite,” she told Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Friday morning. “Let’s at least have a disinfectant. Let’s at least let the transparency and the accountability speak for itself. It's relevant that people know what the motivations are. And that is not an attack on the team. That is what's fair is fair.”

Trump and his defenders have complained in recent weeks that lawyers working on Mueller’s investigation had made political donations to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Mueller, initially appointed to investigate Russia’s interference into last year’s election and the possibility that individuals tied to Trump may have colluded in those efforts, has reportedly expanded his probe to also examine other avenues related to the president, his associates and the Kremlin.

Individuals close to Trump have previously suggested that Trump might consider firing Mueller, an explosive step that White House aides have said is not in the president’s immediate plans. Asked Thursday during an interview with The New York Times whether a probe by Mueller into the Trump family businesses would cross a “red line” that represented an overstepping of the investigation’s bounds, Trump said yes.

Friday on Fox News, Conway said the political leanings of those on Mueller’s team is pertinent information for the public to have as they take in reporting on the ongoing probe. But the counselor to the president stopped short of directly accusing Mueller’s team of bias.

“People should know what folks’ pasts and their motivations and their political motivations are. These weren't minor donations,” she said. “Now, whether that prejudices them one way or the other in the investigation remains to be seen. But it is relevant information for people to have.”

Conway was also critical of the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), accusing them of seeking the limelight amid the Congressional inquiries into allegations of collusion between Moscow and Trump.

“I was just looking at the statistics this morning, they’ve been on TV more than they’ve been presiding over these hearings,” she said. “I mean, literally, Adam Schiff walks around with a cut out of the capitol above his head instead of having these hearings.”

Oh, that is priceless, accusing Schiff and Warner of seeking the limelight, when she seems to have to be on TV at least every 10 minutes and she works for the biggest narcissistic famewhore of all time. And, the administration is transparent? Um, the only thing that is transparent is their level of corruption.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

She's baaaack: "Conway: Examining Mueller’s team is about transparency and accountability"

  Hide contents

Far from criticizing the legal team assembled by special prosecutor Robert Mueller to investigate President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said Friday that questions raised by the White House and other Trump defenders about the independence of Mueller’s legal team are intended only to lend the proceedings some transparency.

Such transparency, Conway said, is within the spirit of the Trump administration, which has refused to release the president’s tax returns and has closed visitor logs to the public.

“Donald Trump went to Washington to disrupt and expose the system. Just to blow that secret door off of its hinges and have more accountability and transparency in a system that thrives on the opposite,” she told Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Friday morning. “Let’s at least have a disinfectant. Let’s at least let the transparency and the accountability speak for itself. It's relevant that people know what the motivations are. And that is not an attack on the team. That is what's fair is fair.”

Trump and his defenders have complained in recent weeks that lawyers working on Mueller’s investigation had made political donations to Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Mueller, initially appointed to investigate Russia’s interference into last year’s election and the possibility that individuals tied to Trump may have colluded in those efforts, has reportedly expanded his probe to also examine other avenues related to the president, his associates and the Kremlin.

Individuals close to Trump have previously suggested that Trump might consider firing Mueller, an explosive step that White House aides have said is not in the president’s immediate plans. Asked Thursday during an interview with The New York Times whether a probe by Mueller into the Trump family businesses would cross a “red line” that represented an overstepping of the investigation’s bounds, Trump said yes.

Friday on Fox News, Conway said the political leanings of those on Mueller’s team is pertinent information for the public to have as they take in reporting on the ongoing probe. But the counselor to the president stopped short of directly accusing Mueller’s team of bias.

“People should know what folks’ pasts and their motivations and their political motivations are. These weren't minor donations,” she said. “Now, whether that prejudices them one way or the other in the investigation remains to be seen. But it is relevant information for people to have.”

Conway was also critical of the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), accusing them of seeking the limelight amid the Congressional inquiries into allegations of collusion between Moscow and Trump.

“I was just looking at the statistics this morning, they’ve been on TV more than they’ve been presiding over these hearings,” she said. “I mean, literally, Adam Schiff walks around with a cut out of the capitol above his head instead of having these hearings.”

Oh, that is priceless, accusing Schiff and Warner of seeking the limelight, when she seems to have to be on TV at least every 10 minutes and she works for the biggest narcissistic famewhore of all time. And, the administration is transparent? Um, the only thing that is transparent is their level of corruption.

Disrupt and expose the system? Blow that secret door off? Let's at least have a disinfectant? She is just a stinking stew of projection, deflection and bizarre metaphors. People only talk this way when they know no one is listening to them speak rationally anymore.

And methinks there must be a raging case of stomach flu in the Conway home. Maybe George has an "office" downstairs that Kellyanne doesn't have the key to?

[fraurosena]

Snort.

[GreyhoundFan]

Why is K-Con allowed out of her office? "Kellyanne Conway says the Trump-Russia investigation is 'not a big story' in contentious, meandering CNN interview"

Spoiler

Senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said on Sunday that the ongoing controversy over President Donald Trump and his campaign's possible ties to Russia was "not a big story."

The contentious interview with CNN's "Reliable Sources" host, Brian Stelter, frequently went off the rails.

Stelter asked Conway whether the Trump administration's combative approach toward the press was an effort to appeal to the president's base.

"No, and again, you want that to say the president said on November 9th, as he was elected, as Hillary Clinton called my cell phone and congratulated and — important word — conceded," Conway said. "I know they can't — they can't let go of these election results."

Stelter replied: "We're talking about Hillary Clinton again? Honestly, I don't have time for that."

Conway then told Stelter that if he was going to talk about Russia and email investigations, "you're going to always be talking about Hillary Clinton."

Stelter fact-checked Conway and pointed out that she was "the one that brought up Russia. I didn't bring up Russia."

"No, no, your network is obsessed with that," Conway interjected. "You're invested in it. All the chyrons say it constantly, all the guests talk about it, and the reason I raised her —"

"There's a big story going on, Kellyanne, and just because you don't deny it doesn't mean it's not a big story," Stelter said.

Conway replied: "It's not a big story."

After more back-and-forth, Conway continued to insist that the Russia investigations, into the hostile foreign power's meddling in the US election and into whether Trump's inner circle coordinated with the Kremlin, were a waste of time.

"Americans are looking at the media," she said. "They're looking at Congress and saying, do your job. Your job is not to Russia, Russia, Russia all day long, and hoping that something, manna, will drop from heaven one day and this will be real and not phony."

Her comments came on the heels of a particularly tumultuous few weeks for the Trump administration, after it emerged that the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., met with a Russian lawyer and a former Soviet military intelligence officer and lobbyist last June during the presidential campaign. When he accepted the meeting, Trump Jr. was aware that it was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump," according to emails he released.

Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is spearheading the FBI's investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow during the election, is currently examining details of that June 2016 meeting.

The Republican-led House and Senate are also conducting their own investigations. Trump Jr., and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort will testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, July 26 in a hearing titled, "Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence US Elections: Lessons Learned from Current and Prior Administrations."

I wish CNN would ban her from appearing.

[JMarie]

Sigh, she was on Hannity tonight.  Super-orange spray tan makes her look like Trump, but without the white half circles under her eyes, but at least she made an attempt to do something with her hair.  Obamacare victims come weekly to the White House to complain, she said.  Democrats should be pushing health care cooperatives and health savings accounts, but they refuse to, he said.  Tomorrow's New York Post has a bunch of conservatives on the cover, and Hannity thinks Conway is the best-looking one on the cover.  They agree that Scaramucci uses colorful language, but so what?

[fraurosena]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

"Kellyanne Conway said finding leakers is easier than leakers think. She might be right."

Spoiler

Drip, drip, drip. It's the sound driving President Trump up the Oval Office's rounded wall.

On Friday, Kellyanne Conway, the president's adviser, told Fox & Friends, “There are many different ways to discover who is leaking.” She said the West Wing and agencies can feel small, given the relatively few people who move sensitive data and documents around the government.

Along with charges of “fake news,” leaks have become the watchword of the Trump administration's offensive against the news media and are what some Republicans have said are distracting from the president's agenda to overhaul immigration policy, repeal the Affordable Care Act and ramp up the fight against the Islamic State.

Leaks have been at the heart of explosive news stories, from the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director to the transcripts of Trump's calls with the heads of Mexico and Australia, published Thursday by The Washington Post.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that the Justice Department has more than tripled the number of leak investigations compared with the number that were ongoing at the end of the last administration. He has directed Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to actively monitor every investigation and instructed the Justice Department's National Security Division and U.S. attorneys to prioritize such cases. The Justice Department will also create a new counterintelligence unit in the FBI to manage the work.

“I think it's easier to figure out who's leaking than some of the leakers realize,” Conway said.

She did not respond to questions about the progress of leak investigations or the methods the FBI and the Justice Department might use to find and prosecute alleged leakers.

How exactly would these investigations play out? The Post spoke to Jason Smolanoff, a former FBI cyberinvestigations special agent and now a senior managing director at Kroll, a security and risk consultant firm. He ran through some potential methods and offered thoughts on how quickly investigations could produce results.

Step 1: Find a pool of suspects

The first step in broad leak investigations is to start with a pool of staffers who may have come in contact with the leaked information itself.

Some of the information that has leaked, including the transcripts of Trump speaking with world leaders, would probably have been accessible to only a small number of employees at few agencies outside the White House, Smolanoff said. Investigators would re-create a trail from when and where files were created, disseminated and stored on government computers and cellphones.

Then investigators can generate a list of official activity from computer log-ins to give a sense of which users could have accessed sensitive information, and when.

Step 2: Shrink your pool using digital tools

Once a pool of potential leakers is created, investigators use a variety of advanced software to cull the list in what is called correlative analysis, Smolanoff said, which eliminates variables and finds characteristics that can point to suspicious behavior.

Investigators cross-reference data points that link physical location, such as a badge swipe at an office door, to information retrieval, such as computer log-ins and server access. Then anomalies could be introduced, Smolanoff said, such as peculiar hours in the office. That helps build a case to prove where and at what time a person was using government equipment.

All of that collection adds up to a lot of raw data, Smolanoff said, and investigators need help looking for subtle clues among days, weeks or even months worth of activity.

That is where cloud-based software and analytics comes in. Potentially useful analysis tools that Smolanoff said could be used is Splunk, a program that harvests data generated by machines such as browser information, IP addresses and GPS coordinates on smartphones that can be paired with log-in and badge access data to show a specific person or group had taken and transmitted data. The data-crunching software program Hadoop can help compare data sets for large pools of people.

Step 3: Subpoena and grab personal data

Say you now have a small group of people whose activity looks suspicious. That's when investigators trigger subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to zero in on data patterns in their personal lives.

Any kind of tool used to send, receive or retrieve information is on the table to be analyzed with digital forensics, Smolanoff said. In the digital age, the list is seemingly endless: social-media accounts, email, text messaging, location-tracking apps such as Uber, search engine results and so on.

And there is a suspect's personal cellphone, which not only wraps up those digital tools in one place but also can be used to track their location during the window that investigators suspect the breach might have occurred, he said.

Those pieces of data can then be used to plug into the correlative analysis to produce a rich portrait of a suspect's communications and digital activity, both at home and work.

Investigators would scrutinize physical and digital methods by which the leaked material may have been transmitted, Smolanoff said. That would include thumb drives, hard drives, instant messages, photocopies, email attachments, photos and other collections.

Step 4: Question and prosecute

If any leakers are identified, FBI investigators would question their activity and seek confessions.

Smolanoff said he suspects they will face consequences more severe than losing their jobs if they end up convicted. Charges could range from mishandling classified information to as high as treason if a serious national security breach occurred, he said.

There is already a precedent. Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor, was charged in June with removing classified information from a government facility and sending it to a news organization, the first criminal charge brought against a leaker during the Trump administration.

She was allegedly among six employees who printed the documents at work but was the only one in email contact with the Intercept, the news outlet that appeared to publish a story based on those documents. The FBI found and questioned her just days after they were notified of the breach, and Winner allegedly admitted she had leaked the documents.

Smolanoff expects similarly swift results from ongoing investigations.

“I don’t anticipate it will take long to find leakers,” he said.

Edited August 5, 2017 by GreyhoundFan

[Howl]

Ms. Con Job is on right now, one-on-one with George Stephanopoulos.  DH is listening through headphones so the sound is muted; according to the chyron, it's the usual Trumpsplaining re: Trump just "weighed" in on Don Jr's statement about The Meeting, but didn't actually dictate it.  

I must say that Kellyanne looks absolutely radiant, refreshed and super glam, like she got a good night's sleep, a super hair and makeup person, a spa day, an intravenous vitamin transfusion and a good blood meal. 

[JMarie]

43 minutes ago, Howl said:

Ms. Con Job is on right now, one-on-one with George Stephanopoulos.  DH is listening through headphones so the sound is muted; according to the chyron, it's the usual Trumpsplaining re: Trump just "weighed" in on Don Jr's statement about The Meeting, but didn't actually dictate it.  

I must say that Kellyanne looks absolutely radiant, refreshed and super glam, like she got a good night's sleep, a super hair and makeup person, a spa day, an intravenous vitamin transfusion and a good blood meal. 

But she was still deflecting like crazy.

[fraurosena]

54 minutes ago, Howl said:

I must say that Kellyanne looks absolutely radiant, refreshed and super glam, like she got a good night's sleep, a super hair and makeup person, a spa day, an intravenous vitamin transfusion and a good blood meal. 

Makes you wonder whose neck she managed to sink her teeth into.