#i tried to write this a week ago but then my laptop died and refreshed my tab so i lost like 400words lmFAO

[havekiddoswilltravel]

Hamilton Musical Review – Wow, Just Wow!

A creative review of Hamilton – by a travel blogging mom.

Burr I’d rather be divisive than indecisive. Drop the niceties.

Hamilton, “A Farmer Refuted”

Watching Hamilton Musical live has been on the top of my personal family bucket list for years. I’ve researched ticket prices many times and was ecstatic when I found out that they would be coming to The Bushnell Center of the Performing Arts in Hartford this December. We are big Bushnell supporters and tend to enjoy a minimum of four shows there each season. I was determined to get tickets. I set reminders on my phone calendar with ticket release dates and went as far as bringing my laptop to the kid’s taekwondo team practice on the morning of the first wave of ticket releases. After 1 hour of refreshing the browser, I scored four reasonable tickets for December 30th. What a perfect Christmas gift for our wanderlust family.

You can write rhymes but you can’t write mine.

Take A Break – Hamilton Musical

 I had taken the kids this summer to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights (a musical about a Dominican bodega owner in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan) and had prepared them for the music, dancing and writing style that would be depicted in Hamilton. As we only had four tickets, we decided to take our two girls and leave the boys behind this time. One more reason for me to watch it again, because honestly, I can’t get enough.  This is not a review that will be focused on whether Hamilton Musical is historically accurate, appropriate, misrepresented history, left a marginalized group out, minimized the evils of slavery or any other overly serious analysis of Mr. Miranda’s intent in writing this musical. I’m pretty sure that Mr. Miranda did not intend his interpretation of Alexander Hamilton to be an all-inclusive, historically accurate depiction of the founding father. Hamilton is not intended to be all things to all people. I come to this review from the perspective of a history, travel, music, dance, culture and entertainment loving travel blogger, wife and mami of four brown kids whom are exposed to a variety of art and theater. Theater often full of casts, music and culture that does not represent them. For this reason alone, Hamilton rocked. #representationmatters. It’s for the same reason that I was moved to tears by In The Heights musical. Mr. Miranda understands the cultural nuances, references, experiences, dance moves, dictation, beats and music that speak to the deepest parts of my Dominican immigrant soul. Let’s dive in. What I loved about Hamilton and how much I wished that I could get inside the heads of all of the white people sitting around us in Hartford, Connecticut watching this art form. If you were one of them and are willing to share, what were your thoughts?

I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable, I am an original.

Burr, “Wait for It”

 Talk less, smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for.

Burr – “Aaron Burr, Sir

 -          Lin-Manuel Miranda is puro Latino. I can relate to everything he stands for in a way that at times is difficult for me to explain to my mainland born and raised children. Bringing them to experience Mr. Miranda’s work like In The Heights and Hamilton, provided a window to our shared culture, history and traditions. He’s a Boricua, born in Washington Heights and raised in a prominent Latino community that closely resembles the one that I was raised in. Like me, he came of age in a bilingual, bicultural home, where music, traditions and food were the norm, but were rarely reflected in the mainstream pop culture. Mr. Miranda has succeeded in creating Broadway characters who manage to erase the invisibility that I’ve often felt as a lover of all things art and theater. I got goosebumps as a sat and watched characters who spoke like my family and friends, danced with the same passion, sabor and vigor and shared the same cultural nuances that bring a sense of nostalgia to this Dominican woman.

-          As I sat in the fancy theater watching the opening number, I was left breathless as the realization hit me that I was watching artists in every shade of brown, wearing traditional colonial garb (minus the wigs), telling the story of a forgotten forefather immigrant who rose from nothing, I saw myself. I shared this same story and I was unable to contain the emotions. I could care less (must put my wokeness aside for the sake of entertainment and rest) about whether our founding fathers were white, sexists, racist, slave owning men, I was taken by the artistry of Hamilton and was able to see myself in Mr. Miranda’s delivery in ways that I’m seldom able to. What a beautiful gift to give our young children. For so long, our narrative and stories have been left out of the arts. With Hamilton, Mr. Miranda placed my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings and friends into the center of the narrative. The bold and unapologetic fashion in which he did so is mind blowing. I lol when Hamilton and Lafayette yelled: “Immigrants, we get the job done.” I was tempted to respond: Asi es. Tu lo sabes. Thank you, Mr. Miranda for allowing me to share this musical with my children and have them see, feel and experience Latinos in a way that is beyond what the main stream media portrays. We know who we are, but it was extremely emotional to have us portrayed outside of the typical narrative of slaves and low-wage workers. Gracias.

We’re finally on the field, we’ve had quite a run. Immigrants: we get the job done.

Hamilton and Lafayette, “Yorktown”

 -          Miranda boldly took on the old minstrel American tradition of black face on stage and reversed it. Oh my goodness, let’s process that one for a minute. I’m cognizant of how this fact and the psychological and social implications of the affect of this when I read negative mainstream reviews of the musical. All of a sudden, those of us usually in the fringes are now put center stage in “The Room Where It Happens” and those usually in the mainstream are left researching, attempting to understand the dictation, body language and music. Wow. That’s genius.

There’s a million things I haven’t done, just you wait

Alexander Hamilton

 Hamilton left me pondering so much about my history, my story and daily life. It was meant to be that our family took in the last show of the year in Hartford on December, 30th. I find myself in a reflective mood during the last week of each year. Since starting my blog 1 ½  years ago, I’ve tried to be consistent in writing, sharing and transparency. Hamilton reminded me of the reasons why I started Have Kiddos Will Travel and it has inspired me to start 2019 “writing like I’m running out of time!”

Why do you write like you’re writing out of time?

Non Stop

 But when you’re gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame?

Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

 The final song of Hamilton left me inspired to continue my blog as an avenue to share my unique and personal story. Life as a work from home, homeschooling mother of four can be isolating at times. This is the primary reason why I started Have Kiddos Will Travel. The blog allows me to document and write my own narrative and by doing so inspire and relate to other women in similar situations as mine. Blogging is risky, as it can leave one vulnerable to other’s not so kosher intentions. I want full control of my story; the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s mine to tell.

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Below are some of the other favorite lines from Hamilton. Do share yours.

Dying is easy, young man, living is harder.

George Washington – “Right Hand Man

 America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me. You let me make a difference. A place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints and rise up.

Hamilton, The World Was Wide Enough

 Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor, “We plant seeds in the South. We create.” Yeah, keep ranting. We know who’s really doing the planting.

Alexander Hamilton, Cabinet Battle #1

 I’m just like my country—I’m young, scrappy, and hungry, and I am not throwing away my shot.

Hamilton, “My Shot”

 know that we can win, I know that greatness lies in you. But remember from here on in, history has its eyes on you….

History Has Its Eyes On You

Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.

Alexander Hamilton, The World Was Wide Enough

[littlefrostwrites]

Prompt: a group of boys find a dead body

for my writing challenge

Kell puts his phone down on his desk, having just finished a phone call with a client. He had good news for her today, happy he was able to let her know that the opposition had decided to settle [description of case here]. It had been nice to hear her happy and grateful voice when he call, but he admitted it had been far more satisfying to see the opposing lawyer’s face when he had executed the winning move. He shrugged his suit jacket back onto his shoulders, having removed it early when he felt warm. But now he wanted to feel put together, as he headed to his managing partner’s office to report the good news. 

He swept through the doors, not bothering to knock as he could see through the glass that she wasn’t busy.

“I settled the London case!” he declared, dropping the file on Astrid Athos’ desk and plopping into the seat across from her. She didn’t look up from where her eyes were fixed on the screen of her laptop.”

“That’s great,” she said. Kell frowned. “But it’s just pro bono. None of that money is going to the firm.” At this, she finally looked up and took off her glasses. She was unimpressed. 

“Yes, but it does make our firm look good, doesn’t it, to be taking on all these pro bono cases, and not only that, but also winning them. So spectacularly as well!” Kell laughed. “You should have seem opposing counsel’s faces-”

“Yes it’s all very well a good that we won, but it needn’t have been you.” Kell sighed as Astrid launched into a well trodden argument. “As a firm, I agree we have to do pro bono, but that’s what we have associates for. You don’t only don’t pass off your mandatory two cases per year to associates as most partners do, you’ve already taken on triple that number this year. And it’s only March.” 

“What can I say, I’m a benevolent guy,” Kell quipped. It was lighthearted in delivery, but they both knew it wasn’t truly. Astrid got up from behind the desk and walked over to where Kell was sitting. He stood up, uncomfortable with her looming over him. This way, he was taller and felt more in control, and so when she put a hand on his cheek gently, it didn’t sting as much. 

“Son, you are a good person. You don’t have to keep making up for the past.” She let her hand and her words linger for a few seconds, before retracting her arm and turning back to her side of her desk. “Besides, you left your silly dreams of civil law behind a long time ago and are a corporate lawyer. And in this field, you do what is best for the firm. What is best for this firm is for you, our highly skilled junior partner, to continue winning cases for paying clients. So I ask that you focus on that for the remainder of the quarter. Do you understand me?” Kell sighed and then nodded sharply.

“Yes.”

_____

Delilah is in the kitchen when Kell finally gets home around 8 PM, the table set and the food cold on top it. She’s not mad though, just greets him with a kiss, asking him how work was and chiming, “You work so hard!” when he told her briefly about his day. They eat dinner in silence, a simple pasta salad. Delly had grown up in a house with not one, but multiple maids to clean the large rooms and cook for her family of six. When they moved in together, Kell had refused Delly’s inquiry of hiring a maid for themselves, citing that two young professionals should be able to also keep the house clean and cook for themselves. When she had accepted his marriage proposal though, she had made him promise that they would at least get a nanny when they eventually had a child. He had agreed reluctantly, supposing that hiring on one staff wasn’t all that uncommon and would necessarily write them off as rich and out of touch. He hoped. 

He asked after Delly’s day as well, which had ended at 4 pm as it always did. She informed him that she had lunch with a number of sponsors, pitching to them the mission of the non-profit that she worked at rather successfully too. Delly was good at her job, and people instantly took to her, charmed by the story of the daughter of the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world using her business degree to work for a non-profit that paid far less than reasonable to support the luxuries that she was accustomed to. What was often left out of the conversation was hefty trust fund that had be deposited into her account at the age of 25 and the company shares that her father had bought in her name since she was four years old. 

Image mattered though, and Delly was perfect for Kell, not only because she was genuinely kind and wanted to help people, but also because she was beautiful, well-connected and had a do-gooder reputation. And Kell was perfect for Delly, a lawyer at a firm that often took on high-profile pro-bono cases, showing they cared about the public, but also a corporate lawyer, with a salary that meant they and their children would never want for anything, even without any of Delly’s family money. 

“Dinner with your parents tomorrow,” Delly reminded him once they had finished dinner and gotten ready for bed. They were lying together in the center of the bed, with his arm around her and her head tucked against his chest. They felt perfect together like this, Kell thought to himself. The kind of couple you would see in a movie, the couple you would root for because they just seemed to fit. 

“Right, 6 pm yeah?” Delly hummed in agreement before extracting herself briefly from his arms to turn off the light on the nightstand. Then she was back again and Kell found himself drifting off to sleep. 

***

Delly and Kell have dinner with his parents once a month, and have dinner with her parents once a month as well, alternating every two weeks to be fair. Today is a Tuesday and they make the forty minute drive from their condo downtown to the very outskirts of the city, watching as the skyscrapers vanish and are replaced by highways, trees and hills, and grand mansions. They park on the driveway of the largest one on the block, a pure ivory two story with five garages and a lakefront view. The first time Kell had brought Delly over, she had spent most of the meeting gushing with his mother about interior design, complementing her exquisite and classy taste in decor, and gathering inspiration for their future house. Kell knew that Delly was already scoping out the market on top of her involvement in their wedding preparations, and had even gone to a couple of open houses with her mother. 

Astrid and Athos greeted Delly and Kell with hugs, before graciously accepting the cherry pie that Delly had baked, instructing the maids to take it to the kitchen to keep warm until it was time for dessert. 

They settled down for their meal and made idle small talk, before Athos spoke more purposefully.

“Kell, I heard that your highschool class is having their ten year reunion this weekend?” He looked pointedly at his son. “Are you planning to make an appearance?”

“Oh we should! It would be so nice to meet some of your old classmates!” Delly exclaimed before Kell could respond. 

“Yes, I think it’d be a good opportunity to touch base with them, reminisce on old times and also, show them your achievements, how much you’ve changed and grown since you all saw each other last.” Athos gives Kell a meaningful look and Kell understands what he’s getting at. He considers for a moment and then says,

“I’d forgotten that was coming up. Yes I agree, it’d be good to make an appearance.” Delly made an excited noise at that and they continued on with their meal.

Later, as they were getting ready to leave, Astrid took her son aside.

“I’m proud that you’ve decided to see your highschool classmates again. I know it must have been hard for you to make that decision.”

“I think it’s time to confront them, don’t you? I’m a different person now, and it’s time to show them all that.” Kell’s voice was steady with conviction, but inside he felt a bit uneasy, a ball of anxiety starting to unfurl. He tapped it down and smiled at his mother. “I’m sure it’ll go fine. And Delly’s so excited to meet everyone, I’m sure she’ll smooth over any awkward moments.” 

“Yes I’m sure it’ll go great, you’ll both impress everyone. Delly was such a good choice for you, she brightens your whole demeanor.” Kell sniffed at that remark, but gave his mother a kiss of the cheek goodbye and his father a hug, finally leaving with one last remark that he would see Astrid bright and early tomorrow at work. 

Scene 3 (unfinished): The reunion happens and goes well. Catches up with boys. No classmates approach them at first, but then slowly some people integrate. Main character repeatedly points out good deeds he has done. Gets internally angry when another classmate takes attention off him recounting his probono work. But halfway through, some of the classmates take the stage to commemorate the death of one of their classmates.  Fiance, “you never told me someone in your class died?”. The word “suicide” is explicitly used at one point. When getting refreshments, Fiance asks him if he knew the other boy well bc he seems “sad”. He mutters not really, is overhead by another classmate. They confront him about it, fiancé finds out.

The reunion is on Saturday, so Wednesday morning, Kell reaches out to his old crew from highschool, asking if any of them are planning on attending as well. When he’s 

“The people here are so rude.” Delly interrupts him and Holland with a sniff and a light stomp of the foot. Kell asks her what she’s on about. “We were chatting so nicely and then they asked who I was with, so I told them I was your fiance and then they suddenly made up some sort of excuse and left! I was just in the middle of convincing them to become donors too.” Delly tried to use every opportunity to promote her causes. As shallow and airheaded as Kell thought she could be, it was moments like this that reminded him why everyone else bought into her passion for making the world a better place. She put so much effort into it that how could anyone doubt her intentions?

“You never told me someone in your class died? Is that why you’ve been so off today? Did you know him well?” Her beautiful face turned inquisitively towards his, her face scrunched in empathy. Kelly adjusted his tie uncomfortably, lowering his voice. 

“Uh, no we weren’t close. I barely knew him,” he lied, trying to keep his voice down. But clearly someone heard him.  

“Excuse me?” Kell and Delly turned to face a red headed lady with a wine glass in her hand. She looked irate and her face was red, a juxtaposition against the cream white of her business casual dress. 

“I’ve heard you! Boasting about all your achievements, all your phony do-gooding. You’re trying to erase what you did in the past, but we all remember. No matter how many cases you win, how many donations you make to anti-bullying campaigns, how many[...] we won’t be fooled again. You’ll always be a cruel, hateful boy and someday, you’re going to trip up again and show those you’ve fooled who you really are - a mean, hateful man, and now a liar and phony.” Kell thought she was done speaking but then she turned to Delly and said, “I’m so sorry honey,” before turning to him again to finish off with, “Go home Dane. Nobody wants you here.” 

A crowd had gathered around them, and Kell could see in the eyes of his former classmates and just as they hadn’t wanted him at their school graduation, they didn’t want him at their reunions either. It didn’t matter that some of them had been genuinely interested in talking with him about the various non-profit initiatives he was invested in and the one he was setting up at his firm, now they were reminded of their shared past and everything he had done since was tinged with insincerity. So he lifted his glass in acknowledgement, set it half empty down onto a nearby table, before taking his leave, sweeping a slightly starstruck Delly against him and towards the exit. 

******

Delly was quiet in the car and didn’t speak until they got home. She took her heels off in the front entrance and then dropped onto the couch in their living now. Kell hovered into the kitchen, but could still hear her when she said,

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kell flipped the kettle on and let the sound of the water heating up fill the space between them for a few moments. 

“I didn’t want you to think any different of me.” He sighed as he walked towards her and then sat down on the coffee table in front of Delly, taking her hands in his. She didn’t look at him. “We were silly teenage boys back then, too caught up in our own worlds to understand the effect that we were having on him. If we had known how sensitive he was--” 

“Sensitive?” Delly interrupted, and the tone of her voice would have keyed him into the danger of the situation he was stepping into. He hurried to correct himself.

“My point is that I understand what we did wrong back then, I wouldn’t do it again. I regret it every day. I’ve changed.”

“Have you? Do you regret what happened because a boy died or do you regret it because your classmates think you’re a terrible person? You know I always did wonder if you truly wanted to do good why didn’t you go into civil law? Why corporate? It never did make sense to me. And now I know! You don’t really care about the less fortunate, you only care about your image! It’s not about helping your client out, it’s about winning, and showing the world how many pro bono cases you’ve done so that they’ll all say, Wow look at Kell Dane, such a champion for the voiceless! You’re a fraud!” Her voiced gradually got louder as she spoke, to the point where she nearly screamed her last accusation at him. 

“You’re one to talk! You’re always going on about new initiatives, and helping those more fortunate than you and then turn around and buy clothing that has been created in sweatshops by the very people you say you care about. I may be a fraud, but you’re a hypocrite!” He lashed out. Delly stared at him with wide eyes. Kell had never yelled at her before, had always made sure to never raise his voice, present himself as a soft hearted, but capable, man. She slowly crumpled, like a butterfly with a broken wing would, and he saw one tear start to fall, and then she slapped him. The force of it whipped his head to the right. Kell didn’t go after her when she ran off to the bedroom.

Delly cries herself to sleep and Kell waits until her tears subside before crawling into bed next to her. He wonders if this is the beginning of the end again. Everyone had been so quick to turn against him in high school, the students, the teachers, the administrative staff, and especially the school board who were only negotiated into allowing him to graduate with the contingency that he was homeschooled for the rest of the year, didn’t attend the ceremony and didn’t speak to the press. The other boys were treated the same way, and they barely talked to each other either, too shocked about what had happened and each ruminating on their own role in Rhy’s fate. Kell spent the next year, next few years, angry with everyone. He was angry with himself for being so stupid as to not have seen it coming, for his friends for the same, at his parents using their money to get him out of any consequences, at everyone at school for deeming him a villain. He vowed to prove them wrong, show them that he wasn’t bad, that he had just been a normal teenage boy, maybe with a bit of a mean streak, but really he was quite decent, good even. He would show them, he had thought.

But now it was clear that he had failed.

Kell tried not to think about Rhy before, because thinking about him made him sad and angry and hopeless, and Kell was trying to remake himself so he could not afford to feel sad and angry about hopeless. Maybe that’s why he never told Delly, because he didn’t want to believe that it had happened, choosing to remove those moments in highschool from his character. But now, after being rejected once again by his classmates and lying in his bed with his fiance turned away from him, he does think about Rhy. Specifically, he thinks about how Rhy had felt when it had happened, if he had been scared. Or if he felt all those years ago the way Kell does now, empty and hopeless, as he set the scene and pulled the trigger on himself. 

[theconservativebrief]

As White House press secretary, Sean Spicer had an up-close view of two events central to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation: the firings of Michael Flynn and James Comey.

And Spicer’s narrative of these events in his new book, The Briefing, is revealing — because of what it leaves out. The book’s passages describing Flynn and Comey’s firings are misleading and incomplete, and the description of Flynn’s firing contains several sloppy errors.

Spicer is surely well aware that offering accounts of events that are the subject of an ongoing investigation could pose problems for his former colleagues, should his account differ from theirs — so he unsurprisingly avoids doing so. He lawyered up and sat for an interview with Mueller’s team.

It was clear, too, that we shouldn’t expect any major revelations in Spicer’s book. Rather than writing a tell-all, he wrote more of a defense of himself. It is clearly aimed at a Trump-loving audience. (If you want to read about how Donald Trump, contrary to popular belief, “is a man of Christian instincts and feeling,” then this is the book for you.)

Still, the accounts of the Flynn and Comey firings stand out for what they leave out — and how they leave misleading impressions. So, yes, the book is a whole lot like one of Spicer’s podium performances.

Win McNamee/Getty Getty Images

The exact circumstances around Trump’s firing of Michael Flynn nearly a year and a half ago remain murky, but here’s a refresher on some key events:

In December 2016, after President Obama announced new sanctions on Russia, Flynn secretly contacted Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and told him to urge Moscow not to retaliate.

In mid-January 2017, after news broke that Flynn and Kislyak had spoken on the day of Obama’s announcement, Sean Spicer and Mike Pence told the public that the pair did not actually talk about sanctions at all.

In late January, after Trump was sworn in, Flynn lied to the FBI, telling them, again, that he and Kislyak didn’t discuss sanctions. Aware from intelligence intercepts of Kislyak that this statement was false, acting Attorney General Sally Yates then warned the White House that Flynn had misled Pence and could be vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

Trump took no action against Flynn for 18 days after Yates’s warning. Only after a pair of Washington Post reports revealed, first, that they did discuss sanctions, and second, the warning from Yates, did Trump finally fire Flynn on the night of February 13. The White House story was that Trump ousted Flynn because he had misled Pence.

There have long been many questions about what happened here. What was Trump’s involvement in, and knowledge of, what Flynn was doing, and the false story he was telling others? Why did he wait so long to fire Flynn? And why did he eventually do it?

Spicer’s book covers the topic in a brief, error-riddled passage that leaves out one crucial part of the story — Yates’s warning about Flynn — entirely. It begins:

During the transition, the media claimed General Flynn had met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on more than one occasion — contrary to what Flynn had told me, Reince [Priebus], and Vice President Pence.

Already, this account is inaccurate. The report that kicked off the controversy revealed that Flynn and Kislyak had spoken on the phone, not that they’d “met.”

In any case, Spicer continues with his explanation for why he put out the false story, saying Flynn just misled him:

I questioned Flynn about it again, and he quickly pulled out his phone to show me a text message to Kislyak, wishing him a happy new year and offering his condolences for members of the Russian Red Army Choir who had died in a plane crash. Flynn convinced me that the media was chasing a non-story. Vice President Pence and I gave flat-out denials that General Flynn had any important contacts with Russian officials.

Next, though, Spicer makes the bold move of skipping over Yates’s warning about Flynn entirely. He instead jumps ahead in the story a few weeks, to the Post stories published in the few days before Flynn’s firing:

But then in a high-profile interview with Adam Entous of the Washington Post, Flynn implied that he had conducted more extensive conversations with the Russian ambassador.

There are more errors here. Entous confirmed to me that Flynn’s interview was with the Post’s Karen DeYoung (though the quote eventually featured in a story co-bylined by Entous). Also, the news from it was that Flynn had denied to DeYoung, yet again, that he’d talked sanctions with Kislyak — but that afterward, his spokesperson tried to walk back the denial.

In any case, Spicer closes off the section with the laughable claim that Trump had “promptly” fired Flynn — which he can only make because he leaves out Yates’s warning from 18 days earlier:

General Flynn’s evolving account of his Russian contacts — and the fact that he had misled us — sank his credibility as national security advisor. The president promptly fired him.

The reality is that Trump was so strangely non-prompt in getting rid of Flynn that Mueller’s investigators have asked multiple White House officials to extensively map out what happened on every one of those 18 days, NBC News has reported.

Spicer closes off this misleading, error-riddled passage by complaining about an erroneous ABC News report on Flynn published months after Spicer himself stepped down. “There is also no question,” he writes, “that some in the media got this story wrong.”

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty

One example of a time when Trump did act “promptly” was when, on the very next morning after Flynn’s firing, he asked then-FBI Director James Comey to stay for a one-on-one chat in the Oval Office and (per Comey) urged him to let the investigation into Flynn go.

That’s not mentioned in Spicer’s book either, of course, because the official White House position is to deny that it happened, even though Comey documented it immediately in a memo.

In any case, Spicer eventually gives his version of another event of great importance to Mueller’s probe — Trump’s firing of Comey on May 9, 2017.

Spicer says he got barely any heads up. “Around 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 9, 2017, I was called into the Oval Office,” he writes. Then, he says, he was presented with the infamous letters from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticizing Comey and recommending his firing.

Spicer writes that both Trump and then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus insisted on making the announcement as quickly as possible, and that the question of why this was happening hardly came up.

“We need to get this out,” the president said.

The president’s advisers wanted to slow this process, and I agreed. … The president acknowledged each point but kept coming back to “We need to get this out.”

…“Let’s go, let’s go — let’s get this done,” the president said. As Donald Trump spoke, Reince turned to me as if to intensify the command “Get it done now.”

… [after he leaves the room] Meanwhile, my phone kept ringing. Reince was now telling me sternly, “Get it out now.”

Trump and Priebus’s obsession with speed here is interesting, though Spicer’s purpose in bringing it up is clearly not to allege anything nefarious, but rather to excuse his own positively horrendous rollout of the firing in the press.

As the passage continues, Spicer:

Insists that he didn’t really hide from reporters in the bushes to avoid questions on the topic

Attempts to offer a generous explanation of Trump’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt two days later in which he revealed he was going to fire Comey regardless of what Rosenstein recommended, and tied the decision to his gripes with the Russia investigation

Gives the mildest of criticisms of Trump’s bizarre tweeted threat that he might have “tapes” of his conversations with Comey (“Why this particular shot across the bow?”)

Somehow, though, Spicer manages to leave out any discussion the series of bombshell leaks in the eight days between Comey’s firing and Mueller’s appointment — even though he’s the press secretary. These stories reported, per their sources, that:

How did Spicer and his colleagues react when reporters inquired about, and eventually published, these stories? What did they think about them? How did they affect his view of what happened with Comey’s firing?

If you want those questions answered, you’ve bought the wrong book. Instead, to end his section on Comey’s firing, Spicer pivots to discuss … wait for it … Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“A sense of injustice over double standards has been a sore point for Republicans for years,” he gripes. Describing emails from Clinton to Huma Abedin found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, he closes out his section with this:

Imagine if any one of us had illegally copied classified information and placed it on the computer of a sex offender. How many special prosecutors would that entail?

It is this kind of double standard that stokes Donald Trump’s ire and erupts in his tweets and statements.

In other words: In conclusion, the president is right, and his critics are hypocrites.

Period.

Original Source -> Sean Spicer’s book misleads about 2 events Mueller is investigating

via The Conservative Brief

[rueur]

Morning Pages (05.01.2017)

Thursday 5th Jan - 7:37 a.m.

I’m already feeling skeptical about this whole morning pages idea. I feel really groggy, and my teeth hurt and my eyes hurt. I need to fart, and my fingers feel really weird typing right now. I don’t think I had a rough night though. I woke up at 3 a.m., maybe halfway through 3 a.m., with my right ear turning all liquidy so I had to wash my fingers, naturally. I flicked on the lamp, checked to see that Fish was still alive (because he swallowed this piece of grass whole yesterday, like it ran the length of his body and I thought he would choke on it and die), and then washed my hands in the dim bathroom. I then climbed back in bed and tried to fall back asleep but it took a while, honestly. I was conscious of how dark it was when I got back in bed and then felt like something was touching my legs again, my feet I mean. And then I thought I’d have to sleep on my other side because of my ear, but I couldn’t do that because I was paranoid that there was something in the room with me. I’ve paused now. I’m not writing. I feel like it’s hard for me to write about this fear of mine. I only get it when I sleep alone. I feel like it’s a defense mechanism to loneliness: fear of being in the presence of spirits. Because really, being here alone was my choice. Being alone at home, sleeping alone at home, is technically not really my choice but I made peace with it. Kind of. Before I came here, it was hard for me to fall asleep in the dark. I think that when I go back home, it’ll still be hard for me to fall asleep in the dark, because I know that my grandma is at home. Or Bugger. I don’t mind if Bugger is still keeping me company, because I love him. I really do. But I also want him to move on. His life as a dog was so tragic, he deserves something better. I don’t want him to be stuck as a tragic ghost dog. Like when Jasper dies, I think I’ll want him to move on immediately. Hopefully Jasper will live a long cat life though.

I felt like putting a paragraph here to not make this seem as rambly as it’s naturally going to be. This is stream-of-consciousness anyway. I’m also constantly worrying about how I’m going to store this stuff. I was thinking of putting it all on a blog? Like every morning I’d add a 3-page entry (or thereabouts) of my stream-of-consciousness morning page of the day. I don’t think I have enough space on Google Drive, so I think I’ll need to put it somewhere else. And my laptop doesn’t have enough space either. I need to get that fixed.

I’ve paused again. I tried to read what I’d written, but I know that I can’t. Julia Cameron said not to in ‘The Artist’s Way’. Lord help me, I hope something comes out of this trial. I think that something will have to; everyone else who’s tried this on Goodreads has said that it helped them. Anyway, I think I should keep talking about 3 a.m. last night, to be honest with you. I tried falling back asleep, I tried sleeping on my other side, and could do neither. Then, begrudgingly, I got up, lifted the blind an inch or so, and then went back to sleep. Wait, no, I turned the lamp back on and tried to sleep with the lamp on but I couldn’t do that to Fish. It was too bright and I’m constantly afraid that I might kill Fish. Fish is not my fish, by the way. He is a near-twelve year-old goldfish who got attacked, like mauled, by a cat when he was around five years old. Emily told me this. And when they found him they thought he was dead. But a couple of hours later, he started twitching and trying to breathe, and Emily rushed to get him back into the water and somehow, miraculously, he made a full recovery and is still alive like seven years later! This is an OLD goldfish, who has undeniably lived. And I need to keep him alive? But so far, so good. I started house-sitting on the 17th of December and now it’s the 5th of January, and I will be here until the 23rd of January. Emily is my old drama teacher. She lives in a small one bedroom apartment in Northcote; she posted on Facebook a while ago that she was looking for a house-sitter/pet-sitter for the summer and I volunteered immediately. I would’ve done it for free because I’ve always wanted to live in Northcote. It’s honestly beautiful. But she’s paying me, $100 a week. Which I’m not complaining about, I’ll need money before the semester starts because I know I’ll have nothing left besides my savings at the end of this year, if I don’t get a job. I quit my old job and Thailander, this Thai restaurant. They were paying illegal wages. I was getting $13 an hour, and I was also being pretty overworked. I quit at a time back when a lot of people were quitting, actually. At the time that I was quitting, Bao and Winnie (my old bosses) were losing not just me, but also Waen and Doro. Waen (whose name is actually also Winnie, but because of bosslady Winnie, we had to call her Waen) was a backpacker/student from Thailander who came to Melbourne to work so that she could take holidays from her jobs on her holiday and then go road tripping around Australia. In her year here, I think she saw more of the country than I’ve seen. I’m pretty sure she went to Central Australia, and Western Australia, and I haven’t been there. And Doro is a very philosophical chef, who I still have on Facebook (I have Waen too, she’s very artistic) and whose page is filled every day with the most inspiring, assuring stuff. It’s kind of refreshing. Anyway, those two (aside from L as well), were the people I loved working with the most. L was the head chef at Thailander. He was so good at his job that he was actually paid minimum wage, but damn did he deserve double that at the least.

My shoulders are getting really tired from typing this out. And it is fast approaching 8 a.m. and I’ll need to get up and feed the cats soon. I’m a little anxious about that. Emily has two cats too: Bruno and Romulus (Romy). Bruno is thirteen and has seen more death-defying action in his life than even Fish. Bruno was hit by a car twice, and to make things even worse, he has recently been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, and also his pancreas has trouble functioning. SO, he doesn’t take in nutrients properly, his hips have been displaced permanently and when he walks it’s always with a bit of a limp and also slightly veering to the right. I have to give him two sets of medication two times a day: a capsule mushed in with his wet food, and thyroid cream rubbed into his ears. Romy is the most low maintenance of the bunch, and the fluffiest, and the fattest. He’s seven, and apparently he was a wild cat before Emily adopted him. Emily says that the stray instincts are still with him.

Oh man, I didn’t even finish talking about Thailander. Fish is looking at me like he wants food. I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl fish, I’ve just been calling it a male this whole time but I honestly have no idea, nor does Emily. Ugh, this morning pages thing is getting quite old. Right now it just feels like a diary to me. This isn’t even stream-of-consciousness, I’m just writing about my life. Maybe I’m doing it wrong? But Julia Cameron said there’s no wrong way of doing it, as long as you get three pages out. I have to admit that the original settings for this word document were Arial font, at size 11 and I changed it to size 12 so I’d have to write less. But I think size 12 is reasonable.

I just scrolled down to look at how blank the rest of this final page is and it’s stressing me out. I have something pulling at my back. Not a presence, just a tired muscle. Then I shouldn’t say ‘I have something pulling’ should I? I should just say, there’s a muscle in my back that’s causing me grief. I took a second to sit up just then, because I didn’t like lying on my stomach. And as soon as I sat up, I felt all the blood rush to my head. I’ve been lying down for so long. I kept waking up at 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 6:30 a.m., and kept thinking ‘maybe I should do the three pages now, or now...or now!’ and kept making myself fall back asleep. When I saw 7:30 a.m., I just had to get up. I was tempted to write them at 3 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep, because I was wide awake and it was technically morning, and I was also feeling a lot at the time. I was afraid. I opened the blinds a little and then tried sleeping with the lamp off but more natural light coming in from the street, and I thought it would be fine. But then the bottom of the blind started hitting the window frame in the night breeze. I stared at it with frustration for some time, timing how often it happened, and then decided to finally say that I was being ridiculous (fuck it! I didn’t know if I was going to allow myself to swear in these pages, I feel like I swear too much), rolled over onto my other side and fell asleep! Who knew that all you needed to get a job done was an overwhelmingly stubborn desire to just get that job done!

Anyway, back to Thailander. I miss L. I miss Hassan, the cute Pakistani chef I worked with on Sundays (11/12 - 9 p.m.) rolling into work super late and super hungover. I miss that whole work environment, honestly. But my restaurant shut down after Doro, Waen and I left. Two of their restaurants shut down actually, out of their original four. Now it’s just the little place in the QV basement, and their very first store on Collins Street. I also miss working in the city, and working in hospitality in the city. I meet a lot of really interesting people. I met Isaac, and Greg, and Andrew. Isaac is a pianist and a musical director. Very talented, very young, very busy. Greg works in set design. He’s a grizzled dude in singlets and he has a big, greyish beard and he’s gluten free. So is Isaac, actually. And they knew each other but they never came in to eat at the same time. Isaac only came in a handful of times though, and while he never left a tip, he did leave his phone number, which was cute. Okay, I’m out of pages. I’ll tell you about Andrew tomorrow morning then?