The Golden Couple (Ivanka and Jared)

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, SnazzyNazzy said:

I remember back in the day I stumbled across a gossip site, that had an interesting tidbit about Ivanka.

It wasn't very salacious, but interesting nontheless. Here goes...

Basically, back in the day, when she was late teen'ish, she wanted to be a model, ala Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid etc. It was very "I'm Ivanka Trump, and I want to be a model". The thing is, back in the day, she didn't quite look like she does now. She has more of her mom's genes, BUT she has a lot of her dad's too. 

So, according to this site I found, all the modelling agencies pretty much outright rejected her, because while she was tall and slim, she looked like her dad in drag. SO, allegedly, she had bucket loads of plastic surgery to "soften" her features, and look less like her dad. It was allegedly  some serious plastic surgery too, like jaw shaving, stuff like that.

So the kicker is, according to this site, that she went back after getting all of this surgery done, the modelling agencies STILL rejected her. 

While I know this is gossip, and to be taken with a grain of salt, it is a plausible scenario. For one thing, you know she was not born with the nose that is currently on her face, it is too small and "done" looking. Also, if you see old pictures of her, she looks totally different. Not the "well she just lost her "baby fat" different, but tweaks to the bone structure different.

I miss that site, because it had some GREAT gossip on it.

Oh, that's definitely not her original face. She looks most like Eric, but she doesn't look like Eric that much anymore.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As West Wing Pressure Mounts"

Spoiler

When Reince Priebus departed from the West Wing in July, after months of rumor and acrimony, he didn’t let the door hit him on the way out. “A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it’s a good time to hit the reset button,” he told CNN. “I’m always going to be a Trump fan.”

But the graceful exit and months of public silence were very far from the end of the story. On Friday, Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who are probing possible Russia collusion and a host of other matters, including obstruction of justice in Trump’s decision to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump and his family. “He was champing at the bit to testify,” a Republican familiar with Priebus’s thinking said. Priebus declined to comment to me about what he told Mueller’s lawyers, but his attorney, William Burck, told Politico that his client “was happy to answer all of their questions.”

According to sources familiar with the matter, the person in Trump’s orbit who may have the most to be worried about in Priebus’s testimony is Jared Kushner. Priebus has knowledge of Kushner’s proximity to the controversial decision to fire Comey during a weekend at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in early May, which, hypothetically, is the lynchpin of an obstruction case against the president and his advisers. Trump was accompanied for the weekend by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller. At the club, Miller drafted an angry letter to Comey justifying his removal. (White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump to revise the letter, which people who viewed it likened to a “screed.”) The following Monday, after returning to Washington, Trump told other advisers, including Priebus, of the decision to oust Comey during an Oval Office meeting.

Kushner’s closeness to the discussion of firing Comey continues to be much discussed by current and former Trump administration officials, who see it as one of the main drivers of the administration’s present legal travails. Two sources familiar with the matter told me that prior to Comey’s dismissal, Kushner expressed concern to West Wing officials about the investigation. “He’s all over us,” Kushner told one official in February, according to two sources briefed on the conversation. “He was freaked out about Comey from day one,” one Trump adviser said.

Some in the West Wing were concerned about Kushner's entanglements even before he was a government employee. According to two sources familiar with the matter, transition officials became concerned about meetings that Kushner had helped to set up with representatives from the Chinese insurance giant Anbang and the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund to raise hundreds of millions to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue, the debt-laden crown jewel in his family’s real-estate empire. The meetings raise ethical questions given Kushner’s status as a presidential adviser involved in foreign policy. They worried that he could be subject to, as one of them put it, “an influence operation” by foreign governments.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell declined to comment. On Monday evening I was contacted by Charles Harder in his capacity as a legal representative for Kushner. He, too, declined to comment. (Harder, who has represented Hulk Hogan and Melania Trump, recently severed ties with another client, Harvey Weinstein.) Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, who is handling the administration’s response to various legal and federal investigations, e-mailed me to say: “It is disturbing how unsubstantiated and reckless this story is. It combines conclusions arising without foundation with well worn but widely peddled fantasies that other outlets have passed on for months because nothing in it is verifiable except for the long well known fact that Jared and his family were in New Jersey that weekend. Jared has fully cooperated with all investigations since the beginning. He has been demonstrably transparent with the Congress. Jared voluntarily produced documents and even appeared for six hours of well received testimony before investigative bodies. Way out of bounds, here!”

Kushner’s legal team has said that their client complied with federal ethics laws when he met with investors. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, agrees. “At the time that Kushner had them, he was not an official,” Painter told me. But Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chair of the government watchdog group CREW, says Kushner’s real-estate meetings with foreign investors are problematic. “They raise issues under the transition’s own ethics code,” Eisen told me in an e-mail. “We have a very senior White House adviser whose family is facing an enormous looming liability on 666 Fifth. While he may have divested his personal interest, his family members are at risk, and you can’t divest your gene pool. The situation has given and continues to give him and his family . . . an enormous possible incentive to curry favor with potential investors.”

For his part, Priebus is trying to keep his channels to Trumpworld open and seems to be downplaying any notion that he used his Mueller testimony to settle scores. According to a source, Priebus said after his appearance: “I really didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

It seems like the walls are closing in on Jared.

[JMarie]

On 10/17/2017 at 3:14 PM, SnazzyNazzy said:

I remember back in the day I stumbled across a gossip site, that had an interesting tidbit about Ivanka.

It wasn't very salacious, but interesting nontheless. Here goes...

Basically, back in the day, when she was late teen'ish, she wanted to be a model, ala Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid etc. It was very "I'm Ivanka Trump, and I want to be a model". The thing is, back in the day, she didn't quite look like she does now. She has more of her mom's genes, BUT she has a lot of her dad's too. 

So, according to this site I found, all the modelling agencies pretty much outright rejected her, because while she was tall and slim, she looked like her dad in drag. SO, allegedly, she had bucket loads of plastic surgery to "soften" her features, and look less like her dad. It was allegedly  some serious plastic surgery too, like jaw shaving, stuff like that.

So the kicker is, according to this site, that she went back after getting all of this surgery done, the modelling agencies STILL rejected her. 

While I know this is gossip, and to be taken with a grain of salt, it is a plausible scenario. For one thing, you know she was not born with the nose that is currently on her face, it is too small and "done" looking. Also, if you see old pictures of her, she looks totally different. Not the "well she just lost her "baby fat" different, but tweaks to the bone structure different.

I miss that site, because it had some GREAT gossip on it.

But she was on the cover of Seventeen!  I worshiped Seventeen, back in the day when real models (and not famous people) were on the cover.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/ivanka-modeling?utm_term=.mw1NBpVRO#.ctjowRQkj

[GrumpyGran]

On 10/18/2017 at 10:55 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Jared Kushner Adds Charles Harder to Legal Team As West Wing Pressure Mounts"

  Reveal hidden contents

When Reince Priebus departed from the West Wing in July, after months of rumor and acrimony, he didn’t let the door hit him on the way out. “A president has a right to hit a reset button. I think it’s a good time to hit the reset button,” he told CNN. “I’m always going to be a Trump fan.”

But the graceful exit and months of public silence were very far from the end of the story. On Friday, Priebus testified for hours with lawyers on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team who are probing possible Russia collusion and a host of other matters, including obstruction of justice in Trump’s decision to fire F.B.I. Director James Comey. While Priebus has been careful not to criticize the president openly, sources who have spoken to him say he’s not happy about the way he was treated by Trump and his family. “He was champing at the bit to testify,” a Republican familiar with Priebus’s thinking said. Priebus declined to comment to me about what he told Mueller’s lawyers, but his attorney, William Burck, told Politico that his client “was happy to answer all of their questions.”

According to sources familiar with the matter, the person in Trump’s orbit who may have the most to be worried about in Priebus’s testimony is Jared Kushner. Priebus has knowledge of Kushner’s proximity to the controversial decision to fire Comey during a weekend at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in early May, which, hypothetically, is the lynchpin of an obstruction case against the president and his advisers. Trump was accompanied for the weekend by Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller. At the club, Miller drafted an angry letter to Comey justifying his removal. (White House counsel Don McGahn reportedly told Trump to revise the letter, which people who viewed it likened to a “screed.”) The following Monday, after returning to Washington, Trump told other advisers, including Priebus, of the decision to oust Comey during an Oval Office meeting.

Kushner’s closeness to the discussion of firing Comey continues to be much discussed by current and former Trump administration officials, who see it as one of the main drivers of the administration’s present legal travails. Two sources familiar with the matter told me that prior to Comey’s dismissal, Kushner expressed concern to West Wing officials about the investigation. “He’s all over us,” Kushner told one official in February, according to two sources briefed on the conversation. “He was freaked out about Comey from day one,” one Trump adviser said.

Some in the West Wing were concerned about Kushner's entanglements even before he was a government employee. According to two sources familiar with the matter, transition officials became concerned about meetings that Kushner had helped to set up with representatives from the Chinese insurance giant Anbang and the Qatari Sovereign Wealth Fund to raise hundreds of millions to bail out 666 Fifth Avenue, the debt-laden crown jewel in his family’s real-estate empire. The meetings raise ethical questions given Kushner’s status as a presidential adviser involved in foreign policy. They worried that he could be subject to, as one of them put it, “an influence operation” by foreign governments.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell declined to comment. On Monday evening I was contacted by Charles Harder in his capacity as a legal representative for Kushner. He, too, declined to comment. (Harder, who has represented Hulk Hogan and Melania Trump, recently severed ties with another client, Harvey Weinstein.) Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, who is handling the administration’s response to various legal and federal investigations, e-mailed me to say: “It is disturbing how unsubstantiated and reckless this story is. It combines conclusions arising without foundation with well worn but widely peddled fantasies that other outlets have passed on for months because nothing in it is verifiable except for the long well known fact that Jared and his family were in New Jersey that weekend. Jared has fully cooperated with all investigations since the beginning. He has been demonstrably transparent with the Congress. Jared voluntarily produced documents and even appeared for six hours of well received testimony before investigative bodies. Way out of bounds, here!”

Kushner’s legal team has said that their client complied with federal ethics laws when he met with investors. Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, agrees. “At the time that Kushner had them, he was not an official,” Painter told me. But Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and chair of the government watchdog group CREW, says Kushner’s real-estate meetings with foreign investors are problematic. “They raise issues under the transition’s own ethics code,” Eisen told me in an e-mail. “We have a very senior White House adviser whose family is facing an enormous looming liability on 666 Fifth. While he may have divested his personal interest, his family members are at risk, and you can’t divest your gene pool. The situation has given and continues to give him and his family . . . an enormous possible incentive to curry favor with potential investors.”

For his part, Priebus is trying to keep his channels to Trumpworld open and seems to be downplaying any notion that he used his Mueller testimony to settle scores. According to a source, Priebus said after his appearance: “I really didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

It seems like the walls are closing in on Jared.

Good god, doesn't he have more lawyers now than OJ Simpson had?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Are Jared and Ivanka erasing history?"

Spoiler

Last week, Politico reported that the National Archives has been warning White House lawyers to make sure that Trump staffers comply with “document preservation laws,” specifically the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all White House communications be captured for posterity. The National Archives isn’t the only institution with concerns. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has asked the White House to provide more information about whether staffers are adhering to the Presidential Records Act. (The White House refused.)

This comes after revelations that top White House aides — including first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner — have been using personal email to conduct official business. Like President Richard M. Nixon, whose transgressions led to the law in question, White House staffers conducting the nation’s business away from public oversight seem motivated by a desire to control history’s perception of them. And like Nixon, they may be forced to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: Presidential recordkeeping is as much about remembering our leaders’ missteps as it is about memorializing their triumphs.

Less than a month after Nixon resigned the presidency under the cloud of Watergate, he struck an eyebrow-raising deal with Arthur F. Sampson, the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA). The Nixon-Sampson agreement allowed the former president to effectively retain control over his papers (and tapes), which the GSA would transfer to him in San Clemente, Calif., for eventual placement in his presidential library.

The timing of the Nixon-Sampson agreement, in the middle of the Watergate investigations, was suspect. New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis laid out a scathing indictment of the deal’s “extraordinary provisions” that would allow Nixon to keep essential documents from prosecutors and the public. The agreement was “about as even‐handed as one negotiated between victor and vanquished — with the United States in the posture of vanquished.”

And yet, Nixon’s request wasn’t all that unusual. At the time, presidents owned their official White House materials, and the preservation of those papers was up to their discretion. Many presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, left their papers to heirs who helped burnish their legacies. In Franklin Pierce’s case, his destruction of documents was, perhaps, more remarkable than his time in office.

It was simply an accepted tradition that presidents would exit Pennsylvania Avenue clutching their White House records (and sometimes the furniture).

But Nixon had gone too far. In a judgment blocking him from absconding to California with his records, Judge Charles Richey wrote, “To uphold former President Nixon’s claim of ownership would be to place him above the law as well as recognize that he may assert a right to the products of his office, which would be to compare him to a monarch. This the court cannot do.”

Nixon fought the records fight until his death. But Congress learned its lesson and, in 1978, passed the Presidential Records Act, which officially declared that “all books, correspondence, memoranda, documents, papers … audio and visual records, or other electronic or mechanical recordations, whether in analog, digital, or any other form” produced by the president and his staff would become the official property of the federal government, to be preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration.” The records act was updated in 2014 to account for the digital age, and to prevent White House employees from using nongovernment email accounts for official business. (In a sign of the changing times, Trump is being sued over his deleted tweets.)

White House staffers therefore live under the constant gaze of the records act. As one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters, I sat through more than one briefing detailing what constituted a record. (Notes outlining a speech with my colleagues? Yes. A grocery list on a Post-it stuck to my desk? No.) The lawyers in the Obama White House repeatedly reminded us not to use personal email accounts for work. With an eye to history, they encouraged us to stay professional in our official emails — though I’m surely not the only one whose occasional colorful language will make my mother blush.

It’s one thing for Trump aides to do the nation’s business over Gmail. They may not have technically violated the law if they forwarded those emails to their work accounts. But the revelation that Jared and Ivanka set up a private email server after the election is, given the Trump campaign’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s private email server, a bit too on the nose.

Perhaps Jared and Ivanka believe they have no choice but to participate in the dismantling of our democracy by working in the administration, and that this blip in their lives will be forgiven or, preferably, forgotten. But for all the misplaced hopes that they would be the reasonable counterweight to their unstable father, they have, time and again, aided and abetted his behavior. Wary of their eventual return to New York high society, perhaps they set up that private email server to obscure from the public eye, and the historical record, the details of their devil’s bargain.

This isn’t new.  Too many public officials prefer to obscure their misdeeds and gild their accomplishments, thus tilting the light to give their records a more favorable glow. But with this White House, it seems that a more sinister game is afoot.

In Trump’s distorted understanding of history, those he has deemed “winners” have the power to erase the “losers.” But here, at last, the Presidential Records Act might have something to say. Its purpose, born out of the wreckage of Watergate, was to protect us not only from official misconduct, but from ourselves. It was meant to warn presidents that they may not brush their foibles, or crimes, under the Oval Office rug. It was to preserve, indefinitely, that which we all might wish to forget.

Trump’s records, like his mistakes, belong to us all. And in the end, the one loser he won’t be able to erase from history is himself.

Yeah, I have little faith that anyone in the WH is following the law.

[fraurosena]

Vice writer Eve Peyser has compiled a list of examples that show that Ivanka Trump is very, very bad at using words.
(The tweets are embedded in the linked article.)

Stephen Colbert has picked up on this and held this hilarious monologue on the issue.

 

[GrumpyGran]

Thanks, @fraurosena, for that reminder of how intelligent she is. Between her and her daddy, the reputation of UPenn is taking a hit.

I wonder if she found Georgetown a bit much for her and got daddy to grease the skids at Penn. Oh, what am I talking about, of course that's what happened. Why else would she walk away from Georgetown, a very reputable university? I'd feel bad for Penn having their reputation sullied but I'm sure the money eased their pain.

[GreyhoundFan]

From the Columbia Journalism Review: "The Jared bubble"

Spoiler

“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.

... < the illustration here is spot-on >

Thus began the unraveling of my relationship with the man who would become one of the most important advisers to one of the most press-hostile presidents in American history.

A year after that conversation, I would be tossed out, one of five editors at the Observer in the 10 years Kushner served as publisher. My case wasn’t helped when I was quoted in a blog post calling the place a “shitshow” under Kushner and his business-side team.

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign and into his presidency, I have looked back on my short tenure at the Observer for signs of the anti-press fervor I can only assume Kushner has shaped. How did this socially ambitious real-estate developer, who bought a beloved Manhattan weekly and counted Rupert Murdoch as one of his personal heroes, end up helping to guide an administration that has made the vilification of anyone associated with journalism a central plank? Did Kushner simply inherit the “fake news” mantra from his father-in-law, or did he have a hand in creating it? Were there hints during his tenure at the Observer of what was to come?

 

It didn’t take long at the Observer for me to figure out that Kushner didn’t have much respect for the people on his payroll who were reporters. Several times during my time there, when reporters were due merit raises, I went to him in his office building on Fifth Avenue in Midtown—which he bought at such a premium that he nearly broke the family business—for approval to raise their salaries.

The numbers were tiny, sometimes as little as $3,000 or $4,000 per year. But they meant a lot to the people who were getting them, who often were struggling to stay afloat in New York City. At the time, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were newly married, kidless, and living in an enormous loft apartment in lower Manhattan that had the feel of very fancy corporate digs. I didn’t spot a single family picture or memento, and the fridge was stocked like a college student’s, with cartons of takeout food and little else. When I would approach Kushner about raises for the staff, he would almost always balk, pointing out that if we didn’t boost their pay, there was a line of replacements willing to work for the same salary or less. Journalists, in his mind, were essentially interchangeable, and easily replaceable. The fact that they were so poorly paid was evidence, in his mind, that what they did or how they did it could not possibly be that important. On a couple of occasions, he reversed course, pulling the plug on pay raises he’d approved—and that I’d already let the staffers know were coming. (CJR asked Kushner, through a spokesman, for comment on the issues raised here, and they did not respond.)

While he was, on the one hand, right—journalism is a notoriously low-paying profession, and there are more willing reporters than there are jobs—his dismissive and even condescending attitude toward the people he had chosen to employ didn’t fit with his emerging public persona as a hip, young progressive Manhattan player. Years later, I would recognize that same disdain for journalists coming from his father-in-law, amplified a thousandfold.

Most weeks, Kushner not only didn’t read the Observer, he didn’t appear to read anything else, either. I never knew him to discuss a book, a play, or anything else that was in the Observer’s cultural wheelhouse. His circle of friends was fairly limited, largely tech executives and other successful business people, a smattering of celebrities, and a coterie of much older successful men, people like Rupert Murdoch, financier Ron Perelman, and the public relations impresario Howard Rubenstein.

Even politics seemed to lie outside his area of interest. Every week, Kushner and I held a conference call with the Observer’s editorial writer, who would pitch ideas for the paper’s two main editorial slots. These ideas usually touched on state, local, or national politics. Kushner almost never showed any interest in what tended, at the time, to be the hottest and most pressing issues of the day.

He bragged that he never read The New York Times, though he did seem to care what was in the New York tabloids and The Wall Street Journal.

At the time, his father-in-law showed a similar cluelessness. Very early in my tenure, I was asked by Kushner to meet with Donald Trump, as a courtesy visit. I went to Trump Tower, navigated the series of outer offices that surround Trump, and met the future president, who was sitting behind his desk, hands folded, in an office completely dominated by framed magazine covers of himself. I had the impression that he had spent a minute composing himself, even posing himself, before I stepped in.

I didn’t entirely know why I was there, and nor, it seemed, did he. He had no words of advice or insights about the Observer or journalism, no thoughts on the news of the day, no story tips. It was clearly a ring-kissing visit, and the fact that I showed up meant the deed was done. “We love Jared,” he repeated, concluding our very short meeting.

While Kushner didn’t remotely care about the content of the paper, he cared desperately that it be seen as a financial success. While that is essentially every publisher’s job, his interest in turning the business side of the Observer around seemed rooted more in bragging rights than in any commitment to the paper itself. He also made it clear that, compared to his day job of buying and selling real estate in New York City, this journalism stuff wasn’t exactly heavy lifting; he treated it as a sort of annoying hobby. (The irony, of course, is that Kushner never was able to replicate the success of Arthur L. Carter, the paper’s founder and previous owner. As for his real-estate success, that has been overshadowed by severe debt problems at his flagship on Fifth Avenue—the building where we’d have our weekly meetings—and some critical stories about rough tactics his company used to force out people who were late in paying their rent.)

You can hear echoes of Kushner’s attitudes toward the press in Trump’s obsession with the “failing” New York Times, a notion that is inaccurate but that echoes Kushner’s singular focus on the Observer’s bottom line, often to the detriment of the quality and integrity of the paper he was supposed to be shepherding.

I came to believe that Kushner wanted the Observer to succeed not because he believed in what it was, but because he needed it as a bullhorn for his own business interests. The episode with the banker “hit job” was only the most egregious of many more minor examples of him using the paper to prop up himself and his family, ranging from a dubious annual listing of the top people in New York real estate (which was dominated by his clients and business partners) to favorable treatment for other people in his business circle. Other former editors of the paper have weighed in with their own stories about Kushner’s attempts to use the paper to settle scores or reward cronies, including an effort by Kushner to get a critical piece into the Observer about a lender who was taking a tough line in renegotiating debt on the Fifth Avenue tower. The story never ran.

Journalism for him was transactional, an attitude his father-in-law seems to share. “I give you ratings and Web traffic,” Trump seems to fume, “and this is how you treat me?” In the end, Kushner, too, seemed to have decided that he had wrung all he could out of the Observer, and that owning a newspaper with a staff of recalcitrant journalists was more trouble than it was worth. By the time he left the paper, it had given up any pretense of being independent of the Kushner family, or of Donald Trump, and its presence as a feisty independent voice in New York journalism had disappeared.

There’s a deep and complicated family history at play. Given his family’s backstory, it never made sense to me why Kushner owned a newspaper at all. His father, Charles, had been sent to prison for, among other things, trying to coerce his brother-in-law not to cooperate with federal investigators by secretly taping him with a prostitute, then mailing the tape to his sister. The case was a cause célèbre in New Jersey (the US Attorney on the case was Chris Christie), and the family long blamed the press for aiding in Charles Kushner’s downfall.

Jared and his family are extremely close, and it was clear that his father’s travails had a big impact on him. (Charles, whom Jared talked to frequently while the father was imprisoned in Alabama, popped in often during my meetings with Jared on Fifth Avenue. I remember this because Jared would refer to him as “daddy,” which I found strange. I also later learned that Charles was behind the “hit job” story, which explained in retrospect why Jared was so persistent about pursuing it.)

Given this background, why would Jared choose to buy a newspaper, of all things? Was his poor treatment of reporters some sort of revenge for the press’s treatment of his father?

I came to view this family drama as almost Shakespearean, and gave up trying to make sense of why Jared did what he did. But these questions came back to me when I began to see Jared showing up at his father-in-law’s primary rallies around the country, spouting the kind of conservative populist message that I’d never heard come out of Jared’s mouth. When I knew them, Jared and Ivanka were hanging out with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, not trying to keep immigrants out of the country.

Initially, I chalked up his devotion to his father-in-law to family loyalty, a deep and unshakeable trait that runs through both the Kushner and Trump clans, and one that is quite admirable.

But there also was something familiar about the anti-media rants we were hearing from Trump. They brought me back to those two very difficult years at the Observer, and the frustration of working for a paper owned by a man who had no respect for or interest in journalism or the people who practice it. In fact, his view was the opposite, a deep suspicion and derision of journalism and reporters, an impression burned into him by a painful family trauma. In his view, journalism’s utility lay only in what it could do to polish his image or enrich his coffers or those of his family.

And it dawned on me then that Kushner and his father-in-law weren’t so far apart after all. Both had used the media, quite successfully, for their own ends. Now the press had become more trouble than it was worth, and both felt perfectly fine tossing it aside.

It reminds me of a story often told by a writer then working for the Observer, who met Kushner, the man who signed his paycheck, for the first time at a cocktail party. The two of them chit-chatted until Kushner, in mid-conversation, turned and walked away. He had, he told the writer, found someone more important to talk to.

Yes, he's a taker too. Just like his FIL.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

From the Columbia Journalism Review: "The Jared bubble"

  Reveal hidden contents

“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.

... < the illustration here is spot-on >

Thus began the unraveling of my relationship with the man who would become one of the most important advisers to one of the most press-hostile presidents in American history.

A year after that conversation, I would be tossed out, one of five editors at the Observer in the 10 years Kushner served as publisher. My case wasn’t helped when I was quoted in a blog post calling the place a “shitshow” under Kushner and his business-side team.

Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign and into his presidency, I have looked back on my short tenure at the Observer for signs of the anti-press fervor I can only assume Kushner has shaped. How did this socially ambitious real-estate developer, who bought a beloved Manhattan weekly and counted Rupert Murdoch as one of his personal heroes, end up helping to guide an administration that has made the vilification of anyone associated with journalism a central plank? Did Kushner simply inherit the “fake news” mantra from his father-in-law, or did he have a hand in creating it? Were there hints during his tenure at the Observer of what was to come?

 

It didn’t take long at the Observer for me to figure out that Kushner didn’t have much respect for the people on his payroll who were reporters. Several times during my time there, when reporters were due merit raises, I went to him in his office building on Fifth Avenue in Midtown—which he bought at such a premium that he nearly broke the family business—for approval to raise their salaries.

The numbers were tiny, sometimes as little as $3,000 or $4,000 per year. But they meant a lot to the people who were getting them, who often were struggling to stay afloat in New York City. At the time, Kushner and Ivanka Trump were newly married, kidless, and living in an enormous loft apartment in lower Manhattan that had the feel of very fancy corporate digs. I didn’t spot a single family picture or memento, and the fridge was stocked like a college student’s, with cartons of takeout food and little else. When I would approach Kushner about raises for the staff, he would almost always balk, pointing out that if we didn’t boost their pay, there was a line of replacements willing to work for the same salary or less. Journalists, in his mind, were essentially interchangeable, and easily replaceable. The fact that they were so poorly paid was evidence, in his mind, that what they did or how they did it could not possibly be that important. On a couple of occasions, he reversed course, pulling the plug on pay raises he’d approved—and that I’d already let the staffers know were coming. (CJR asked Kushner, through a spokesman, for comment on the issues raised here, and they did not respond.)

While he was, on the one hand, right—journalism is a notoriously low-paying profession, and there are more willing reporters than there are jobs—his dismissive and even condescending attitude toward the people he had chosen to employ didn’t fit with his emerging public persona as a hip, young progressive Manhattan player. Years later, I would recognize that same disdain for journalists coming from his father-in-law, amplified a thousandfold.

Most weeks, Kushner not only didn’t read the Observer, he didn’t appear to read anything else, either. I never knew him to discuss a book, a play, or anything else that was in the Observer’s cultural wheelhouse. His circle of friends was fairly limited, largely tech executives and other successful business people, a smattering of celebrities, and a coterie of much older successful men, people like Rupert Murdoch, financier Ron Perelman, and the public relations impresario Howard Rubenstein.

Even politics seemed to lie outside his area of interest. Every week, Kushner and I held a conference call with the Observer’s editorial writer, who would pitch ideas for the paper’s two main editorial slots. These ideas usually touched on state, local, or national politics. Kushner almost never showed any interest in what tended, at the time, to be the hottest and most pressing issues of the day.

He bragged that he never read The New York Times, though he did seem to care what was in the New York tabloids and The Wall Street Journal.

At the time, his father-in-law showed a similar cluelessness. Very early in my tenure, I was asked by Kushner to meet with Donald Trump, as a courtesy visit. I went to Trump Tower, navigated the series of outer offices that surround Trump, and met the future president, who was sitting behind his desk, hands folded, in an office completely dominated by framed magazine covers of himself. I had the impression that he had spent a minute composing himself, even posing himself, before I stepped in.

I didn’t entirely know why I was there, and nor, it seemed, did he. He had no words of advice or insights about the Observer or journalism, no thoughts on the news of the day, no story tips. It was clearly a ring-kissing visit, and the fact that I showed up meant the deed was done. “We love Jared,” he repeated, concluding our very short meeting.

While Kushner didn’t remotely care about the content of the paper, he cared desperately that it be seen as a financial success. While that is essentially every publisher’s job, his interest in turning the business side of the Observer around seemed rooted more in bragging rights than in any commitment to the paper itself. He also made it clear that, compared to his day job of buying and selling real estate in New York City, this journalism stuff wasn’t exactly heavy lifting; he treated it as a sort of annoying hobby. (The irony, of course, is that Kushner never was able to replicate the success of Arthur L. Carter, the paper’s founder and previous owner. As for his real-estate success, that has been overshadowed by severe debt problems at his flagship on Fifth Avenue—the building where we’d have our weekly meetings—and some critical stories about rough tactics his company used to force out people who were late in paying their rent.)

You can hear echoes of Kushner’s attitudes toward the press in Trump’s obsession with the “failing” New York Times, a notion that is inaccurate but that echoes Kushner’s singular focus on the Observer’s bottom line, often to the detriment of the quality and integrity of the paper he was supposed to be shepherding.

I came to believe that Kushner wanted the Observer to succeed not because he believed in what it was, but because he needed it as a bullhorn for his own business interests. The episode with the banker “hit job” was only the most egregious of many more minor examples of him using the paper to prop up himself and his family, ranging from a dubious annual listing of the top people in New York real estate (which was dominated by his clients and business partners) to favorable treatment for other people in his business circle. Other former editors of the paper have weighed in with their own stories about Kushner’s attempts to use the paper to settle scores or reward cronies, including an effort by Kushner to get a critical piece into the Observer about a lender who was taking a tough line in renegotiating debt on the Fifth Avenue tower. The story never ran.

Journalism for him was transactional, an attitude his father-in-law seems to share. “I give you ratings and Web traffic,” Trump seems to fume, “and this is how you treat me?” In the end, Kushner, too, seemed to have decided that he had wrung all he could out of the Observer, and that owning a newspaper with a staff of recalcitrant journalists was more trouble than it was worth. By the time he left the paper, it had given up any pretense of being independent of the Kushner family, or of Donald Trump, and its presence as a feisty independent voice in New York journalism had disappeared.

There’s a deep and complicated family history at play. Given his family’s backstory, it never made sense to me why Kushner owned a newspaper at all. His father, Charles, had been sent to prison for, among other things, trying to coerce his brother-in-law not to cooperate with federal investigators by secretly taping him with a prostitute, then mailing the tape to his sister. The case was a cause célèbre in New Jersey (the US Attorney on the case was Chris Christie), and the family long blamed the press for aiding in Charles Kushner’s downfall.

Jared and his family are extremely close, and it was clear that his father’s travails had a big impact on him. (Charles, whom Jared talked to frequently while the father was imprisoned in Alabama, popped in often during my meetings with Jared on Fifth Avenue. I remember this because Jared would refer to him as “daddy,” which I found strange. I also later learned that Charles was behind the “hit job” story, which explained in retrospect why Jared was so persistent about pursuing it.)

Given this background, why would Jared choose to buy a newspaper, of all things? Was his poor treatment of reporters some sort of revenge for the press’s treatment of his father?

I came to view this family drama as almost Shakespearean, and gave up trying to make sense of why Jared did what he did. But these questions came back to me when I began to see Jared showing up at his father-in-law’s primary rallies around the country, spouting the kind of conservative populist message that I’d never heard come out of Jared’s mouth. When I knew them, Jared and Ivanka were hanging out with Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, not trying to keep immigrants out of the country.

Initially, I chalked up his devotion to his father-in-law to family loyalty, a deep and unshakeable trait that runs through both the Kushner and Trump clans, and one that is quite admirable.

But there also was something familiar about the anti-media rants we were hearing from Trump. They brought me back to those two very difficult years at the Observer, and the frustration of working for a paper owned by a man who had no respect for or interest in journalism or the people who practice it. In fact, his view was the opposite, a deep suspicion and derision of journalism and reporters, an impression burned into him by a painful family trauma. In his view, journalism’s utility lay only in what it could do to polish his image or enrich his coffers or those of his family.

And it dawned on me then that Kushner and his father-in-law weren’t so far apart after all. Both had used the media, quite successfully, for their own ends. Now the press had become more trouble than it was worth, and both felt perfectly fine tossing it aside.

It reminds me of a story often told by a writer then working for the Observer, who met Kushner, the man who signed his paycheck, for the first time at a cocktail party. The two of them chit-chatted until Kushner, in mid-conversation, turned and walked away. He had, he told the writer, found someone more important to talk to.

Yes, he's a taker too. Just like his FIL.

This did not improve my opinion of him. Not at all. My opinion has been that he is an arrogant and entitled little boy who has never lived in the real world. But it would appear that there's something dark there, more likely a sociopath.

It appear Princess likes to surround herself with bullies.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Japan is all abuzz about the arrival of a Trump: Ivanka Trump"

Spoiler

TOKYO — Trump delivered a much-anticipated speech in Tokyo that the Japanese government hopes will make waves. But it’s not President Trump, who’s arriving here on Sunday; it’s Ivanka. 

The first daughter and adviser to the president addressed the Japanese government’s World Assembly for Women conference Friday, a double-whammy win for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

First, he gets a high-profile speaker for one of his key initiatives — and one that has failed to bear any other fruit: increasing women’s participation in the Japanese workforce, or, in Japanese government parlance, an initiative letting women “shine.” 

Second, Abe can curry more favor with Donald Trump just two days before he arrives in Tokyo on his first trip to Japan as president. The visit will include a round of golf at a country club and a banquet, but no headline speech. That job will fall instead to his daughter.

Ivanka Trump gave a “special speech” on female entrepreneurship and women’s participation in the economy, similar to those she made during a women’s forum hosted by Angela Merkel in Germany earlier this year.

The Japanese government added a day to what’s usually a two-day conference, scheduling her speech on a public holiday because she couldn’t make it earlier. But Abe, who introduced her to the audience, wanted them to hear from Trump, described by one of the prime minister’s top aides this week as “one of the most remarkable people in the world because she is actively trying to support women entrepreneurs and improve women’s participation in society.”

She will have dinner with Abe and his wife Friday night, leaving Japan before her father arrives.

Japan has something of a fascination with Ivanka Trump, who is viewed here by some as the perfect woman: She has a career and a beautiful family and blond hair and always looks immaculate.

“Many people think she’s like a princess,” said Lully Miura, a political scientist at the University of Tokyo. “She’s well educated, beautiful, sophisticated and rich. And it’s very surprising to Japanese women that she can also talk about things that are important to society.”

At least four television channels broadcast a live shot of an empty escalator Thursday afternoon, awaiting her arrival at the airport, interspersed with her tweets and Instagram photos. 

TV commentators noted approvingly that she says she spends 20 minutes each morning meditating and only eight minutes putting on her makeup — balancing her luxury celebrity lifestyle with being a mother of three children. At least one channel had a cardboard cutout of Ivanka on set.

The Tokyo metropolitan police have reportedly formed a women-only riot police unit to protect Trump during her visit, although they will be dressed in suits to blend in.

Likewise, Japanese companies that import her clothing label say they’ve had a surge in sales.

“Inquires and orders for the brand increased dramatically from January, and during the busiest period, more than 10 customers contacted us each day because they heard about Ivanka,” said Tamana Kawanishi, manager of Chez Ibiza, a clothing shop in Tokyo. “We received zero inquires before the election.”

An online store, Waja, was selling about six Ivanka Trump brand items of clothing a month before her father was elected president. This year, it has averaged about 600 a month.

“I think people who saw the news about Ivanka’s visit to Japan are checking our website and buying,” said Yukie Suzuki, a Waja spokeswoman.

While the 36-year-old’s arrival in Japan has generated the kind of coverage usually reserved for celebrities, Ivanka Trump and her message at the prime minister’s conference do little to advance the cause of the average Japanese woman, analysts say.

“I’ve long been cynical about his efforts to promote women,” said Chelsea Szendi Schieder, an expert on gender in Japan who teaches at Meiji University in Tokyo. Abe’s initiative, dubbed “womenomics,” seems like a branding effort that promotes a few elite women rather than a serious effort to reduce the wage gap or poverty experienced by single mothers, she said. 

Abe has championed increasing women’s participation in the workforce as a way to pull Japan out of its decades of economic malaise. But his efforts have resulted in little tangible progress. 

Underlining this, Japan has slipped further in the World Economic Forum’s global gender-equality rankings. Japan now comes in 114th out of 144 countries regarding gender equality, making it by far the worst in the Group of Seven industrial nations. Japan stood at 101st in 2012, the year Abe returned to office.

The decline in women’s “political empowerment,” largely because of a reduction in the number of women in parliament and in senior political positions, drove this year’s deterioration, according to the report, published Thursday. 

Only two of the 24 ministers in Abe’s cabinet and less than 10 percent of members of parliament are women.

While more women are working, they are overrepresented in part-time or casual jobs that do not come with the security or benefits of regular jobs. Seventy percent of part-time workers are women, according to the latest statistics from the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training.

Furthermore, there is strong pressure on women to quit their jobs once they have babies, a phenomenon so prevalent that it has its own name: “mata-hara,” short for “maternity harassment.” Almost half of working women quit their jobs after having a baby, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Much of the problem stems from an inflexible work culture that demands long hours at the office and mandatory attendance at after-work social events with the boss. 

The two most high-profile cases of “death by overwork” in Japan have both involved young women, one an advertising-agency worker who killed herself and the other a TV reporter who had a heart attack at 31.

But it is also because of a tax structure that provides no incentive for people in a marriage to work and a lack of child-care facilities. 

But Miura, of the University of Tokyo, commended the right-leaning Abe’s efforts to at least try to change the entrenched gender imbalances in Japanese society. 

“A conservative country like Japan won’t change without conservative leadership,” she said. “The Abe administration is going in the right direction, but they need to help the ordinary Japanese woman, rather than just promoting these successful elites.”

Okay, I got a little sick, reading of all the adoration for Ivanka. Blech.

[fraurosena]

Well, @GreyhoundFan, it seems they don't like Ivanka as much as your article claims, thankfully!

Empty seats greet Ivanka Trump at women's empowerment speech in Tokyo

Quote

The US first family’s visit to Asia has got off to an inauspicious start, after Ivanka Trump shared her views on sexual harassment and women’s empowerment in front of a half-empty venue in Tokyo.

Donald Trump’s daughter – already a familiar face in Japan thanks to her modelling work and fashion empire – did not mention her father by name during her brief address to the World Assembly for Women on Friday, focusing instead on her work with the US administration to promote women’s role in the economy.

Officials reportedly said her speech was the most registered event of the three-day assembly, but that tight security had meant not everyone had been able to enter the hall before the doors were closed for the duration of the speeches by Abe and Trump.

However, the Guardian arrived at the hall 10 minutes before the event began and witnessed no long lines of people waiting to get in. Another attendee who entered as the doors were closing said just a handful of people were milling around outside.

Earlier this year, she was greeted with boos and hisses at the W20 summit in Berlin when, appearing on a panel with the German chancellor Angela Merkel, she referred to her father as a “tremendous champion of supporting families”.

On Friday in Tokyo, speaking in a reference to an avalanche of allegations of sexual harassment in the entertainment and political worlds, she said: “All too often our workplace culture fails to treat women with appropriate respect.

“This takes many forms, including harassment, which can never be tolerated.”

The comments also revived memories of Donald Trump’s boast, in a leaked videotape that emerged during the presidential campaign, that he could get away with sexually assaulting women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Ivanka Trump, who has faced criticism for failing to relinquish all of her business interests while serving as an unpaid adviser to her father, said women should not be defined by whether they work inside or outside the home.

“Truth be told, on Sunday nights, after a messy and wonderful weekend with my children, I am far more exhausted than on Friday evenings, after a long week of work at the office,” she said at the venue, where those rows of empty seats brought to mind the large gaps in the crowd at her father’s inauguration in January.

“As a professional with three young children, and despite the help I was able to have at home, I too have experienced the struggles of balancing competing demands of work and family.”

Acknowledging her “fortunate” upbringing, she added: “Because of the opportunities I’ve had my whole life, I felt an obligation to seize this moment and join the administration.”

Earlier, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, lauded his own record on getting more women into the workplace and improving childcare provision, as part of the growth-oriented “womenomics” initiative he unveiled early in his premiership.

Noting that the number of Japanese women in managerial positions had doubled over the past five years – albeit from a very low base – Abe said his country’s male-dominated corporate culture was becoming more inclusive.

“We’ve put our full strength into creating an environment where it’s easy for women to work,” he said. “I really feel that Japan has come a long way.”

Abe, though, was speaking a day after the Economic Forum’s global gender equality rankings showed Japan had slipped four places to 114th out of 144 countries, mainly due to the poor representation of women in parliament.

Japan fell three places overall from last year and remains at the bottom of the G7 nations. In the political category, it plunged 20 places from last year to 123rd. Last month’s election increased female representation in the lower house by only two seats compared with the last election in 2014.

Now, just 47 – or just over 10% – of the 465 MPs in Japan’s lower house are women. The upper house fares better, with women occupying about a fifth of the seats.

Men also dominate the upper echelons of Japan’s business world. Only 3.7% of executives at listed companies are women, according to government figures.

Ivanka Trump singled out the poor representation of women and minorities in science, technology, engineering and maths, saying the male-dominated sectors were still “moving in the wrong direction”.

Donald Trump arrives in Japan on Sunday at the start of a 12-day visit that includes stops in South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. His daughter had been expected to accompany him to Seoul and Beijing, but recently pulled out, saying she would return to the US to promoted the administration’s tax reforms.

[VelociRapture]

So, what are our thoughts? If Jared is indicted and Daddy throws him under the bus to try and save himself... who will Ivanka side with? Is there a way for her to appear supportive of both men in a situation like that? Will she finally cut the cord and support her husband in that instance? Or will her position as Daddy’s little girl cause her to stay loyal to him and turn on the father of her children? Or what if Ivanka is indicted too? Will Daddy turn on both of them? Or will Daddy go out of his way to protect her?

[AnywhereButHere]

I think daddy will throw either of his sons under the bus even before the finger was done pointing, no question. Daddy's Princess will get a little more leeway. Not much, but a bit more before the tires hit her.

I see Princess siding with daddy over Jared. I think she'd rather play the suffering wife rather than boot herself out of daddy's graces.

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree with @AnywhereButHere. I think Ivanka will do whatever most benefits her in the end. If I had to guess, I bet daddy's will gives her more than the others. Even though Jared has money, it's probably not daddy level. Also, as much as it pains me to say it, I think daddy is less likely to do actual prison time than Jared. If and when (please, Rufus, let it be when) Jared gets convicted, she can save face by leaving him and go back to being the sweet princess/apple of daddy's eye.

[WiseGirl]

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I think Ivanka will do whatever most benefits her in the end. 

This times 1,000!

I think princess wants (or gets) the whole Trump empire when daddy kicks the bucket. She'll side with him.

Normally I would be more sensitive about someone passing, but it's him, so nope.

Every other child gets thrown under the bus, but her.

[fraurosena]

Hmm. Well, I don't think I would be surprised at all if the presidunce drops Ivanka like a hot coal if he thinks it will benefit him. He's a narcissistic asshole after all. And although he'll throw Melania, Tiffany, Jared, Junior, Eric, and Barron (in that order) under the bus before princess, in the end, he'll gladly shove her under the wheels if it suits his need.

[GrumpyGran]

I think Ivanka will throw Jared under the bus if he starts to smell. If Dumpy starts looking guilty of something, Melania will be gone, with Baron in tow, pretty quickly. She can write a book and make some bucks to live on.

Dumpy will throw everyone under the bus to avoid prison, although it's hard to imagine him actually ending up there. If it starts looking bad for him, he'll blame anyone he can, except Ivanka, resign and claim he was framed. 

And Ivanka was shoveling some serious shit at that conference, wasn't she?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Queen Ivanka’s uncomfortable throne"

Spoiler

Not since Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire surreptitiously rigged between the towers of the late, lamented World Trade Center in 1974 has there been a tightrope walk as perilous and as public as Ivanka Trump’s.

It’s hard enough trying to be Queen of Manhattan in the 21st century, when the fame factory of social media has scrambled the delicate balance of wealth, glamour and ambition required to wear the crown. Over the past year, Ivanka’s social climb has been further complicated by business woes, legal thickets and — most of all — her father’s snatching of the presidency, which has turned the Trump name to poison in chic society.

Those of us who don’t belong to Manhattan society (meaning nearly everyone) might wonder whether queens are necessary in the first place. But through reigns of terror and periods of grace, matriarchs have ruled for nearly 150 years over America’s island principality between the East River and the Hudson. Caroline Astor is often cited as the first Queen of Manhattan. The Gilded Age made overnight millionaires, but only Mrs. Astor could make a rich person into a socialite. Her guest list was law — at least until she met Alva Vanderbilt.

Alva, an Alabama native with the bearing of a linebacker, usurped Astor’s crown and raised the stakes for future queens. Where Astor reigned in passive silence from a divan raised above her ballroom floor, Vanderbilt was an activist monarch. She led suffrage rallies and organized pro-labor fundraising events (when she wasn’t summering at her Newport mansion, where even the driveway was Italian marble). But her greatest achievement may have been her daughter Consuelo, a slender beauty whom Alva forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough, forever infusing New York society with cosmopolitan worldliness and a bias in favor of the comely.

Since those days, presiding over Manhattan has been a balancing act: a queen must be famous and mysterious at the same time; scheming in private but serene in public; always busy but never tied down. The best of them — Babe Paley, Jackie Onassis — know everyone, yet remain somehow unknowable themselves.

All true of Ivanka, who appears to combine the grit of Vanderbilt with the swanlike elegance of Paley, of whom Truman Capote observed that her only flaw was her perfection. But perfection is a higher bar for a woman today than it was in Paley’s 1960s. Today’s Queen of Manhattan needs more than looks and money. She must be an entrepreneur, a TED-talker, a woke woman and a mother, climbing the best-dressed list even as she floats somehow above the world on a raised platform.

What this looks like in real time Trump demonstrated this week. A post to her Instagram feed (she has more than 4 million followers) showed her stretched out on a bed for story time, surrounded by her three perfect children. “I’m looking forward to visiting Japan, but sure will miss these three!” Queen Mommy chimed. The next we knew, she was smiling upon arrival halfway around the world, her sunglasses opaque, her bow-topped shoes entrancing. Then it was on to Toyko for a speech to the World Assembly for Women, where she dwelled on the importance of opening traditionally male-dominated occupations in science, technology, engineering and math.

“Female and minority participation in STEM fields is moving in the wrong direction,” the Visionary Queen observed, now clad in a pink suit that managed to be at once businesslike and flashy. Fashion websites and news websites tracked her moves with equal intensity — the former telling readers where to buy her outfits, the latter reporting that Ivanka would quickly return to the United States to take up the job of tax reform.

This is a long way from 1980s New York, with Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley trading sly jokes between graceful puffs on their cigarettes, and just as far from the glitz and ditz of a decade ago, starring Paris Hilton and Tinsley Mortimer. It’s a good fit for today’s Manhattan, except for one problem: The Trump name is like a curse throughout the realm.

Her apparel business has been buffeted by anti-Trump boycotts and scrutiny of her China ties. Her husband, Jared Kushner — the silent Ken to her Everything Barbie — is hampered by ethics watchdogs in his desperate attempt to bail out a family-owned skyscraper and at the same time under pressure from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Adding insult to injury, her father is said to be blaming Kushner’s bad advice for some of his own worst decisions, egged on by Javanka-hating Svengali Stephen K. Bannon.

That’s a fine how-do-you-do from a father who knows, down deep, that he alone may keep Ivanka from the throne. “If she weren’t my daughter, it would be so much easier for her,” the president has said. That wasn’t always true, but it is now.

Yeah, my sympathy level is at zero. She didn't have to come to DC and take up space as an "adviser". She could have stayed in NYC and kept her picture-perfect life.

[formergothardite]

I'm sure Ivanka is working hard to "architect" her way out of this mess. 

[AmazonGrace]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/03/ivanka-trump-sexual-harassment-should-never-tolerated/

Spoiler

Sexual harassment of women should "never be tolerated", Ivanka Trump told an audience in Tokyo on Friday, calling for women to be treated with greater respect at work.

Blink twice if you need to be rescued, Ivanka. 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Queen Ivanka’s uncomfortable throne"

  Reveal hidden contents

Not since Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire surreptitiously rigged between the towers of the late, lamented World Trade Center in 1974 has there been a tightrope walk as perilous and as public as Ivanka Trump’s.

It’s hard enough trying to be Queen of Manhattan in the 21st century, when the fame factory of social media has scrambled the delicate balance of wealth, glamour and ambition required to wear the crown. Over the past year, Ivanka’s social climb has been further complicated by business woes, legal thickets and — most of all — her father’s snatching of the presidency, which has turned the Trump name to poison in chic society.

Those of us who don’t belong to Manhattan society (meaning nearly everyone) might wonder whether queens are necessary in the first place. But through reigns of terror and periods of grace, matriarchs have ruled for nearly 150 years over America’s island principality between the East River and the Hudson. Caroline Astor is often cited as the first Queen of Manhattan. The Gilded Age made overnight millionaires, but only Mrs. Astor could make a rich person into a socialite. Her guest list was law — at least until she met Alva Vanderbilt.

Alva, an Alabama native with the bearing of a linebacker, usurped Astor’s crown and raised the stakes for future queens. Where Astor reigned in passive silence from a divan raised above her ballroom floor, Vanderbilt was an activist monarch. She led suffrage rallies and organized pro-labor fundraising events (when she wasn’t summering at her Newport mansion, where even the driveway was Italian marble). But her greatest achievement may have been her daughter Consuelo, a slender beauty whom Alva forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough, forever infusing New York society with cosmopolitan worldliness and a bias in favor of the comely.

Since those days, presiding over Manhattan has been a balancing act: a queen must be famous and mysterious at the same time; scheming in private but serene in public; always busy but never tied down. The best of them — Babe Paley, Jackie Onassis — know everyone, yet remain somehow unknowable themselves.

All true of Ivanka, who appears to combine the grit of Vanderbilt with the swanlike elegance of Paley, of whom Truman Capote observed that her only flaw was her perfection. But perfection is a higher bar for a woman today than it was in Paley’s 1960s. Today’s Queen of Manhattan needs more than looks and money. She must be an entrepreneur, a TED-talker, a woke woman and a mother, climbing the best-dressed list even as she floats somehow above the world on a raised platform.

What this looks like in real time Trump demonstrated this week. A post to her Instagram feed (she has more than 4 million followers) showed her stretched out on a bed for story time, surrounded by her three perfect children. “I’m looking forward to visiting Japan, but sure will miss these three!” Queen Mommy chimed. The next we knew, she was smiling upon arrival halfway around the world, her sunglasses opaque, her bow-topped shoes entrancing. Then it was on to Toyko for a speech to the World Assembly for Women, where she dwelled on the importance of opening traditionally male-dominated occupations in science, technology, engineering and math.

“Female and minority participation in STEM fields is moving in the wrong direction,” the Visionary Queen observed, now clad in a pink suit that managed to be at once businesslike and flashy. Fashion websites and news websites tracked her moves with equal intensity — the former telling readers where to buy her outfits, the latter reporting that Ivanka would quickly return to the United States to take up the job of tax reform.

This is a long way from 1980s New York, with Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley trading sly jokes between graceful puffs on their cigarettes, and just as far from the glitz and ditz of a decade ago, starring Paris Hilton and Tinsley Mortimer. It’s a good fit for today’s Manhattan, except for one problem: The Trump name is like a curse throughout the realm.

Her apparel business has been buffeted by anti-Trump boycotts and scrutiny of her China ties. Her husband, Jared Kushner — the silent Ken to her Everything Barbie — is hampered by ethics watchdogs in his desperate attempt to bail out a family-owned skyscraper and at the same time under pressure from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Adding insult to injury, her father is said to be blaming Kushner’s bad advice for some of his own worst decisions, egged on by Javanka-hating Svengali Stephen K. Bannon.

That’s a fine how-do-you-do from a father who knows, down deep, that he alone may keep Ivanka from the throne. “If she weren’t my daughter, it would be so much easier for her,” the president has said. That wasn’t always true, but it is now.

Yeah, my sympathy level is at zero. She didn't have to come to DC and take up space as an "adviser". She could have stayed in NYC and kept her picture-perfect life.

First, she doesn't know her own limitations. Second, she's not anywhere near as smart as she thinks she is. I think that all of the women mentioned in that article did not grow up in the echo chamber that produced Ivanka. They had more awareness of needing to curry favor and do actual work to achieve the reputation. For some of them the work was charity work, lots of it. I doubt Ivanka bothers with that.

I'm curious as to why she bailed out of Japan before Daddy showed up. Not buying that tax bullshit.

[VelociRapture]

1 hour ago, GrumpyGran said:

First, she doesn't know her own limitations. Second, she's not anywhere near as smart as she thinks she is. I think that all of the women mentioned in that article did not grow up in the echo chamber that produced Ivanka. They had more awareness of needing to curry favor and do actual work to achieve the reputation. For some of them the work was charity work, lots of it. I doubt Ivanka bothers with that.

I'm curious as to why she bailed out of Japan before Daddy showed up. Not buying that tax bullshit.

Maybe she wanted to spend time with her family. You know, before she and the Kush are indicted. 

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Queen Ivanka’s uncomfortable throne"

  Reveal hidden contents

Not since Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire surreptitiously rigged between the towers of the late, lamented World Trade Center in 1974 has there been a tightrope walk as perilous and as public as Ivanka Trump’s.

It’s hard enough trying to be Queen of Manhattan in the 21st century, when the fame factory of social media has scrambled the delicate balance of wealth, glamour and ambition required to wear the crown. Over the past year, Ivanka’s social climb has been further complicated by business woes, legal thickets and — most of all — her father’s snatching of the presidency, which has turned the Trump name to poison in chic society.

Those of us who don’t belong to Manhattan society (meaning nearly everyone) might wonder whether queens are necessary in the first place. But through reigns of terror and periods of grace, matriarchs have ruled for nearly 150 years over America’s island principality between the East River and the Hudson. Caroline Astor is often cited as the first Queen of Manhattan. The Gilded Age made overnight millionaires, but only Mrs. Astor could make a rich person into a socialite. Her guest list was law — at least until she met Alva Vanderbilt.

Alva, an Alabama native with the bearing of a linebacker, usurped Astor’s crown and raised the stakes for future queens. Where Astor reigned in passive silence from a divan raised above her ballroom floor, Vanderbilt was an activist monarch. She led suffrage rallies and organized pro-labor fundraising events (when she wasn’t summering at her Newport mansion, where even the driveway was Italian marble). But her greatest achievement may have been her daughter Consuelo, a slender beauty whom Alva forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough, forever infusing New York society with cosmopolitan worldliness and a bias in favor of the comely.

Since those days, presiding over Manhattan has been a balancing act: a queen must be famous and mysterious at the same time; scheming in private but serene in public; always busy but never tied down. The best of them — Babe Paley, Jackie Onassis — know everyone, yet remain somehow unknowable themselves.

All true of Ivanka, who appears to combine the grit of Vanderbilt with the swanlike elegance of Paley, of whom Truman Capote observed that her only flaw was her perfection. But perfection is a higher bar for a woman today than it was in Paley’s 1960s. Today’s Queen of Manhattan needs more than looks and money. She must be an entrepreneur, a TED-talker, a woke woman and a mother, climbing the best-dressed list even as she floats somehow above the world on a raised platform.

What this looks like in real time Trump demonstrated this week. A post to her Instagram feed (she has more than 4 million followers) showed her stretched out on a bed for story time, surrounded by her three perfect children. “I’m looking forward to visiting Japan, but sure will miss these three!” Queen Mommy chimed. The next we knew, she was smiling upon arrival halfway around the world, her sunglasses opaque, her bow-topped shoes entrancing. Then it was on to Toyko for a speech to the World Assembly for Women, where she dwelled on the importance of opening traditionally male-dominated occupations in science, technology, engineering and math.

“Female and minority participation in STEM fields is moving in the wrong direction,” the Visionary Queen observed, now clad in a pink suit that managed to be at once businesslike and flashy. Fashion websites and news websites tracked her moves with equal intensity — the former telling readers where to buy her outfits, the latter reporting that Ivanka would quickly return to the United States to take up the job of tax reform.

This is a long way from 1980s New York, with Nan Kempner and Pat Buckley trading sly jokes between graceful puffs on their cigarettes, and just as far from the glitz and ditz of a decade ago, starring Paris Hilton and Tinsley Mortimer. It’s a good fit for today’s Manhattan, except for one problem: The Trump name is like a curse throughout the realm.

Her apparel business has been buffeted by anti-Trump boycotts and scrutiny of her China ties. Her husband, Jared Kushner — the silent Ken to her Everything Barbie — is hampered by ethics watchdogs in his desperate attempt to bail out a family-owned skyscraper and at the same time under pressure from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Adding insult to injury, her father is said to be blaming Kushner’s bad advice for some of his own worst decisions, egged on by Javanka-hating Svengali Stephen K. Bannon.

That’s a fine how-do-you-do from a father who knows, down deep, that he alone may keep Ivanka from the throne. “If she weren’t my daughter, it would be so much easier for her,” the president has said. That wasn’t always true, but it is now.

Yeah, my sympathy level is at zero. She didn't have to come to DC and take up space as an "adviser". She could have stayed in NYC and kept her picture-perfect life.

I’m definitely not wasting tears for Ivanka. She made her choices and she can deal with all of the very justified fallout.

Tiffany better be thanking her lucky stars that she’s still in school and not old enough to really be a part of this clusterfuck. She may be the only adult Trump to emerge from this relatively unscathed. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ivanka Trump’s impending visit to India prompts roundup of beggars"

Spoiler

NEW DELHI — As Ivanka Trump’s visit to India nears, the south Indian city of Hyderabad is getting ready to dazzle its foreign guests — by locking its homeless and destitute people out of sight in prison rehabilitation centers.

Nearly 400 beggars were picked up from city streets and trucked away to one such center at the Chanchalguda jail, the Indian Express reported.

As the city scrubs up to impress its foreign guests, police plan to clear away 6,000 beggars and have banned begging entirely in the city until the first week of January.

The beggars are “employing children and handicapped persons to seek alms at the main junctions of roads,” said the ban order. “Such acts are causing annoyance and awkwardness.”

...

“Some beggars argued that we were taking their freedom to live anywhere they want but we told them it was for their own good because they are going to the rehab centre where they will be taken care of,” an unnamed official told the Express.

The beggar clearance comes weeks ahead of the three-day Global Entrepreneurship Summit that starts Nov. 28, where the first daughter will lead the American delegation to co-host the summit.

Authorities told ABC News that they want Trump and foreign delegates to see India’s good side and not the “Slumdog Millionaire” stereotype commonly associated with the country.

The event’s theme is “Women First” and its tagline, “Prosperity for All.”

In the past few decades, Hyderabad has rapidly rebranded itself as India’s Silicon Valley, as an outsourcing hub for global firms and the Indian headquarters of international tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. But despite rapid growth, wealth is unevenly distributed and a huge homeless population lives off the scraps of the city’s techie middle class.

In recent years, the city’s fortunes have begun to turn for the worse. Automation threatens jobs and new visa restrictions in multiple countries, including changes to H-1B in the United States, have dampened the hopes and ambitions of many young technology students.

To bring back some of its sparkle, India’s government is keen to portray the country as a pioneering technology hub and attract foreign investment.

George Rakesh Babu, founder of the homeless charity Good Samaritans in Hyderabad, said, “The preparations are happening in every corner of our city. But the prison capacity in Hyderabad is not enough to look after all these people.” He pointed out that the central jail’s maximum capacity was only 1,000.

Vanishing acts like this are not unprecedented when foreign dignitaries come to India. They happened in Hyderabad in 2000 when President Bill Clinton visited the city.

To judge from some of the reaction on the police department’s Twitter account, the move was welcomed by many.

...

Others lamented that the roundup was temporary.

” . . . After the international conference has completed, situation remains same,” tweeted one man.

“Super job,” tweeted another. “But see that they r not allowed again on road.”

...

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit was announced in June, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Trump in Washington.

I'm not surprised. They don't want to offend Princess Ivanka's eyes.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Ivanka Trump’s impending visit to India prompts roundup of beggars"

  Reveal hidden contents

NEW DELHI — As Ivanka Trump’s visit to India nears, the south Indian city of Hyderabad is getting ready to dazzle its foreign guests — by locking its homeless and destitute people out of sight in prison rehabilitation centers.

Nearly 400 beggars were picked up from city streets and trucked away to one such center at the Chanchalguda jail, the Indian Express reported.

As the city scrubs up to impress its foreign guests, police plan to clear away 6,000 beggars and have banned begging entirely in the city until the first week of January.

The beggars are “employing children and handicapped persons to seek alms at the main junctions of roads,” said the ban order. “Such acts are causing annoyance and awkwardness.”

...

“Some beggars argued that we were taking their freedom to live anywhere they want but we told them it was for their own good because they are going to the rehab centre where they will be taken care of,” an unnamed official told the Express.

The beggar clearance comes weeks ahead of the three-day Global Entrepreneurship Summit that starts Nov. 28, where the first daughter will lead the American delegation to co-host the summit.

Authorities told ABC News that they want Trump and foreign delegates to see India’s good side and not the “Slumdog Millionaire” stereotype commonly associated with the country.

The event’s theme is “Women First” and its tagline, “Prosperity for All.”

In the past few decades, Hyderabad has rapidly rebranded itself as India’s Silicon Valley, as an outsourcing hub for global firms and the Indian headquarters of international tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. But despite rapid growth, wealth is unevenly distributed and a huge homeless population lives off the scraps of the city’s techie middle class.

In recent years, the city’s fortunes have begun to turn for the worse. Automation threatens jobs and new visa restrictions in multiple countries, including changes to H-1B in the United States, have dampened the hopes and ambitions of many young technology students.

To bring back some of its sparkle, India’s government is keen to portray the country as a pioneering technology hub and attract foreign investment.

George Rakesh Babu, founder of the homeless charity Good Samaritans in Hyderabad, said, “The preparations are happening in every corner of our city. But the prison capacity in Hyderabad is not enough to look after all these people.” He pointed out that the central jail’s maximum capacity was only 1,000.

Vanishing acts like this are not unprecedented when foreign dignitaries come to India. They happened in Hyderabad in 2000 when President Bill Clinton visited the city.

To judge from some of the reaction on the police department’s Twitter account, the move was welcomed by many.

...

Others lamented that the roundup was temporary.

” . . . After the international conference has completed, situation remains same,” tweeted one man.

“Super job,” tweeted another. “But see that they r not allowed again on road.”

...

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit was announced in June, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Trump in Washington.

I'm not surprised. They don't want to offend Princess Ivanka's eyes.

Oh goody. Another expensive jaunt for the princess. Probably really scouting a new location for a factory. They should leave those beggars out on the street, she would be thrilled to know there are so many people who would be willing to work for next to nothing. Cause that's how she empowers women.

[GreyhoundFan]

Jennifer Rubin has no love for Ivanka: "Ivanka Trump might be the worst enabler of them all"

Spoiler

CNN reports:

Ivanka Trump spoke out for the first time against embattled Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing sexual relationships with teenagers when he was in his early thirties. Her father, President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has largely stayed mum on the issue.

“There’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” Trump told The Associated Press in an interview otherwise focused on tax reform published Wednesday.

“I’ve yet to see a valid explanation and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” the first daughter and presidential adviser said.

Really, Ivanka? Next time a news outlet snags an interview with her, it might ask:

• Why can her father not bring himself to condemn Moore?
• Would you urge Alabama voters to cast ballots for his opponent, Doug Jones?
• Is there a “special place in hell” for a man who reportedly “entered the Miss Teen USA changing room where girls as young as 15 were in various states of undress” and bragged about such situations (“I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else”)?
• Does that spot in hell have a spot for men who discuss their teenage daughter in creepy sexualized terms?
• Would that spot in hell have room for a man who reportedly tells 14-year-olds that “in a couple of years I’ll be dating you”?

Ivanka Trump knows that young women and men allegedly accosted and abused by powerful men in Hollywood (e.g. Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey) have come forward with detailed accounts. Criminal investigations have been launched, series and movies canceled, and careers ruined. So:

• Is there also a special place in hell for powerful men who made crude sexual advances, grope women and use their status to quiet and defame their accusers?
• Should those women be believed if their stories are detailed, consistent with known facts and collectively portray a pattern of behavior?

Ivanka Trump doesn’t like being called “complicit” in her father’s policy agenda. But her great sin is helping to vouch for and normalize her father’s character. His alleged predatory behavior — just as Roy Moore’s — should have disqualified him from office. And yet she helped convince voters that he was a terrific guy, a feminist even.

When the New York Times ran a report extensively documenting his treatment of women, Ivanka Trump was there to defend him:

“Most of the time, when stories are inaccurate, they’re not discredited and I will be frustrated by that. But in this case, I think they went so far,” Ivanka said. “… This is an article that is widely being discredited. The lead person who was interviewed — for the story and that the story opens up with — was all over the news yesterday, saying that they manipulated what she was saying. So you know, I don’t find it that meaningful to comment on this particular story because I think the facts are starting to speak for themselves.”

Ivanka also rejected a former colleague’s claim that she had been groped by Donald Trump during a business meeting.

“I’m not in every interaction my father has, but he’s not a groper. It’s not who he is,” she said. “And I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women. He was promoting women in development and construction at a time when it was unheard of. There was no trend towards equality in the real estate and construction industry back in the 1980s. And he was doing it because he believes ultimately in merit.”

Really.

In July 2016, she told the Sunday Times of London, “My father is a feminist. He’s a big reason I am the woman I am today.”

And in April this year in Germany, boos rained down on her when she insisted, “I’ve certainly heard the criticism from the media and that’s been perpetuated, but I know from personal experience, and I think the thousands of women who have worked with and for my father for decades are a testament to his belief and solid conviction in the potential of women. … As an adviser and as a daughter, I can speak on a very personal level knowing that he encouraged me and enabled me to thrive.”

Whether or not Ivanka Trump knows better, she has put herself forth to validate her father’s treatment of women and discredit accusers. She’s in no position now to lecture us on Moore, although if she’d like now to come clean on her father’s conduct and comment on his eternal punishment, she might recover some dignity and respect in the eyes of American women (and men, as well). Since that’s not happening, my advice to her is to make herself scarce. Her voice only reminds us of her unforgivable complicity in selling Trump to the voters.