https://twitter.com/MikeBloomberg/status/1211781268922359810
Mike Bloomberg ✔ @MikeBloomberg

As president, I'll turn the East Room into an open office plan, where I’ll sit with our team.

I’ll use the Oval Office for some official functions – never for tweeting – but the rest of the time, I’ll be where a leader should be: with the team. http://politi.co/2tbPhLl



5:49 PM - Dec 30, 2019

https://www.nbcwashington.com/entertainment/the-scene/newseum-will-shut-its-doors-tuesday/2194298/



Published at 6:57 am on December 30, 2019

The Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue NW will shut its doors for the final time Tuesday.

The museum, which is dedicated to the First Amendment, has seen 850,000 visitors every year. But with general admission set at nearly $25 for adults and nearly $15 for kids, the Newseum has struggled to compete with free museums in the District.

All of the Newseum's historic artifacts, including the huge facade, will go into storage. The Freedom Forum, the Newseum's primary funder and creator, hopes to reopen it at another location but has not announced a plan.

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https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1211694118767738886
Barack Obama @BarackObama

From hip-hop to country to The Boss, here are my songs of the year. If you’re looking for something to keep you company on a long drive or help you turn up a workout, I hope there’s a track or two in here that does the trick.



12:02 PM - Dec 30, 2019

https://heavy.com/news/2019/12/thomas-grafton/

Grafton Thomas was named as the suspect accused of stabbing multiple Jewish people with a machete at a Monsey, New York rabbi’s home during Hanukkah celebrations in Rockland County, New York, on Saturday, December 28, 2019. It was the latest in a series of attacks against Jewish people in New York.

The Jerusalem Post reported that the attack occurred at what is called Rabbi Rottenberg’s Shul. Ramapo police chief Brad Weidel said in a press conference that five people were stabbed at the residence. Two of the victims remained hospitalized on Sunday.

Some media outlets reported the suspect’s name as Thomas Grafton or Thomas E. Grafton, but public records reveal it to be Grafton E. Thomas.

Grafton Thomas is 37 and lives in Greenwood Lake, New York, which is about 20 miles away from Monsey in Orange County, New York. Governor Andrew Cuomo said Sunday, “This is violence spurred by hate. It is mass violence and I consider this an act of domestic terrorism. Let’s call it what it is.” He said there have been at least 13 anti-Semitic attacks in New York state since December 8.

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The suspect fled the stabbing scene in a vehicle, but it didn’t take long for police to locate it. Police revealed that the NYPD had located the suspect in the 32nd Precinct. Authorities said a witness wrote down the suspect’s license plate at the scene and it was uploaded into a police database. License plate readers helped alert the NYPD that the suspect had driven his Nissan Sentra into New York City, where he was apprehended.

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https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/edward-gallagher-members-of-navy-seal-team-7-say-chief-committed-war-crimes-in-interviews-with-investigators/

Never-before-seen confidential video reveals shocking details from the war crimes investigation of a decorated Navy SEAL. In interviews obtained by The New York Times'"The Weekly," members of SEAL Team 7 said they witnessed Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher stabbing a young ISIS fighter for no reason.

The SEALs call Gallagher "toxic," "evil" and a man who was "perfectly OK with killing anybody that was moving," reports CBS News correspondent David Martin.

"I think he just wants to kill anybody he can," one said.

The testimony paints a chilling pattern of violence executed by their platoon chief.

"Did Eddie say anything when he did this or did he just literally pull out a knife and just start stabbing him?" one SEAL was asked.

"He just pulled out a knife and started stabbing him," he replied.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/305760/

William Greider died this week at age 83. This essay, originally published in 1980, is widely considered his most famous piece of writing. It caused a firestorm of controversy when it first appeared. David A. Stockman, the budget director for the incoming Reagan Administration, spoke too freely to Greider about his doubts over Reagan’s supply-side theory of economics. Stockman was then, in his words, "taken to the woodshed" by the president.

"None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."
—David Stockman


I. How the World Works
Generally, he had no time for idle sentimentality, but David A. Stockman indulged himself for a moment as he and I approached the farmhouse in western Michigan where Stockrnan was reared. With feeling, he described a youthful world of hard work, variety, and manageable challenges. "It's something that's disappearing now, the working family farm," Stockman observed. "We had a little of everything—an acre of strawberries, an acre of peaches, a field of corn, fifteen cows. We did everything."

A light snow had fallen the day before, dusting the fields and orchards with white, which softened the dour outline of the Stockman brick farmhouse. It was built seventy years ago by Stockman's maternal grandfather, who also planted the silver birches that ring the house. He was county treasurer of Berrien County for twenty years, and his reputation in local politics was an asset for his grandson.

The farm has changed since Stockman's boyhood; it is more specialized. The bright-red outbuildings behind the house include a wooden barn where livestock was once kept, a chicken coop also no longer in use, a garage, and a large metal-sided building, where the heavy equipment— in particular, a mechanical grape picker— is stored. Grapes are now the principal crop that Allen Stockman, David's father, produces. He earns additional income by leasing out the grape picker. The farm is a small but authentic example of the entrepreneurial capitalism that David Stockman so admires.

As the car approached the house, Stockman's attention was diverted by a minor anomaly in the idyllic rural landscape: two tennis courts. They seemed out of place, alone, amidst the snow-covered fields at an intersection next to the Stockman farm. Stockman hastened to explain that, despite appearances, these were not his family's private tennis courts. They belonged to the township. Royalton Township (of which Al Stockman was treasurer) had received, like all other local units of government, its portion of the federal revenue-sharing funds, and this was how the trustees had decided to spend part of the money from Washington. "It's all right, I suppose," Stockman said amiably, "but these people would never have taxed themselves to build that. Not these tight-fisted taxpayers! As long as someone is giving them the money, sure, they are willing to spend it. But they would never have used their own money."

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http://pressthink.org/2019/12/the-christmas-eve-confessions-of-chuck-todd/

That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was discoverable years before he says he discovered it.

26 DEC 2019 1:40 AM THE CHRISTMAS EVE CONFESSIONS OF CHUCK TODD

Jay Rosen

‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s Meet the Press.

Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain weird.

Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.

Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press. While the theme of the interview was waking up to the truth of Republican actions in the information warfare space, Todd went to sleep on the implications of what he revealed. It took him three years to understand a fact about American politics that was there on the surface, unconcealed since the day after inauguration. Many, many interpreters had described it for him during those lost years when he could not bring himself to believe it. (I am one.)

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