Please stop electing Republicans

She also signed a law weakening child labor laws.  Those kids probably don't have time to read.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Huckabee sleaze?

Who could have imagined?

Arkansas Republicans on Thursday approved an audit of their governor’s purchases after a blogger’s open-records requests unleashed a political storm that has resulted in claims about the state altering public documents.

At the center of the controversy: a $19,000 lectern for Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

What started with raised eyebrows over a hefty price tag has given rise to questions about the state’s handling of public information requests. Now, a Republican legislative panel will audit the lectern purchase, as well as how Sanders’s office handles open-records requests.

  WaPo

UPDATE 10:02 am:

Typical red state behavior

Was this a good choice?

Considering the last couple of years have seen "normal" vs "crazy" applied to the GOP, is this the best choice of phrases for her to use?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The important stuff

Delivering for Arkansans.

Do they ever listen to themselves?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Arkansas, heads up

Nice ad by the man running against Sarah Huckabee Sanders for Governor of Arkansas...

Light years ahead of Sanders.

It's going to be very ugly

She'll have to fight Marjorie Taylor Greene for it.

Republicans.  The worst.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

People are getting nasty out there

Yeah, she earned that.

Forbes is not playing

That Donald Trump devolved from commander-in-chief to liar-in-chief didn’t surprise Forbes: As we’ve chronicled early and often, for all his billions and Barnum-like abilities, he’s been shamelessly exaggerating and prevaricating to our faces for almost four decades. More astonishing: the number of people willing to lend credence to that obvious mendacity on his behalf.

[...]

From Day One at the Trump White House, up has been down, yes has been no, failure has been success. Sean Spicer set the tone with the inauguration crowd size – the worst kind of whopper, as it demanded that people disbelieve their own eyes. The next day, Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s lie with a new term, “alternative facts.” Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied at scale, from smearing those who accused Trump of sexual harassment to conjuring jobs statistics. Her successor, Stephanie Grisham, over the course of a year, never even held a press conference, though the BS continued unabated across friendly outlets. And finally, Kayleigh McEnany, Harvard Law graduate, a propaganda prodigy at 32 who makes smiling falsehood an art form. All of this magnified by journalists too often following an old playbook ill-prepared for an Orwellian communication era.

[...]

Press secretaries like Joe Lockhart, Ari Fleischer and Jay Carney, who left the White House with their reputations in various stages of intact, made millions taking their skills — and credibility — to corporate America. Trump’s liars don’t merit that same golden parachute. Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

[...]

[A]s Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, in a thriving democracy, everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Our national reset starts there.

  Forbes

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sarah Sanders is still out there

Sarah Sanders deleted a nasty tweet

But, as they say, the internet doesn't forget.

I think so, too.  As Sarah Kendzior says, the cruelty is the point.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of Sarah Sanders...

It seems she needs to get out more.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There's an easy remedy, Sarah

Then don't be one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sarah found a job!

On Fox & Friends.




...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  The revolving door betwedn Fox and the White House.

Help name Sarah Huckabee's inevitable book

Some of these, as you might have guessed, are pretty good.

Sarah Sanders' replacement

From the few times I've seen of lying and defending Melania, she should be fine, but I wonder how Melania feels about having her spokesperson taken away from her.

"I am pleased to announce @StephGrisham45 will be the next @PressSec & Comms Director! She has been with us since 2015 - @POTUS & I can think of no better person to serve the Administration & our country. Excited to have Stephanie working for both sides of the @WhiteHouse. #BeBest" Melania Trump tweeted.

  CNN

I guess she's ok with it.

Grisham will keep her current job too.

[...]

Trump has tweaked the job duties before handing the reins to Grisham, whose purview will include a larger scope of responsibility than that of her predecessor Sarah Sanders, and one as yet unprecedented in this administration. Trump has appointed Grisham both White House director of communications as well as press secretary, a senior White House official tells CNN. Grisham will be assuming the roles formerly held by Bill Shine, who departed as White House communications director in March, and Sanders, who has said her last day will be this Friday.

Wow. She's going to have a lot on her plate. Oh wait, I forgot. They don't do press conferences any more. She'll have plenty of time.

Grisham has been with team Trump longer than anyone currently in the White House, with the exception of Dan Scavino, both of whom started on the Trump campaign in 2015.

[...]

After Trump took office, Grisham served as deputy press secretary in the West Wing during Sean Spicer's tenure.

However, Grisham soon caught the eye of first lady Melania Trump, who was impressed by Grisham's assistance during the first visit of Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in February 2017. By the end of March, Grisham had made the move to the East Wing.

During her time with the first lady, Grisham has handled much of the responsibility of the first lady's forward-facing presence where she's made a name for herself as a dogged, if caustic, defender.

Dubbed "the enforcer" in a 2018 Washington Post profile, Grisham's job is to thwart as much as possible the criticism levied at the first lady on topics that have ranged from picking cyberbullying as part of her platform to Trump's need for privacy during a secretive kidney operation last April.

Well, that's what they SAID it was anyway.

But it was Grisham's participation in one of Melania Trump's biggest power plays that got the most attention. As sparring with East Wing staff escalated after fallout from a tiff during the first lady's first solo trip to Africa, Grisham released a statement calling for the firing of Mira Ricardel, a longtime government official and Trump's deputy national security adviser.

Ricardel, who was not particularly well-liked according to those who worked with her, and Grisham, had butted heads during the Africa trip, and Ricardel had not forgotten it, making it a mission to continue the feud back home in the weeks that followed. After flagging Ricardel's behavior to the West Wing, to no avail, the first lady consented to Grisham releasing a statement that read: "It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House."

Within two days, Ricardel had been dismissed from the White House by the President and Melania Trump had staked claim that she and her staff are not to be tangled with.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Post script on Sarah Sanders

For months there had been speculation that Sanders would step down. It’s less clear from what, given that she hasn’t stood behind the podium to take questions from the press in more than 95 days. The New York Times summed up the job she is set to depart like this: “In Tokyo she took a sushi-making class. In London she posted a Buckingham Palace selfie with Louise Linton, the actress who is married to the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. (In an undocumented interaction, she asked the Prince of Wales to sign her dinner menu. He did.) In Ireland Ms. Sanders and her husband, Bryan, took a photo with a group of Trump loyalists at the president’s private golf club and visited a local pub.” In other words, she’s spent the past few months like most Trumpian kleptocrats: enjoying the perks of government “work.”

With no actual accomplishments to memorialize in the traditional White House departure postmortem, Sanders will be remembered first and foremost not for what she did, but for how she did it: With frequent sneers and ceaseless scorn, she was one more woman who helped Trump launder his sexism and racism. Like Ivanka Trump, with her nebulous “women’s empowerment initiative,” or Kellyanne Conway, who claimed that women who oppose Trump “just have a problem with women in power,” Sanders has obfuscated and stalled and deflected, providing effective cover for some of the president’s most misogynistic behavior.

[...]

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Sanders never seemed particularly popular with the media, even compared with her predecessor Sean Spicer, who made his mark as an ineffective dolt who could never quite read people’s names and will be best remembered for his commitment to...a lie about the size of the crowd at the president’s inauguration. Sanders earned the most positive media attention of her entire tenure at the White House after she was lightly mocked at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. So congratulations on that.

[...]

Sanders offered up a last final insult to the press when she reflected on how she’d like to be immortalized for her work: “I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could…to answer questions,” she said, “[and] to be transparent and honest throughout that process.”

Yes, the woman who wagged her finger at the press while the president pursued his hateful agenda and lied to reporters over and over, even when the matter at hand concerned no less than the fate of our free and fair elections, would like to be celebrated for her virtue. But the woman who told a CNN correspondent, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences, I guess,” was never an honest broker. Her allegiance was to the man from whom she derived her power, and the only “transparent” thing about her role was the depths to which she would sink to remain in his favor.

  Glamour.com

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Remembering Sarah Sanders

Sarah Sanders has been probably the most dishonest White House press secretary in history. Which, when you’re serving the most dishonest president in history, is what the job requires. But what made her so valuable to Trump was the enthusiasm with which she embraced a task that, to anyone with any principles, should have been a horror.

[...]

There isn’t nearly enough time to document the entire mountain of falsehoods Sanders served up even before she stopped doing press briefings altogether three months ago.

[...]

Beyond the specific lies [she told], the character of Sanders’ interactions with journalists was unusually destructive. She treated the media with open contempt — not just as individual people, but the entire enterprise in which they are engaged. She insulted them, demeaned them, and generally acted as though they were nothing but irritants who had no right to raise questions that might undermine anyone’s worship of the glorious perfection that is Donald Trump.

[...]

Let’s recall the brief and disastrous tenure of her predecessor, Sean Spicer. What made Spicer’s time as White House press secretary so cringeworthy was a mutual awareness among him, the reporters asking him questions, and the public watching at home: He was lying, we knew he was lying, and he knew that we knew he was lying. And because he knew that we knew he was lying, he was embarrassed. He sweated, he stuttered, he shouted, he seemed always to be teetering on the brink of a breakdown. His shame was evident for all to see.

I’m not saying Spicer is some kind of admirable figure. He chose to work for Trump and chose to repeat Trump’s lies, two sins that should never be forgiven. But he was so terrible at it precisely because, somewhere inside him, there pulsed a weakened but living shred of a conscience, trying with its last remaining energy to force its way to the surface.

Sarah Sanders was not so burdened. She showed no conscience and no shame. She was smooth and calm and collected as she served up poisonous lies and infinite bad faith to the public. She was exactly what Trump wanted and all he could ever have asked for.

 WaPo

Thar she blows!

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving the Trump administration after a turbulent tenure marked by attacks on the media, dissemination of false information and the near-disappearance of the daily press briefing.

“Our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas,” President Donald Trump said Thursday in a tweet.

[...]

The president did not immediately name a replacement press secretary.

  Bloomberg

He doesn't need one. They no longer hold press conferences.

Sanders also disappeared largely from the public eye in recent months, holding only two of the once-daily White House press briefings since the beginning of 2019. Trump explained her absence in a January tweet saying that she no longer briefed reporters because “the press covers her so rudely.”

“I told her not to bother, the word gets out anyway,” Trump wrote.

Yep. Trump Twitter.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.



UPDATE:

The White House press secretary—the office, if not the person—is an outgrowth of the idea that, in a democracy, information matters, and facts matter, and while politicians and the press may tangle and tussle, they are ultimately on the same team. Sanders, who ascended to the press-secretary role in July of 2017, after the brief and peevish tenure of Sean Spicer, publicly rejected that idea. To watch a Sanders press conference, or to watch her representing the White House on cable news, was to be confronted with a vision of America that is guided by political Darwinism—an environment in which everything is a competition, with the winner determined by who can shout the loudest, who can distract the most effectively, who can get in the best insult before the time for questioning is over.

Here is some of the misinformation Sanders has spread on behalf of the White House: She has insisted that her boss never “promoted or encouraged violence,” although Donald Trump, among many other such promotions, said of a protester who’d been ejected from a 2016 rally, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” She has outright dismissed the stories of the multiple women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse as lies. She has told reporters that she’d heard from “countless” FBI agents who were happy that Trump had fired James Comey in 2017; she would later characterize that, to Robert Mueller, as a mere “slip of the tongue.”

Her broader legacy, though, is an acquiescence to the idea that facts themselves have a political bias. The agent of a president who has transformed “fake news” from an offhanded insult into a democratic anxiety, Sanders has used her powerful pulpit to promote the “Fake News Awards,” her boss’s carnivalesque attempt to institutionalize his mockery of the American media. She has accused reporters of “purposefully misleading the American people.” She has deflected; she has belittled; she has eye-rolled; she has condescended; she has obfuscated; she has misled; she has lied.

[...]

Sanders has stood behind the lectern of the White House briefing room, the ground zero of American democracy, doing what every press secretary will: articulating an idea of what the country is—and of what the administration that is guiding the nation most readily prioritizes and most wholeheartedly believes. Her tenure serves as a reminder of what happens when partisanship, aided by the power of the presidency, is allowed to subsume everything else: traditions, norms, truth, people’s lives.

  The Atlantic

But Sanders had unofficially left her job as White House press secretary earlier this year, when she allowed the tradition of frequent official White House briefings to lapse — and then, to die. When Trump announced Sanders’s departure, it had been 94 days since the last briefing.

[...]

In fact: Sanders stood at the White House briefing room lectern and lied. That’s not a matter of opinion. That’s not a matter of bias. That’s not a matter of analysis. It’s a documented event.

[...]

In an administration full of liars, Sanders was a distinguished, acclaimed liar.

Last December, Sanders was asked what she wished for her legacy. “Transparent and honest,” she replied, in part. A wish it will remain.

  WaPo