Ms. Harris has spent the months since November largely out of the public eye, delivering a paid speech in Australia and appearing at weddings of some of her famous friends. She was in England last week for the wedding of the Apple heiress Eve Jobs, whose mother, Laurene Powell Jobs, is a close friend. In June, she attended the wedding of Hillary Clinton’s top aide and the son of a Democratic megadonor. In May, she was spotted at the Met Gala in New York.
Weddings, planned in advance, always "happen to coincide" with world events that pop up spontaneously.
Mr. Soros and Ms. Abedin announced their engagement last July. They initially planned to elope, Vogue reported on Saturday, but they changed their minds after an engagement party co-hosted by Mrs. Clinton in December, where attendees pressured the couple to hold a more traditional celebration.
“I think she deserves it,” Mrs. Clinton told the magazine. “She deserves to have that kind of moment.”...
If only we could all have what Hillary Clinton thinks we deserve.
The moneyed scene was especially striking given the Democratic Party’s raging debate over how to improve its historically low standing with voters and win back working-class Americans, with whom it is widely seen as having lost touch....
Here's how I'd spin it: It was so out of touch it was in touch. They were in touch with their out of touchness.
I voted for the least popular choice: "Update your bio, then run." He pleaded guilty to a crime and served his sentence. He's a registered sex offender. But he has a right to free speech and social media is for everyone.
I'm assuming "then run" means get on with tweeting. Not run for office.
ADDED: I wondered, how's Huma Abedin these days. I see she filed for divorce in 2017, when he pled guilty, but she withdrew the case in 2018. Years later, there is still no divorce. The Guardian published an interview with her last month:
"You have told that man, I'd absolutely be interested in fucking you — pretty much tonight.... If you send the message I pretty much am up to fuck, and the guy leans in to kiss you, he may be operating on bad information. Our system doesn't put him off the hook. The man is still required to respond to the signals as soon as they are clarified.... I suppose there could be such a thing as a 24-year-old who can be in a meeting with a Senator and is still too dumb to know what an invitation to come up to his place really means.... The Senator didn't read the signals wrong. The Senator read the signals exactly as they were sent. They were the wrong signals. I think it was very generous of the Senator to say he read the signals wrong. He didn't read anything wrong. The signals were crystal clear. They were sent wrong."
Scott Adams takes a strong position on the Huma Abedin accusation against an unnamed Senator.
1. I initially resisted taking this story to heart because Abedin did not come out strongly on the side of women but is continuing a pattern of protecting Democratic Party men, as I showed you here, yesterday.
2. I have personally lived my entire life, going back to adolescence, with the understanding that Scott Adams is putting very starkly, that one's actions are understood that way. In fact, I followed a personal credo: Don't give him any ideas. I'm sure I missed out on some lovely experiences because I was so cautious, and this was a caution that went way beyond avoiding sexual assault. I didn't want the other person to feel hurt or embarrassed.
3. So I agree with part of what Scott Adams is saying, that by accepting the Senator's invitation, she gave him hope, and she ought to know that her action inspired hope.
4. But hope goes on only in his head (and the rest of his nervous system). He probably also had hope as soon as he saw her, as soon as she was friendly to him. He got ideas. Fine! The question is what can he do with that hope?
5. Since I spent a lifetime operating under the credo Don't give him any ideas, I'm not in a great position to parody Scott's advice to ladies with a statement that begins, "Gentlemen, if a woman accepts your invitation," but there is one thing I'm sure of, so let me try.
7. Notice Adams's language: "the guy leans in to kiss you." That's like kissing in a romcom, where the man gradually and gently moves his lips closer to hers and observes her response, so that there's lots of nonverbal communication. That's not what happened (as far as we know from Abedin's description). The Senator suddenly advanced to French kissing (and whatever that "pressing" was).
8. I would tend to think that Abedin had a lot of self-esteem and — rightly! — believed she could offer a man a wonderful relationship and intended to give this man a chance to enter into the highly valuable sphere that is her life. Let's keep talking about what actions mean. His action meant: You're not an important person in my life.
The starkly different outcomes from Strzok’s interviews — a felony charge against Flynn and a free pass to Mills and Abedin — are sure to raise questions from Republicans about double-standards in the FBI’s two most prominent political investigations....
Strzok was also a prominent part of the Clinton investigation, so much so that he conducted all of the most significant interviews in the case....
These jeans sent a different message [than the black sweater she wore at the sentencing], one surely received by the paparazzi staked outside her door that morning. With a smattering of yellow and orange flowers and leaves from hip to heel, the jeans said: bright and cheery. They said, Let’s roll around in a meadow covered with wildflowers in our hair like hippie children from the 1960s singing “Let the Sunshine In.”... They’re a walking celebration. An explosion of animated joy.
What's up with the adjective "divorce" in "Divorce Jeans"? The occasion is that the sentencing is over. Abedin and Weiner are not yet divorced. The article refers to him as "her soon-to-be-ex-husband." And I don't think he's gone to prison yet.
But we get the idea: "Divorce" works as an adjective in front of the names of things — e.g., "divorce hair" — a woman adopts to express that she has cut herself off from her old married life and feels just great about all the freedom flooding into he life.
In other contexts, it might be bad to celebrate your freedom when your mate is going to prison, losing his freedom. But Weiner's crime required Abedin to show no empathy.
From his lawyers: "He responded to the victim's request for sexually explicit messages not because she was a teenager but in spite of it.... He responded as a weak man, at the bottom of a self-destructive spiral, and with an addict's self-serving delusion that the communications were all just internet fantasy." Like he's the victim.
The link goes to The Chicago Tribune and is worth clicking to see the photo of Huma and Anthony in court (on Wednesday). She's in profile looking away from him. The expression on her face is somewhere between impassivity and anger. He's turned toward her, but his eyes seem to be aimed somewhere around the back of her head. The expression on his haggard, wrinkled face seems to be in the vicinity of self-pity and some kind of disgust other than self-disgust.
When he says he "crushed the aspirations of my wife," I can't help hypothesizing that he wanted to crush the aspirations of his wife. And while we're on the subject, did Bill Clinton want to crush the aspirations of his wife? Let's be on the lookout for the aspirations-crushing impulse in the husbands of ambitious wives.
“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,” Mr. Trump said in a letter dated Tuesday to Mr. Comey.
Shortly before the announcement, the FBI notified Congress by letter that Comey had misstated key findings involving the Hillary Clinton email investigation during testimony last week, but nothing about that issue seemed to suggest it might imperil Comey’s job....
In defending the probe at last week’s hearing, Comey offered seemingly new details to underscore the seriousness of the situation FBI agents faced last fall when they discovered thousands of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails on the computer of her husband, Anthony Weiner.
“Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,” Comey said, adding later, “His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him I think to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state.”... At another point in the testimony, Comey said Abedin “forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contain classified information.’’
Neither of those statements is accurate, said people close to the investigation.
I'm 16% of the way into the book that goes "Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign." (I know the percent because I'm reading it on Kindle (in combination with the "whispersync'd" audio version, useful when walking around).)
I just wanted to quote 3 things:
1. At the 5% mark, the unholy mess: "The campaign was an unholy* mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, distorted priorities, and no sense of greater purpose. No one was in charge, and no one had figured out how to make the campaign about something bigger than Hillary. Muscatine felt that the speech said nothing because it tried to say too much."
2. At the 9% mark, Huma, the croc-filled moat: "[Huma Abedin] had the final say on where Hillary went and who had access to her. Rather than just being a gatekeeper, Abedin took on the role of channeling Hillary for the rest of the campaign... That made her indispensable to both the candidate and the rest of the team... But many feared speaking their minds around her. She couldn’t be counted on to relay constructive criticism to Hillary without pointing a finger at the critic. If Hillary was a candidate often isolated from her formal campaign — and she was — Abedin was the croc-filled moat encircling her. The Royal Huma Guard made it harder for Hillary’s senior- and midlevel aides to get time with the candidate, and that made it impossible to really know the woman they were selling."
3. At the 14% mark, the Brianna/Bianna screwup: "In May [2015], as Bernie was starting to campaign in earnest and it was becoming clear that the press wouldn’t let the e-mail story go, Hillary’s aides began planning her first national television interview of the campaign, a chance to strike back at the widely held perception that she was hiding from the press. Palmieri asked Abedin to find out which newscaster Hillary would prefer, and the answer that came back was 'Brianna.' That meant CNN’s Brianna Keilar, and Palmieri worked to set up a live interview on CNN. Only it turned out that Hillary had said 'Bianna'— as in Bianna Golodryga of Yahoo! News, the wife of former Clinton administration economic aide Peter Orszag. By the time the mistake was realized, it was too late to pull back. Hillary went through with the interview on July 7, and it was a disaster." Here's what her own people perceived as a disaster:
___________________
* The use of the word "unholy" to just mean awful or dreadful interested me. I wondered how long that completely nonreligious application of the religious-seeming word had been around. The OED finds the first published use in a letter written by Charles Dickens in 1842: "I am reminded of my promise to see to the Pantomime, and am called out at this unholy hour." A similar word is "ungodly," first recorded in the nonreligious meaning in a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Olalla" (1887)(whole text here):
I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar, would not suffer me to sleep. I lay there and tossed, my nerves and senses on the stretch. At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time. But it must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries. I leaped from my bed, supposing I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and discordant that they shocked the heart. It was no illusion; some living thing, some lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully tortured...
I assume the reason for leaving is that the election is over, Hillary lost, and there's no reason for him to hide away and pretend to be reforming himself. Freed from the obligation to stop impairing Hillary and Huma's rise to power, he can lunge toward freedom.
Page Six calls him "unemployable," but I assume he's writing a memoir. Tell it all, Anthony. You've got great material, and you love to write about yourself. You're not shy about sharing sexual details. I'm sure you'll be just fine. What a great tragicomic character!
I know, it will be a problem not hurting Huma and the son you two had together. Maybe you can't write the great memoir you have the material to write. Maybe you'll end up bullshitting about addiction and treatment and hawking it on women's TV, duly abasing yourself. Please don't do that. Write a real memoir. Tell the truth.
Obviously, a good commercial memoir's first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who's spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet. But none of [Austin's memoir's] loyalties are to the reader. The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends....
The FBI already had a warrant to search Weiner's laptop, but that only applied to evidence of his allegedly illicit communications with an underage girl.
Said Audie Cornish on "Meet the Press" today, claiming "some sources in the F.B.I. and the former district attorney's." (Cornish is the host of NPR's "All Things Considered.")
The moderator, Chuck Todd, immediately pushed her back: "Not full revolt. There's been a lot. I mean it's--there are agents--Let's not say full revolt." Todd was very controlling of his guests today, interrupting a lot. I thought it made him seem desperate.
Cornish continued:
CORNISH: All right, a semi-full revolt. Because what I'm getting at is if Comey hadn't said what he said to Congress and the rest of the world, it would have leaked. It would have leaked. That whole building was ready to leak that they had discovered this new source with Weiner and Abedin. So, I don't think Comey had much chance [choice?] here. And I think the F.B.I. is badly divided.
I think that explains a lot about why Comey got his letter out. There was also this, from Pete Williams (the "Meet the Press" justice correspondent), who who was asked whether Comey would "provide more details before the election" (as both the Clinton and Trump campaigns have requested):
PETE WILLIAMS: [That's not going to happen] based on what I was told just in the last couple of hours. I don't think they plan to say anything further. They believe that they did the right thing by telling Congress about this development. And their logic goes something like this: that the fact of the discovery of these emails was going to leak. That if it had leaked it would come out in all sorts of different ways and be interpreted in all sorts of different ways, and that the best way to handle this was just to get out in front of it. And secondly, they thought that if they waited till after the election and then it was discovered that they had found these emails, that would play into this whole scenario about how the system is rigged.
AND: Mike Pence was also a guest on the show. (And Todd really interrupted the hell out of him, but Pence kept his relentlessly on-task, solemn demeanor.) Pence brought out a point that I hadn't seen elsewhere: "[T]he F.B.I. director is keeping his word to the Congress that if new pertinent information came forward that justified the reopening of the case, that he would alert the Congress." If that's correct, that's the answer to the question why Comey came forward when he did.
Picking up the idea that Comey was keeping his word, that he had no choice, but a duty, Todd asked: "Do you think think Director Comey has a duty, though, to share more information of what's known?" Pence, ever somber, came out with: "I think he has a duty to move forward professionally and in a timely way on this." So, basically, no, Comey doesn't need to say anything more. In fact, Pence added, why doesn't Huma Abedin just put her emails out? Why does the Hillary campaign think the missing information should come from the FBI? If they sincerely want transparency, why don't they get transparent?
They're a fascinating mystery. She's so closed and he's so open. Why are they together? Why were they ever together? Why are they still together? Are they together now for the child? Would that explain the exposure of the child in a sexual context? What do I have to do to unlock myself from this locked off lady?
ADDED: Meade just said: "If this was really about crossing a line with a child, that child would never have appeared in the movie."
While his wife, Huma Abedin, travels the country campaigning for Hillary Clinton, the disgraced ex-congressman has been sexting with a busty brunette out West — and even sent her a lurid crotch shot with his toddler son in the picture, The Post has learned....
Weiner was clearly aroused by his conversation with the 40-something divorcee when he abruptly changed the subject.
“Someone just climbed into my bed,” Weiner wrote.
“Really?” she responded.
Weiner then hit “send” on the cringe-inducing image, which shows a bulge in his white, Jockey-brand boxer briefs and his son cuddled up to his left, wrapped in a light-green blanket.
“You do realize you can see you[r] Weiner in that pic??” the woman wrote.
Moments after forwarding the photo, Weiner freaked out over the possibility he had accidentally posted it publicly — just as he did during the infamous episode that forced him to resign from Congress in 2011.
“Ooooooh . . . I was scared. For half a second I thought I posted something. Stop looking at my crotch,” Weiner wrote back....
Carlos is into the danger. Have a little empathy. You know I do. It's his sexual orientation. And it's safe sex. Except the part where you humiliate your wife, whose name I'd put right next to the word "humiliate" if a thousand writers hadn't already done that juxtaposition. It's not a new humiliation, just another iteration of the old humiliation.
And now, again. Once more, with feeling. Once more, with the child in the picture. Once more, with open discussion of the excitement he gets from risking fucking his wife again. Fucking — I mean that metaphorically.
I'd say the third time is the modern psychological novel — inviting us to explore the complications of a modern marriage.
UPDATE: I put up a new post about Huma finally separating from Anthony: here.
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