Jeff Sessions Rebrands Himself as Trump's 'Number One Supporter' in Senate Campaign Pitch to Alabama Voters

Former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose troubled tenure under Donald Trump ended with him stepping down in 2018, is now claiming he is the president's "number one supporter" in his Senate campaign.

Sessions is pitching himself to Alabama voters as an ardent Trump loyalist despite being "forced…out" of the office by the president in November 2018, as The New York Times described the tense White House split. But now Sessions is being challenged by Alabama residents who polls show have overwhelming support for Trump – and a lot of questions about Sessions' loyalty and respect for the president.

On Twitter and in conservative talk radio conversations, the former Republican senator seeking to reclaim his old seat is touting himself as "the one who helped Donald Trump form his agenda."

Trump turned against "very weak" Sessions after the then-attorney general recused himself from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump administration for allegedly colluding with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. Despite this, Sessions is washing over his falling out with the president to appeal to Alabama voters.

"I have been Donald Trump's number one supporter," Sessions said during a campaign appearance in Hoover, Alabama, last month, NPR reported. "Before he announced I was advancing the agenda that he believes in. I'm the one that helped Donald Trump form his agenda. I'm the one who campaigned with him all over this country on his plane. I introduced him at the Republican convention, I nominated him."

Sessions had earlier tweeted on February 26: "Talk is cheap and action matters. I will continue to be @realDonaldTrump's No.1 supporter because I understand his platform & message better than anyone. I've stood up to the establishment in Washington before, and I'm ready to seize the moment again as a Warrior for Truth."

The Sessions Senate campaign has sought to re-brand the longtime Alabama lawmaker as a conservative warrior on Trump's behalf.

"I've been with [Trump] from the start because it's the right thing for America," Sessions said in a recent video ad showing him onstage with Trump in a red "MAGA" hat. "Republicans in Washington are too soft. Trump needs a warrior for truth."

During a recent Leland Live podcast interview on Birmingham's 99.5 talk radio program, a Jasper, Alabama resident questioned why Sessions didn't do Trump's bidding at the outset of the Mueller investigation. Throughout 2017 and until his 2018 push out of the administration, Trump quoted Fox News pundits and supporters on Twitter who insulted and badgered Sessions for not pro-actively ending the Mueller investigation. Trump indirectly applied "Drain the Swamp" chants at his Attorney General for not showing more loyalty.

"Why didn't you stand with him during the investigation when you were the attorney general?" the Alabama caller self-identified as "Richard."

"I have stood with Donald Trump all the way through," Sessions replied to the caller, telling he and listeners that he was simply following the law.

Trump has about a 60 percent approval rating among Alabama voters from all political affiliations and overwhelming support from Alabama Republicans. On Tuesday, March 3, Sessions will face off against several GOP primary challengers in a hotly contested bid to take on current Democratic Senator Doug Jones in the general election. Sessions previously held the Alabama Senate seat for two decades until he became Trump's attorney general.

https://www.newsweek.com/jeff-sessions-rebrands-himself-trumps-number-one-supporter-senate-campaign-pitch-alabama-voters-1489917

Chicago unveils plan to fix Obama Center site housing concerns

Chicago officials have proposed a plan to address affordable housing concerns around the site of the planned Obama Presidential Center.

The city would invest about $4.5 million in four programs to help low-income residents fix their homes, help others become homeowners and renovate vacant buildings, according to The Chicago Tribune.

The proposed ordinance follows a sit-in outside Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office by protesters concerned about gentrification and neighborhood preservation and years of activism on the issue.

Activists have called for other protections including a rental assistance fund. The $500 million center planned for lakefront property on Chicago’s South Side is expected to transform parts of the city by bringing in new businesses and housing developments, but area residents have been concerned about being displaced. A construction date hasn’t been set.

“We need to be helping people more,” said Linda Tinsley who has lived in the area for 14 years. The Obama Presidential Center will include a plaza and four buildings, along with a two-acre children’s play area and a public library branch.

https://depauliaonline.com/46875/news/chicago-unveils-plan-to-fix-obama-center-site-housing-concerns/

Michelle Obama no more interested in office

The Obamas have acted like a comfort blanket for the American left — and much of the rest of the world — since Donald Trump was elevated to the White House in 2016.

From comparing every statement from the couple to those from the 45th president, to pining for the way Barack dealt with world leaders, nostalgia has held sway. So it is little wonder that there is talk of Michelle Obama being involved in the Democratic ticket for the presidential election later this year.

With personal poll ratings that would make Trump blush — YouGov puts the former first lady at 57 per cent approval — and near-universal name recognition, there are plenty of reasons why officials, politicians and voters alike would be tempted to mention her name.

Not least because words associated with Obama by those polled include “intelligent, likeable, genuine” and “stands up for other people”. Compared to the dreaded word “socialist” that is attached to Bernie Sanders — which has got party officials worried – she seems like a safe option.

Mark Hamill certainly thinks so, having tweeted that he hopes whoever wins the Democratic party nomination considers Obama to be their running mate. But there are three main problems with the push to include Michelle on the ticket, no matter how tempting the thought might be.

The first, and seemingly most crucial is that Obama has made very clear, numerous times, that she is not interested in returning to the White House. On Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2018, the chat-show host asked her whether anyone “has seriously approached you and tried to convince you to run for office?”

“All the time,” Obama said. “But I’ve never had any serious conversations with anyone about it because it’s not something I’m interested in or would ever do. Ever.” There has been no backtrack from that stance; there have been no coy interviews intimating that she would if she was asked in just the right way; there have been no coded messages in opinion pieces issued as “come and get me” pleas. Indeed, the Obamas as a whole have sought to stay out of the Democratic primary, even with Barack’s old VP, Joe Biden, running for the nomination.

Further, does America really need another family dynasty? I know we all love the idea of them — and there are certainly far worse families than the Obamas to guard over the national interest — but it would continue the status quo. Would Sasha and Malia be next to be called upon by the party to serve their country?

The bigger risk to the Democrats is that in failing to get behind one candidate — one that is already out in the field doing the hard campaign yards — they will do nothing more than hand the keys to the White House back to Trump for four more years. Nothing says a party is in disarray more than having to parachute in a candidate at the last minute. And which family would do more to galvanise Trump’s supporters to head to the polls than the Obamas? Trump has all the benefits of incumbency, no challenger, a united party and plenty of time to build a campaign that can win.

Having Michelle Obama on the ticket is a pipe dream, we all know that. The reality is that the Democrats have made their bed and have to lie in it. It doesn’t matter which candidate comes out victorious from the nomination process, the party has to get behind them.

The Obamas have a part to play in that — but the party should be talking about the future, not the past.

https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2020/03/01/michelle-obama-no-more-interested-in-office

Undercover Lovers, or How The CIA Became Style

FOR MANY DECADES, for those of us on the left, no argument had to be made as to why the CIA was an evil force; that was an a priori. The corollary was that if the CIA had touched something, it was irredeemably tainted. And this didn’t just apply to the backroom deals or the cowboy adventurism whose ultimate product was dead brown poor people — it held for the Agency’s seemingly innocuous endeavors. Partly populated in its early decades by Ivy League intellectuals and poets, the CIA liked culture and universities, and they put their money where their interests were. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazines, the National Student Association, the Museum of Modern Art, even Partisan Review and The Paris Review — all had received CIA funding or, at the very least, had some links to the Agency during the 1950s and 1960s.

Predictably, writers on the left and in academia insisted that these collaborations utterly discredited those institutions and publications and everything they’d done and said. First to hit the easy target were public intellectuals Christopher Lasch and Jason Epstein, then several art historians, including Serge Guilbaut (with the snappiest title of them all: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art). British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders essentially brought this period to a close with her Who Paid the Piper? in 1999, although Joel Whitney struck these themes again, rehashing many of Saunders’s anecdotes, in his 2016 Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers. The title gives you a sense of its measured tone.

But a funny thing was happening behind the university gates. Over the past 15 years or so, academic historians and novelists on the left started to find in the pre-Vietnam CIA something to admire, or at least not to revile quite so much. In their monographs, scholars such as Hugh Wilford, Penny Von Eschen, Giles Scott-Smith, Deborah Cohn, Kenneth Osgood, Michael Krenn, and others (including me!) detailed how the State Department, the United States Information Agency, and the CIA used arts and culture to advance American interests in the early years of the Cold War. And while these books certainly didn’t endorse the covert service’s hidden activities, absent was the autonomic condemnation of anything with CIA fingerprints that typified previous scholarship on the topic. It was no longer “If the CIA was involved, it’s poisoned”; instead, the approach was “What were the actual effects of this program? What was its extent? And what exactly was the nature of the harm or even good that it did?”

Cont.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/undercover-lovers-or-how-the-cia-became-style/

>>8294313

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