Donald Trump is circumventing attempts to control his behavior by the White House Chief of Staff, with the help of Melania.

I'm going to hold my breath until that mean old John Kelly gives me back my Twitter machine.

Courtesy of New York Magazine:  

White House chief of staff John Kelly’s celebrated efforts to corral his notoriously undisciplined boss may not be 100 percent effective, according to an unsurprising new report in The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, President Trump has been known to summon aides to his private quarters at night to give them assignments, which he then asks them to keep secret from Kelly. 

The Journal also reports that, according to several anonymous sources, Trump sometimes dodges his official call schedules so he can sneak in advice from friends outside the White House. That is, again, to avoid Kelly and Trump’s other minders’ attempts to control who the president talks to and what information he receives. From the other end, Trump’s friends have reportedly been getting around Kelly by passing messages to Trump through the First Lady, who has, according to the Journal, “taken on a more central role as a political adviser” since moving into the White House over the summer. 

The White House didn’t comment on the story, but staffers maintained that Trump and Kelly continue to get along and work well together. Melania Trump’s spokesperson, on the other hand, called the reports “more fake news.” But a more accurate categorization would probably be: “more leaked news that characterizes the president as a mischievous little boy treating the White House as his clubhouse and his advisers like substitute teachers.”

You know I thought people were half joking when they referred to Trump as the Toddler-in-Chief. 

But now that seems to be precisely the correct definition for who he is.

Organization trains Christian teachers to sneak their religion into public schools.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:  

Finn Laursen believes millions of American children are no longer learning right from wrong, in part because public schools have been stripped of religion. To repair that frayed moral fabric, Laursen and his colleagues want to bring the light of Jesus Christ into public school classrooms across the country — and they are training teachers to do just that. 

The Christian Educators Association International, an organization that sees the nation’s public schools as “the largest single mission field in America,” aims to show Christian teachers how to live their faith — and evangelize in public schools — without running afoul of the Constitution’s prohibition on the government establishing or promoting any particular religion. 

“We’re not talking about proselytizing. That would be illegal,” said Laursen, the group’s executive director. “But we’re saying you can do a lot of things. . . . It’s a mission field that you fish in differently.” 

“They appear to be encouraging teachers to cross the line,” said Daniel Mach of the American Civil Liberties Union, which fought the Christian Educators Association in a 2009 court case over Florida teachers’ religious expression at school. “Decisions about the religious upbringing of children should be left in the hands of parents and families, not public school officials.” 

Others say that there would be outrage if teachers of any other faith were being encouraged to express their beliefs in the classroom, legally or otherwise — particularly at a time when anti- Muslim sentiment is on the rise and some parents have complained that academic lessons about Islam can amount to religious indoctrination.

And that's really the crux of the issue.

These Christian educators believe that THEY are being discriminated against for their religious beliefs, when if there were another religious group using the same devious tactics they would be justifiably horrified.

THAT is why we have the separation of church and state, to protect children from proselytizing from ANY religious group or denomination.

You would think that educators might actually know that.

Darrell Issa tries to earn brownie points from internet users by kissing up to Reddit. Reddit bitchslaps him instead.

Seriously how smart can these so-called "Redditors" be?

Courtesy of CNN:

In an unusual step, a U.S. congressman is proposing a two-year ban on all new federal legislation regulating the Internet. 

Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California who has been an advocate for Internet freedoms, has posted online a draft of his legislation, the Internet American Moratorium Act of 2012. The bill would "create a two-year moratorium on any new laws, rules or regulations governing the Internet." 

Issa first posted the complete text of the bill Monday on Project Madison, the nickname for a crowdsourcing platform that allows citizens to amend individual passages of legislation by adding or striking language. On Tuesday, he posted a link to the bill on Reddit, the social news site, where users quickly voted it to the top. 

"Together, we can make Washington take a break from messing w/ the Internet," Issa said on Reddit, where he also invited users to suggest changes to the proposed bill. He said he will begin taking questions about it from Reddit users Wednesday morning.

I don't trust Darrell Issa as far as I can throw him, and someday I'd like to find out just how far that might be, and the overwhelmingly liberal users of Reddit were no less suspicious. Here are a few of the responses that he received:

Hey Darrell, why did you vote for CISPA? 

He's a wolf in sheep's clothing. He doesn't support SOPA, but was a co-sponsor of CISPA because it wasn't as widely publicized. He's been constantly lying to everybody regarding his stance on net neutrality for the past two years. 

His legislation's name is as Orwellian as the PATRIOT Act, come to think of it. Issa's shown himself to be a sleaze time and again...I'm certain he has an ulterior motive. 

Internet lawyer here. This bill, as currently drafted, is a bogus, apparently fraudulent attempt to impose a wholesale ban on all federal regulations regardless of their impact on the internet. Reddit, we are being pandered to by a Republican Party whose future existence is threatened by its tanking approval ratings among the "young."

There were a few who tried to come to Issa's aid and provide a more neutral response, but overall there was mostly open hostility and anger at the idea that he thought they were that easily manipulated.

Overall it was very gratifying to see that the Redditors, mostly comprised of the very young people who we are counting on to move this country forward, did not fall for what I believe was a fairly obvious attempt to gain their support in a transparently sneaky fashion.

Perhaps Issa might think twice before trying this kind of bullshit again.

P.S. For those few who have never heard of Reddit, let me cautiously provide a link. However be warned, hours of very productive time may be lost forever if you visit.

Just what is Mitt Romney hiding from Uncle Sam in his offshore accounts? Good question.

"Look it's not my fault the tax laws allow me to get away with this kind of thing."

Courtesy of Vanity Fair:

The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true. The answer, in fact, isn’t straightforward. Romney, like the superhero who whirls and backflips unscathed through a web of laser beams while everyone else gets zapped, is certainly a remarkable financial acrobat. But careful analysis of his financial and business affairs also reveals a man who, like some other Wall Street titans, seems comfortable striding into some fuzzy gray zones.

"Gray areas?" Somehow I think that the Republicans would allow President Obama no such "gray areas." But should they be of concern to the American voters?

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it. 

That’s not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.

The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it, as if to remind us of George Romney’s warning that one or two tax returns can provide a misleading picture. Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.” 

Simply put Mitt Romney is a man running for President, who appears at least, to keep as much money out of the hands of his own government as humanly possible.

Money, by the way, that he made right here in the good old USA. And money that he now hides in tax havens in other countries.

Should voters be irritated by that? Yeah, since they are expected to pay their share while wealthy tax cheats like Romney squirrel their money away in offshore accounts, I certainly think they should be.

Take a moment to read the entire Vanity Fair article if you have the time, it is really quite eye opening.