The Biden administration has been trying to get Neera Tanden a position since the beginning. What does she have on whom?
Neera Tanden will become the White House staff secretary, a White House official confirmed on Friday, meaning she will assume a central role that involves managing the flow of paper to President Biden and among senior officials.
The position is not one that requires Senate confirmation.
And that's good for her, because she might not get it.
Tanden was Biden’s first choice to lead the Office of Management and Budget but assumed a role as a White House senior adviser instead after she hit serious roadblocks in her confirmation process.
Republicans angered over her political tweets during her years leading the Center for American Progress blocked her nomination, and the White House could not secure 50 Senate Democrats to back her.
[...]
Biden has yet to select a new nominee for OMB director, a position that Shalanda Young has held in an acting capacity for several months.
Perhaps another reason the Republicans didn't like her...
Tanden is a longtime adviser to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
President Biden's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Neera Tanden, on Tuesday apologized for her past tweets disparaging Republicans.
[...]
"Over the last few years, it’s been part of my role to be an impassioned advocate. I understand, though, that the role of OMB director calls for bipartisan action, as well as a nonpartisan adherence to facts and evidence," she said.
Republicans on the committee pilloried Tanden for scathing language she used against Republicans on Twitter while heading up the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio), the panel's ranking Republican, went through a litany of tweets in which Tanden had referred to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) as “the worst,” said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) was “a fraud,” proclaimed that "vampires have more heart" than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), and compared then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to the villain in the "Harry Potter" series, Voldemort.
[...]
“I recognize the concern. I deeply regret and apologize for my language," Tanden responded, adding that the onus was on her to earn the trust of GOP senators.
They always regret it when they get busted while looking for an appointment.
She may not get confirmed. It's not that she's wrong. But she should have had more sense than to say those things publicly. Who does she think she is? Trump?
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Flashback:
It's also a mistake in no small part due to her close ties to Hillary Clinton. And there's this. And that email to John Podesta.
Stop pulling from the old Hillary Clinton-associated Democrats.
We remember Neera from 2016.
Other emails show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
[Likely Hillary Clinton presidential chief of staff Neera] Tanden made up a story about her not being at the DNC platform hearings for “any discussions” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. She made up that story when there was publicly available and easily accessible evidence to the contrary. When she was challenged about her made-up story, she doubled down. She suggested that the edited video gave a misleading impression about her presence there. She accused me of being a liar and demanded that I retract my lie. She never once admitted that it was she, not me, who was not telling the truth. She never once apologized to me for claiming to her 25,000 followers that I was lying.
[...]
If Tanden can act this way in the face of verifiable evidence that’s plain as day, and there for everyone to see, when the stakes are so low, is it completely implausible that she would act in a roughly similar fashion when the evidence is not so publicly available and not so easily accessible and when the stakes are much higher? When she has an even stronger and more self-interested reason for covering her tracks?
[...]
When someone commented on Facebook that they couldn’t understand why a powerful player in DC would be so obsessively monitoring her mentions on Twitter, particularly in response to a not terribly important person like me, Astra [Taylor, a documentary film maker,] made a shrewd observation:
This election has really shown the people who feel entitled to rule the country to be deeply narcissistic and not busy doing anything of actual importance — this is the liberal version of Trump reading all his press/mentions every morning and sending “corrected” copies back to the journalists.
Exactly.
Never underestimate the narcissism—or amateurishness—of America’s ruling classes. While people like Tanden are in meetings with other important people, where God knows what or whose fate gets decided, they’re keeping their eye on their Twitter mentions, making sure no one’s looking at them cross-eyed, making sure they’re someone whom you don’t want to cross.
In a tweet, [ spokesperson for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas)] Drew Brandewie said that Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden's past history of "disparaging comments about the Republican Senators' whose votes she’ll need" made her confirmation highly unlikely.
[...]
[Tanden] has led the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, since 2010. During the 2016 election, Tanden was a top ally of the Democratic Party's then-nominee, Hillary Clinton, and was seen at the time as a likely candidate for a White House role.
I didn't get that "joke" Trump made about Hillary pretending not to hate Catholics. I had to do a little research.
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan called for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to disassociate herself from anti-Catholic statements made by her campaign chairman and said the remarks were “extraordinarily patronizing and insulting to Catholics.”
[...]
Emails released last week by WikiLeaks showed Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Director of Communications Jennifer Palmieri, both Catholics, in conversations with activists from two left-wing organizations. In the emails, Catholics were debased, with their beliefs being called “severely backwards.” Conservative Catholics also were accused of “an amazing bastardization of the faith,” and Rupert Murdoch was mocked for baptizing his children as Catholics in the River Jordan.
The U.S. Church’s bishops were slammed in the emails as well, referred to as “a middle ages dictatorship.”
[...]
The statements "are just extraordinarily patronizing and insulting to Catholics,” Cardinal Dolan told ABC affiliate News Channel 13 on Monday.
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Podesta admitted to helping launch a “progressive” infiltration of the Church in another email, and he took an active role in attempting to incite a liberal Catholic revolt against the U.S. bishops.
Podesta is going to get buried, isn't he? And he's not alone. Neera Tanden, now Jennifer Palmieri.
“If it had been said about the Jewish community, if it had been said about the Islamic community, within 10 minutes there would have been an apology and a complete distancing from those remarks,”[said Dolan].
I'm sure he's right about that.
To be fair, however, when it comes to Cardinal Dolan, I don't think he's got a lot of indignation capital.
The whole of DC is going to be implicated before these emails leaks are finished. I bet the GOP elites have about shat themselves wondering when someone is going to leak their emails.
To be fair, if you read the Wikipedia bio of David Brock, you might find that you agree with either assessment.
As an aside: what email program are these people using? Those carat marks for replying are dinosaur stuff, aren't they?
One of Hillary's loyal ass-kissers, Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, has just been exposed by another batch of Wikileaks emails.
Here's Twatwaffle Tanden - and horrible public speaker (somewhat reminiscent of Hillary herself) - sucking up for a future position in a Hillary administration - her public rhetoric:
Here's Tanden privately:
“Everyone wants her to apologize. And she should,” Tanden wrote in one September 2015 email. “Apologies are like her Achilles heel.”
[...]
Tanden observed in the email to Podesta that “she didn't seem like a b---- in the interview” and that she would “get to a full apology in a few interviews.”
In another August 2015 email, Tanden offered this particularly tough criticism of Clinton’s handling of the email scandal.
“…[Her] inability to just do a national interview and communicate genuine feelings of remorse and regret is now, I fear, becoming a character problem (more so than honesty.)”
In January 2016, after the delivery of an apparently well-crafted tweet by Podesta, the campaign chairman complained to Tanden that he wanted to tweet it earlier, but it was held up.
“Got held by who? Hillary. God. Her instincts are suboptimal,” Tanden responded.
Somehow, I don't think she's going to make it to a Clinton administration position. Maybe she won't be alone. I'm looking at you, John Podesta.
Clinton’s description of herself as a moderate Democrat at a September 2015 event in Ohio causes some uproar amongst her team. In a mail from adviser Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, to Podesta in the days following the comment she asks why she said this.
“I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn't remember saying it. Not sure I believe her,” Podesta replies. Tanden insists that the comment has made her job more difficult after “telling every reporter I know she's actually progressive”.
“It worries me more that she doesn't seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment,” she adds.
[...]
A May 2015 email between Podesta and Tanden appears to imply Clinton’s brothers are a source of embarrassment for the campaign.
In an email titled, ‘Glad you said no’ Tanden writes, “When H asked us to hire her old friend,” and Podesta replies, “Yup. Maybe we can rent the Queen Mary for the next 18 months and fill it with her brothers and assorted crazy hangers on sail around and around.”
They should know better. They know how vindictive Hillary is.
Maybe we shouldn't leave out Jake Sullivan.
Emails between Clinton’s foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan and Tanden from March 2016 discussed how it was “REALLY dicey territory” for Clinton to comment on strengthening “bribery laws to ensure that politicians don’t change legislation for political donations.”
Tanden agrees with Sullivan, “She may be so tainted she's really vulnerable = if so, maybe a message of I've seen how this sausage is made, it needs to stop, I'm going to stop it will actually work.”
Keep making that sausage guys. And get better email security.
If Neera gets the end of Hillary's boot, it couldn't happen to a moredeservingperson.
[Likely Hillary Clinton presidential chief of staff Neera] Tanden made up a story about her not being at the DNC platform hearings for “any discussions” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. She made up that story when there was publicly available and easily accessible evidence to the contrary. When she was challenged about her made-up story, she doubled down. She suggested that the edited video gave a misleading impression about her presence there. She accused me of being a liar and demanded that I retract my lie. She never once admitted that it was she, not me, who was not telling the truth. She never once apologized to me for claiming to her 25,000 followers that I was lying.
[...]
If Tanden can act this way in the face of verifiable evidence that’s plain as day, and there for everyone to see, when the stakes are so low, is it completely implausible that she would act in a roughly similar fashion when the evidence is not so publicly available and not so easily accessible and when the stakes are much higher? When she has an even stronger and more self-interested reason for covering her tracks?
[...]
When someone commented on Facebook that they couldn’t understand why a powerful player in DC would be so obsessively monitoring her mentions on Twitter, particularly in response to a not terribly important person like me, Astra [Taylor, a documentary film maker,] made a shrewd observation:
This election has really shown the people who feel entitled to rule the country to be deeply narcissistic and not busy doing anything of actual importance — this is the liberal version of Trump reading all his press/mentions every morning and sending “corrected” copies back to the journalists.
Exactly.
Never underestimate the narcissism—or amateurishness—of America’s ruling classes. While people like Tanden are in meetings with other important people, where God knows what or whose fate gets decided, they’re keeping their eye on their Twitter mentions, making sure no one’s looking at them cross-eyed, making sure they’re someone whom you don’t want to cross.
UPDATE 10/19/16: Tanden may not be the likely Chief of Staff in a Hillary administration any more. Leaked emails have just come out that could block her ambitions.
Remember Neera Tanden, CEO of the self-described "progressive public policy research and advocacy organization" CAP (Center for American Progress)? (Hint: She's tired of freeloaders.)
As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent put it earlier this year: CAP “is poised to exert outsized influence over the 2016 president race and — should Hillary Clinton win it — the policies and agenda of the 45th President of the United States. CAP founder John Podesta is set to run Clinton’s presidential campaign, and current CAP president Neera Tanden is a longtime Clinton confidante and adviser.”
[...]
[E]mails, provided to The Intercept by a source authorized to receive them, are particularly illuminating about the actions of Tanden [...] , a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official. They show Tanden and key aides engaging in extensive efforts of accommodation in response to AIPAC’s [...] vehement complaints that CAP is allowing its writers to be “anti-Israel.” Other emails show Tanden arguing that Libyans should be forced to turn over large portions of their oil revenues to repay the U.S. for the costs incurred in bombing Libya, on the grounds that Americans will support future wars only if they see that the countries attacked by the U.S. pay for the invasions.
[...]
In 2012, a former AIPAC spokesman, Josh Block, launched a campaign to brand several young, liberal writers at CAP’s blog, ThinkProgress, as anti-Semites due to their writings on Israel, Palestine and Iran.
[...]
Rather than stand behind its writers, top CAP officials, led by Tanden, applied constant coercion to stifle content upsetting to AIPAC.
[...]
Most of the CAP writers accused of Israel heresy were gone from the organization within a short time thereafter, and several have publicly revealed that they had been censored on matters pertaining to Israel.
[...]
In October 2011, a CAP national security writer, Benjamin Armbruster, circulated a discussion on CNN about whether Libya should be forced to turn over its oil revenue to the U.S. as compensation and gratitude for the U.S. having “liberated” Libya.
After one CAP official, Faiz Shakir, noted how perverse it is to first bomb a poor country and then make it turn over its revenues to you for doing so, Tanden argued that this made a great deal of sense.
[...]
Tanden’s twist on the argument — that Americans will continue to support foreign wars only if they see the invaded countries forced to turn over assets that the U.S. can use to fund its own programs — is singularly perverse, as it turns the U.S. military into some sort of explicit for-profit imperial force.
“CAP’s top donors include Walmart and Citigroup,” and also “include the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents leading biotech and bio-pharma firms, and Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.” Other large CAP donors include Goldman Sachs, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, Bank of America, Google and Time Warner.
Here's an exchange between Neera and Glenn Greenwald two days ago:
The Intercept Tweeted today that Hillary named Tanden to her DNC platform team. I haven't been able to confirm that, but it's not like The Intercept to put out something prematurely. (UPDATE: She did. It's here.)
And I'm tired of people who have everything begrudging the poor for the subsidized crumbs they get.
[Tanden] is the president of CAP, the Center for American Progress. CAP is a high-powered progressive think tank that most people think of as either a very influential mainstream liberal think tank or, if you want to be a little more insidery, as the Clinton family's personal think tank. Being president of is, as Joe Biden might say, a Big Effin Deal. Tanden is the kind of person who gets mentioned frequently as a possible chief-of-staff in a Hillary Clinton White House.
Mother Jones
Perfect. They both make the word "liberal" totally meaningless.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
UPDATE 5/22: More Neera:
If this is a progressive, what's the new label for people who are actually progressives?
