Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers gave a speech at this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, targeting GOP candidates, Donald Trump, VP Joe Biden and the President. While he received quite a few laughs, some guests (i.e. Trump) were less than amused:
Photo: UpstateNYer
From the Daily Mail:
The West Wing of the White House is all-but disappearing behind an $86 million building project that is going to last for years.
And a mysterious tunnel is being built, fuelling speculation that a secret underground lair is what’s really under construction.
In recent weeks, an expanding and sometimes ear-splitting zone of excavation has enveloped the mansion’s famous office wing.
Heavy equipment and metal-and-concrete superstructures are part of the vast construction project.
The front door and the Marine who guards it have disappeared behind a high green-and-white plywood fence. From Pennsylvania Avenue, all that’s visible is a sliver of second-floor roof line.
For years to come, the front yard at 1600 Pennsylvania will remain a noisy building site, say officials in charge of the White House’s ‘Big Dig’.
Officials describe the job as an overdue upgrade of underground utilities. That includes water and sewer lines, electrical conduits, pipes for chilled and hot water and steam heat systems, and storm sewers.
Dan Turton with President Obama.
Assassination attempts against congressional representatives, former officials dumped in landfills, and now Christopher Weber from Politics Daily at AOL says that the wife of a White House aide has been found dead in a burning car. If this is frigid, sleepy January, I shudder to think what the crazy heat of July is going to bring:
Ashley Turton, wife of the Obama administration’s House of Representatives liaison, Dan Turton, was found dead in a burning car Monday morning, Roll Call and other news outlets are reporting.
Fire officials said it appeared the car crashed as it was pulling in or out of the garage behind a rowhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., at about 5 a.m. Neighbors dialed 911 after spotting the fire.
The body was discovered after fire crews doused the blaze. The fire also charred part of the garage. Nobody in the house was injured, fire officials said.
Gay rights activists briefly handcuffed themselves to the White House’s north gate on Monday, urging President Barack Obama to repeal a ban on homosexuals serving openly in the military.
Thirteen demonstrators organized by the GetEQUAL campaign for gay rights — including nine veterans, a Catholic priest and other advocates &mdash were arrested after shouting they were “proud to serve” and vowing: “We will not disappear.”
“Today, we have sent a loud and clear message to the US Senate and President Obama that we expect them to make good on their promises to end this inhumane law this year, during the lame-duck session of Congress,” GetEQUAL co-founder and director Robin McGehee said in a statement.
She was among those arrested.
The protest came ahead of the Pentagon’s Internal Review into the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, due on December 1.
According to The Washington Post, the long-awaited report, which included a survey of troops, found that the United States could lift the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces with little risk to current war efforts.
The Independent reported on Oct. 8:
The White House was facing allegations yesterday that it had muzzled its own scientists in the early days and weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill so that the public would be ignorant of the potential scale of the environmental disaster that was unfolding.
A paper written for the National Commission established by President Barack Obama to investigate what happened suggests that officials at the White House stood in the way of scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when they were preparing to release details of a worst-case scenario for the blow-out including a top-end estimate of the rate of flow of oil into the sea.
In a second report also written for the Commission, investigators say that “for the first 10 days of the spill, it appears that a sense of over-optimism affected responders”.
As the spill worsened BP came under wide criticism for allegedly attempting to downplay the scale of the leak.
Dina Cappiello writes on the AP via Yahoo News:
WASHINGTON — The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been, according to a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission’s staff reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says, citing interviews with government officials.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Jerry Miller, head of the White House science office’s ocean subcommittee, told The Associated Press in an interview at a St.
The White House is going green. First Michelle Obama began a vegetable garden, now they’re installing solar panels. The Obama’s are encouraging an environmentally conscious lifestyle. From The Environmental Leader:
The White House announced plans to install solar panels and a solar hot water heater on the roof of the White House Residence. These two solar installations will be part of a Department of Energy (DOE) demonstration project that shows that American solar technologies are available and reliable for installation in homes throughout the country, according to the DOE.
President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House’s West Wing 31 years ago but they were removed by his successor, Ronald Reagan, reports Bloomberg.
“President Obama has said the Federal Government has to lead by example in creating opportunity and jobs in clean energy,” said Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in a statement. ”By installing solar panels on arguably the most famous house in the country, his residence, the President is underscoring that commitment to lead and the promise and importance of renewable energy in the United States.”
Continues at The Environmental Leader …… Read the rest
In Washington, the Obama economic team has sprung a leak. First, Budget Director Peter Orszag, the calculating numbers savant, bailed. And now, “distinguished” economist Christina Romer, the only woman in that inner circle boys club has quit too. (Would you want to be around Larry Summers all day long?)
Why this crew of losers wasn’t fired eludes me despite their claims of having prevented a worst collapse. No doubt, they know more than they are saying, and, perhaps, now that they are no longer selling, they may be willing to do some telling on just how bad it is and what went wrong.
Who’s next? Could Ben Bernanke be leaving the Fed for Fed-Ex?
Economist Max Wolfe has none of the political restraints of power. At the news of another 131, 000 jobs gone, at all the talk of permanent unemployment as the “new normal,” he sighed with a tinge of optimism:
“We have been in the present labor market swoon since December 2007.… Read the rest
With a title like that who can resist reading? Bound to disappoint of course… From the Wall Street Journal:
Seven years ago today, in a speech on the Iraq war, Sen. Ted Kennedy fired the first shot in an all-out assault on President George W. Bush’s integrity. “All the evidence points to the conclusion,” Kennedy said, that the Bush administration “put a spin on the intelligence and a spin on the truth.” Later that day Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle told reporters Mr. Bush needed “to be forthcoming” about the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Thus began a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us.
The next morning, Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and John Edwards joined in. Sen. Kerry said, “It is time for a president who will face the truth and tell the truth.” Mr. Edwards chimed in, “The administration has a problem with the truth.”
The battering would continue, and it was a monument to hypocrisy and cynicism.
Shawn Talbott, the nutritional biochemist behind the disinformation documentary Killer At Large, is taking his film to the White House. Here’s the post from his blog:
I’m VERY excited about my trip to Washington DC tomorrow to participate in Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to fight childhood obesity. I’m attending this event through my role as Executive Producer for the Killer At Large film and as part of the advisory board for the Chef & Child Foundation of the American Culinary Foundation (ACF).
It will be a thrill to join more than 50 chefs for the kickoff of the “Chefs Move to Schools” on June 4. This new program is part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and will be led by White House assistant chef, Sam Kass as a way to take the message of healthy nutrition to schools across America.
For a long time, we have made the Killer At Large documentary about the American obesity epidemic available FREE to teachers and schools around the country – and I’m pleased that so many chefs have taken Killer into their own educational programs.
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