Category Archives: Viva!

Trump Mar-a-Lago Buddy Wrote Policy Pitch. The President Sent It to VA Chief.

by Isaac Arnsdorf

In late 2017, on one of President Donald Trump’s retreats to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, he caught up with an old friend: Albert Hazzouri.

When Hazzouri is not at Mar-a-Lago, he’s a cosmetic dentist in Scranton, Pennsylvania. At a campaign rally there in 2016, Trump gave him a shoutout: “Stand up, Albert. Where the hell are you, Albert? Stand up, Albert. He’s a good golfer, but I’m actually a better golfer than him. Right?”

Shortly after Hazzouri and Trump saw each other in late 2017, Hazzouri followed up with a message, scrawled on Mar-a-Lago stationery. Here’s the letter:

In a telephone interview, Hazzouri said he sent the note as a favor to the 163,000-member American Dental Association. He said he had only the vaguest sense of what proposal he was vouching for.

“I’m really not involved in any politics, I’m just a small-time dentist,” he said. “I guess there’s a lot of money spent on veterans’ care and American Native Indians’ care, and I guess they wanted to have a little hand in it, the American Dental Association, to try to guide what’s going on or whatever.”

The idea seemed to intrigue Trump. He took a thick marker and wrote on top of Hazzouri’s note, “Send to David S at the V.A.,” referring to David Shulkin, then the secretary of veterans affairs. Next to the Mar-a-Lago coat of arms, an aide stamped: “The president has seen.”

It was not the first time Mar-a-Lago membership had bestowed access to the VA. As ProPublica revealed last year, Trump handed sweeping influence over the department to club member Ike Perlmutter, who is the chairman of Marvel Entertainment and was a major donor supporting Trump’s campaign, along with a physician and a lawyer who are regular guests at the resort. The trio, known as the “Mar-a-Lago Crowd,” acted as a shadow leadership for the department, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions, including budgeting and contracting. The House veterans committee is now investigating the trio’s “alleged improper influence.”

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Beyond the VA, Trump’s presidency has been rife with examples of special interests seeking influence through business associates or friends and family, rather than going through the normal channels. Shortly after the election, the Australian ambassador reportedly managed to contact Trump not through the State Department but thanks to golfer Greg Norman, and Trump’s post-election call with the Vietnamese premier was facilitated by Marc Kasowitz, a personal lawyer for Trump. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson helped a friend’s obscure company secure a research deal with the Environmental Protection Agency, and inaugural chairman Tom Barrack provided support to a company seeking to export nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia.

In Hazzouri’s case, the details of his pitch to “create an oversight committee” are murky. A spokeswoman for the American Dental Association, Katherine Merullo, declined to elaborate on the proposal. Michael Graham, who leads the ADA’s Washington office, recalled that one of his staffers raised the topic with Hazzouri, but Graham said he didn’t know the details. In general, Graham said, the organization wants the government to pay for more dental services.

“The ADA has been looking into how we can get involved in veterans’ issues,” Graham said. “Lots of vets may not be eligible but need care.”

The VA provides dental care only in limited instances, primarily when veterans have a dental injury related to their service. Many veterans also have Medicare, but that doesn’t cover most dental services either. The ADA has lobbied on bills that would expand dental services for veterans, arguing that better dental care leads to better health overall. Of course, it would also lead to more billable patients for the ADA’s members.

Hazzouri’s overture doesn’t appear to have succeeded. Shulkin, who was fired in March 2018, said in an email that he did not recall having received the message. Hazzouri said neither he nor the ADA ever got a meeting.

Hazzouri did, however, reference the proposal a few months later, in an effort to open an office in Florida.

“My intention is to establish a small office in order to treat the President, his family and visitors who may have dental needs while conducting official business,” Hazzouri wrote to the Florida Board of Dentistry in a February 2018 letter published by Politico. “An additional intention is to have the office serve as a dental delivery site on selected dates for U.S. veterans or children from underserved populations.”

Despite invoking the project as part of a bid to expand his business, Hazzouri said he wasn’t pursuing any personal benefit by pitching the ADA’s proposal to Trump. “I wasn’t doing this for any opportunity,” he said. “There are areas in Florida where they said it would be awesome to donate time.”

Hazzouri’s Florida office never materialized either: According to the minutes of his board hearing, Hazzouri hadn’t completed a required examination and withdrew his application for a license to practice in the state.

Hazzouri declined to explain why his note to Trump addressed him as “King,” calling it an inside joke from long before Trump became president. “I call other people King,” he said. “It’s a very personal thing.”

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Mexican TV network criticised for brownface parody of Roma star Yalitza Aparicio

Loser! Pendejo

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Televisa’s Yeka Rosales posted videos of herself on social media wearing brown skin paint in an apparent parody of the indigenous actress

A television personality for the Mexican-based Televisa network is facing criticism for dressing up in brownface and wearing a prosthetic nose to make fun of indigenous Mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio.

Televisa’s Yeka Rosales posted photos and videos of herself on social media wearing brown skin paint in an apparent parody of Aparicio, who attended the Oscars last week after being nominated for best actress for her role in Roma.

The stunt, designed to promote Televisa’s season premiere of the comedy show La Parodia, highlights the racism some scholars say indigenous people in Latin America still face in the media.

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Salvini crackdown: bulldozers demolish Italian camp housing 1,500 refugees

fascisti!

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San Ferdinando shanty town cleared in first major eviction after launch of hardline immigration measures

More than 1,500 people are being ousted from the refugee camp at San Ferdinando, in southern Italy, in the largest eviction since Italy’s rightwing populist government’s immigration measures kicked in.

On Wednesday morning, almost 1,000 paramilitary police officers surrounded the 400 shacks where the migrants have lived since the camp was established in 2010, near Gioia Tauro, in Calabria. As people were ushered out clutching their few possessions, bulldozers demolished the shanty town of cardboard and wood huts in a matter of hours.

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‘We want to live with them’: wolves airdropped into US to tackle moose problem

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With the wolf population dwindling in a Michigan park, four were trapped in Ontario and transported by helicopter

At a remote national park, four Canadians were recently airdropped into a dizzying new life in America.

They are expert moose hunters, accustomed to cold climates, and covered in fur.

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How many tampons do you need? This man will explain

what was he thinking?

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The astonishing misplaced confidence of some men has been on show again, with one very clever chap attempting to mansplain menstruation to women – using maths

This week, mansplaining on the internet reached giddy new heights as one man tried to calculate just how many tampons are necessitated by “the average period”.

A Twitter user shared a screengrab of a comment, posted on PinkNews’s Facebook page by a plucky gentleman outlining how women might be able to manage their periods affordably with only his trusty man-brain and the power of maths. To his credit, the maths was correct – it was just everything else that was wildly wrong.

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Former Trudeau aide at centre of scandal denies he pressured ex-minister

Gerald Butts said he had one short conversation with Jody Wilson-Raybould at the time about helping SNC-Lavalin Group Inc

A former key aide of Justin Trudeau, who is at the centre of a major political crisis, has denied he had pressured the then justice minister to allow a major firm to avoid a corruption trial last year.

Related: Justin Trudeau’s cabinet rallies behind him after second resignation

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Mark Zuckerberg lays out new ‘privacy-focused’ vision for Facebook

too little, too late #timeisup

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The company has weathered a series of revelations in the last two years about its private data collection and misuse

For 15 years, Facebook has pushed, prodded, cajoled, lured and tricked billions of people into sharing the most intimate details of their lives online, all purportedly in service of making the world “more open and connected”.

On Wednesday, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg put forward a new idea: doing the opposite.

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Ilhan Omar and the weaponisation of antisemitism | Joshua Leifer

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It should not be difficult to recognize the meaningful distinction between Ilhan Omar’s recent comments and the kind of antisemitism surging on the right

Ilhan Omar’s most recent comments have been stripped entirely of their context, their intentions twisted and reversed. During an event in Washington DC last week, she spoke sensitively about her commitment to human rights advocacy, her experiences of Islamophobia, and her compassion for her Jewish constituents. Then Omar said: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country … I want to ask, why is it OK for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, of fossil-fuel industries, or big pharma, and not talk about a powerful lobby that is influencing policy.”

Related: Democratic party elites silence Ilhan Omar at their peril | Trita Parsi and Stephen Wertheim

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Microplastic pollution revealed ‘absolutely everywhere’ by new research

Oops! This means we are eating and breathing it!

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Contamination found across UK lakes and rivers, in US groundwater, along the Yantze river and Spanish coast, and harbouring dangerous bacteria in Singapore

Microplastic pollution spans the world, according to new studies showing contamination in the UK’s lake and rivers, in groundwater in the US and along the Yangtze river in China and the coast of Spain.

Related: Rivers of waste: Pakistan’s recyclers go out on patrol – in pictures

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