Archive for March, 2017

Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter among women featured in conservative women calendar spread – AOL

Kelsey Weekman, AOL.com

Mar 23rd 2017 2:42PM

Remember that glamour shot of Kellyanne Conway someone spotted in the background of an interview at her home?

It turns out that the stunning shot is one of many featured in a calendar dedicated to attractive, politically-conservative women.

Between 2009 and 2012, Conway joined the likes of Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann in posing for a calendar commissioned by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

19 PHOTOS

Kellyanne Conway since the election

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WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 24: Kellyanne Conway is seen as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer speaks at a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday January 24, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Kellyanne Conway and one of her daughters arrives at Trump Tower for meetings with President-elect Donald Trump on January 2, 2017 in New York. / AFP / KENA BETANCUR (Photo credit should read KENA BETANCUR/AFP/Getty Images)

LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS -- Episode 469 -- Pictured: (l-r) Kellyanne Conway during an interview with host Seth Meyers on January 10, 2016 -- (Photo by: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS -- Episode 469 -- Pictured: (l-r) Kellyanne Conway during an interview with host Seth Meyers on January 10, 2016 -- (Photo by: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway speaks at the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, U.S. January 27, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway chats with repoters on board Air Force One as they wait for U.S. President Donald Trump to arrive for travel to Philadelphia from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

White House senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (C) stands with a Secret Service agent as they wait for U.S. President Donald Trump to arrive to board Air Force One for travel to Philadelphia from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

White House Senior Advisor Kellyanne Conway stands near a bust of late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. as U.S. President Donald Trump meets with labor leaders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S. January 23, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Senior aide Kellyanne Conway listens while White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer holds the daily press briefing January 23, 2017 at the White House in Washington, DC. / AFP / Nicholas Kamm (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

Senior staff at the White House Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon (L-R) applaud before being sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence in Washington, DC January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Counselor to U.S. President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway prepares to go on the air in front of the White House in Washington, U.S., January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Counselor to U.S. President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway prepares to go on the air in front of the White House in Washington, U.S., January 22, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

White House Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks, Senior Counselor Steve Bannon and Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway arrive for the presidential inauguration on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool

Kellyanne Conway, advisor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, departs for a church service before the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump kisses his campaign manger Kellyanne Conway's hand at a pre-inauguration candlelight dinner with donors at Union Station in Washington, U.S. January 19, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway arrives to attend a candlelight dinner at Union Station on the eve of the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Kellyanne Conway, advisor to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, arrives with him aboard his plane at Reagan National Airport in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. January 17, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives to a swearing in ceremony of White House senior staff in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2017. Trump today mocked protesters who gathered for large demonstrations across the U.S. and the world on Saturday to signal discontent with his leadership, but later offered a more conciliatory tone, saying he recognized such marches as a hallmark of our democracy. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

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CBLPI publishes the calendars to raise money for the nonprofit, which was founded in 1993 after Michelle Easton served in the Reagan and first Bush White Houses.

"We are an organization that prepares and supports women leaders," Easton told Broadly. "We make them stronger, better conservatives. We use successful conservative women as role models."

The organization is named for late Connecticut congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, who mixed femininity with right-wing politics and wrote for various magazines.

According to Broadly, CBLPI employees decided to create calendars in 2004 after watching the movie "Calendar Girls" -- a story of Women's Institute members who raise money by posing nude in a calendar.

"[A donor] had the idea (we let him think it was his) that we should do a calendar," former CBLPI program director Lisa De Pasquale told Broadly. "[For the first few calendars], I did it on the cheap with the photos they provided or we took from events."

Conway's legendary mink photo came from the 2009 calendar, which had a "Pretty in Mink" theme. Coulter also posed for it.

You can check out the 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 calendars and more in full on the CBLPI website.

See how people are reacting to the story:

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Conservative women calendar spread ignites Twitter

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@broadly @jyoohoops even in a photoshoot that conway hair looks thirsty.

@Olivianuzzi @mitchsunderland "There is no backstory, except I was the only one wearing my own mink." classic coulter

@Olivianuzzi @mitchsunderland It does kinda look like JCPenny glamour shots tbh, but hating on looks is so sexist. #GetEnlightened

@Olivianuzzi @mitchsunderland @broadly She looks really pretty, but the whole thing is hilarious.

@Olivianuzzi @mitchsunderland Beautiful, successful women. Yay!

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[H/T Broadly]

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Kellyanne Conway, Ann Coulter among women featured in conservative women calendar spread - AOL

Ann Coulter Unloads on Paul Ryan’s ‘Deeply Unpopular’ – Breitbart – Breitbart News

AP Photos: Evan Agostini, Richard Drew

by Katie McHugh22 Mar 20170

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Obamacare 2.0 would inflict severe healthcare costs on Rust Belt voters while easing taxes on counties that voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to Bloomberg News. Trump swept into the White House on a populist wave becausevoters protested mass immigration policies, erosive trade deals, and never-ending Middle Eastern military conflictsnot because they wanted another crazy corporatist agenda, Coulter tweeted.

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Conservatives are furious over the bills complete lack of enforcement against illegal aliens receiving healthcare tax creditsmeant for citizens and certain immigrantsthrough document fraud and identity theft. Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash said the bill has no constituency beyond the political class entrenched in Washington, D.C. and their wealthy insurance company allies.

Big Government, Obamacare, Ann Coulter, Obamacare 2.0, Paul Ryan

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Ann Coulter Unloads on Paul Ryan's 'Deeply Unpopular' - Breitbart - Breitbart News

The European Union Just Turned 60. Now What? – TIME

European Council President Donald Tusk, panel right, speaks to EU leaders during an EU summit meeting at the Orazi and Curiazi Hall in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, on March 25, 2017. Alessandra TarantinoAP

(ROME) European Union leaders marked the 60th anniversary of their founding treaty on Saturday as a turning point in their history in the knowledge that Britain will officially trigger divorce proceedings from the bloc next week.

Desperately trying to portray that sustained unity is the only way ahead in a globalized world, the no-show of British Prime Minister Theresa May was a symbol of the cathartic crisis the 27 other EU nations are going through.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker called Brexit "a tragedy."

EU Council President Donald Tusk said that sustained unity for was the only way for the EU to survive.

"Europe as a political entity will either be united, or will not be at all," he told EU leaders at a solemn session in precisely the same ornate hall on the ancient Capitoline Hill where the Treaty of Rome founding the EU was signed on March 25, 1957.

"Only a united Europe can be a sovereign Europe in relation to the rest of the world," Tusk said. "Only a sovereign Europe guarantees independence for its nations, guarantees freedom for its citizens. "

In a series of speeches, EU leaders also acknowledged how the bloc had strayed into a complicated structure that had slowly lost touch with its citizens, compounded by the severe financial crisis that struck several member nations over the past decade.

Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, who was hosting the summit, said that over the past dozen years the EU's development had stalled.

"Unfortunately, we stopped" he said, and "it triggered a crisis of rejection."

At the same time though, the summit in sun-splashed Rome, where new civilizations were built on old ruins time and again, there also was a message of optimism.

"Yes, we have problems, yes there are difficulties, yes there will be crisis in the future, but we stand together and we move forward," Gentiloni said. "We have the strength to start out again."

At the end of the session, all 27 leaders signed a new Rome Declaration saying that "European unity is a bold, far-sighted endeavor."

"We have united for the better. Europe is our common future," the declaration said.

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The European Union Just Turned 60. Now What? - TIME

The rise(s) and fall(s) of the European Union – POLITICO.eu

The worlds most complex democratic experiment took shape 60 years ago this week in the lingering shadow of the worlds greatest, ugliest war.

From those early days of six members through to todays 28 and soon to be 27 members, its been a rollercoaster ride all the way.

Once harshly divided, Europe is now far more united, and undeniably richer.

Yet as the EU turns 60, just how much of that success is due to the EUs existence and the directives and regulations fashioned in Brussels and adjudicated in Luxembourg is still a matter of fierce debate.

Here are the key moments:

The original Six Nations (the post-war peaceniks, not the rugby tournament) of Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg refashion their coal and steel community into a customs union and the beginnings of a common market based on free movement of capital and goods. They do this via two Treaties of Rome, which establish the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). There are plenty of Founding Fathers, but no Founding Mothers.

Delegations attending the talks before signing the treaties creating the European Economic Community in March, 1957 | AFP via Getty Images

The Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) is established. This is the beginning of six decades of multilingual non-intuitive European acronyms, made-up words, and other forms of cruelty to language. Citizens everywhere, to the extent that they ever pay attention, are flummoxed. From semesters to comitology, from Antici to trilogues, the citizens of Brussels now stumble, punch-drunk, through such sentences as this: The new MPCC for CSDP will be there in the EUMS. Fonctionnaires receive nothing more than a 40 percent tax break to compensate for this hardship.

Throughout the 1960s EFTA exists as a viable (and more worldly) rival to the new European community, and with more members: Austria, Britain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. Its lower and looser ambitions hold back the growth of the European Economic Community that will later become the European Union.

Fifty years of ceaseless scrapping over the Common Agricultural Policy, sovereignty, Brussels-driven taxation and the use of majority voting in the European Council crystallized for the first time in 1965 when a petulant Charles de Gaulle withdrew his permanent representative to the EEC and stomped away from summits until he got his way. The Great National Sulk is now firmly established as a European diplomatic ploy.

French President Charles de Gaulle, in 1966 | AFP via Getty Images

Fearing a dilution of their highly prized sovereignty, won and lost and won again in Arctic conditions, the Norwegians turned their backs on the euro tribe in a referendum on membership. Decades before Tinder was invented, the Norwegians swiped left on the EECs profile before theyd even had a chance to get to know each other. It would be decades before a second date took place. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark had no such qualms (possibly because they skipped the pesky referendum part), and jumped straight into bed with the frisky EEC.

Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil becomes the leader of the first elected European Parliament, and Margaret Thatcher takes over as U.K. prime minister. It will be another decade before anyone thinks to nominate a female European commissioner, another two before there is a second female Parliament president, and three decades before Cathy Ashton and Catherine Day become the EUs chief diplomat and the Commissions top civil servant, respectively. There has never been a female Commission or Council president.

mile Nol retires as secretary general of the Commission after 30 years on the job, dating back to the very first day of the new European Commission. As many as five people hold the post over the next 30 years. The principal legacy of Nols bureaucratic marathon is the influence of French administrative methods and the widespread use of the French language in the European institutions.

The dramatic moment ushers in a new era for Europe, in which East and West converge. Not only that, it leads to the reunification of Germany and reignites the debate over how the rest of Europe can keep Germany now the Gulliver in Lilliput pinned to the ground. One of the solutions will be the euro, as much a shackling device as it is a currency.

West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 | Gerard Malie/AFP via Getty Images

Jacques Delors great achievement, the EU single market, is born the culmination of a tortured six-year pregnancy that began with the Single European Act. Although the policy was partly inspired by Thatcher, she fought Delors on it anyway. Despite its occasional growth spurts and being the apple of the eye of its Europhile parents, the EU single market has suffered from arrested development throughout its young life. In her 1988 Bruges Speech, Thatcher inveighed against a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. The Sun newspaper brings its destructive panache to the EU debate with its front page Up Yours Delors. (The British tabloids have been at war with Brussels ever since.)

Yugoslavia falls apart and war and genocide return to Europes doorstep. The EU, a body set up to ensure peace, watches impotently as its neighbors massacre each other in a series of atavistic meltdowns. The U.S. steps in to knock Balkan heads together and negotiate peace accords. The ethnically motivated conflicts peter out only in 2001, and the EU starts to bring the region under its wing.

Two Bosnian Croat soldiers pass by the corpse of a Bosnian Serb soldier killed in the Croatian attack on the Serb-held town of Drvar in western Bosnia, August 1995 | Tom Dubravec/AFP via Getty Images

This treaty, thrashed out in a snoozy little town at the intersection of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, is a high-water mark of euro-optimism, laying the groundwork for the euro and for ever greater union. Maastricht established clear rules for foreign and security policy as well as justice and home affairs. The European Community officially became the European Union.

Seventy-five years after Austria lost an empire, it is accepted into the EU. Having come to the party far too late, Viennas grand state buildings cant be put to EU use, and the Union is stuck with dreary Strasbourg and Luxembourg as its homes outside Brussels. The next day, Hungary the other wing of the former Austro-Hungarian empire becomes the first former Soviet satellite to apply for membership.

The Schengen Accord is concluded. No more border checks! No more hassle! Europe will live life in the borderless VIP lane. While the EU captures the popular imagination with this step forward, its a shame no one stops to create a coast guard, or a unified software system to monitor those coming and going in the Continents visa-free travel zone. (In a sign of things to come, the U.K. scoffs at Schengen and says no thank you.)

The Schengen Accord was concluded in 1995 | Charles Caratini/AFP via Getty Images

With the establishment of the European Central Bank, the EU joins the global race to elevate central bankers to the status of pinstripe-wearing Gods. The move follows on the heels of the rise of former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Bank of Englands newly granted independence.

Commissioners quit en masse in the wake of allegations of widespread fraud, including against dith Cresson. The French commissioner paid her retirement-aged lover as a staff member and oversaw the disappearance of EU research funds. Under siege, Cresson developed a newfound interest in civil rights, but failed in her effort to establish the right of political elites to sleep with their own kind while sending the bill to taxpayers.

The European Commission recommends that Greece become the 12th member of the eurozone based on falsified economic indicators. Economists everywhere warn that the eurozones governance is incomplete, akin to a half-built house that wont be able to weather a cyclone.

Travelers everywhere celebrate not having to pay extortionate cambio fees while traveling, thanks to the euro, which quickly gains the status of the worlds No. 2 currency behind the U.S. dollar and hands itself a financial time-bomb in the process. Germany, which can cope with the debt, borrows more cheaply than ever to become a global export powerhouse that will dominate other European economies. Others also borrow like the Germans, but fail to remember that they are Spaniards, or Italians, or Greeks.

The Commission blocks a proposed merger between American companies GE and Honeywell, and proves it can set the global agenda on competition policy. The power play infuriates the Americans, who invented the field of antitrust and now see their companies become dartboards for Brussels. Fifteen years later, a string of billion-euro fines, repayment orders, and multi-year investigations will leave the worlds biggest companies, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Gazprom, Heineken and Saint-Gobain, thoroughly dazed and confused.

There are scenes of exalted celebration in eight former Soviet states, as well as in wee Cyprus and mini Malta, which join the clubs ranks as part of the EUs biggest enlargement effort. For the first time, more than half of European countries are members of the Union. Old Europe starts to get jittery.

A European constitution is drafted with great fanfare. Some of its authors hope it will become Europes version of the U.S. constitution a template for democrats worldwide. But voters in France and the Netherlands ruin the dream, rejecting the constitution and throwing the Union into a period of reflection. The EU emerges from its depression by crafting the Lisbon Treaty which is again rejected, this time by the Irish.

The global financial crisis, which the EU initially blamed on American cowboys, hits home. It sees the EU supervising the rescue of one bank a day, puts the Unions single market at risk, and sends unemployment soaring, growth plummeting and several countries into humiliating EU-funded bailouts. Most European governments have blithely neglected to implement structural reforms that would have helped their economies absorb the shockwaves, but they find it easier to blame Wall Street, George W. Bush and Brussels.

Europe was battered by the 2008 financial crash | Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

The Union strengthens its arsenal by establishing a bailout fund and banking union. It is ruthless in spanking countries that have broken the EUs budget rules and need a bailout, especially Greece. But there are successes in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, which take their bitter medicine and turn their budgets around.

Greece has struggled to climb out of an economic hole | Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

The EU has a visa-free travel zone without any real migration policy or effective external border. This calamitous oversight becomes apparent in the summer of 2015, as refugees and economic migrants flood into the EU, skirting makeshift border fences and heading for Germany. Mutti Merkel establishes herself as the new face of global liberalism by welcoming them with open arms. Brussels is sidelined as national governments initially come to an agreement on refugee relocation and resettlement, then largely refuse to implement it.

The U.K. votes to leave a union it never fully embraced, setting off an existential crisis among the blocs 27-member rump. Britains vote comes to symbolize a strain of nationalist populism that imperils the Union ahead of a string of national elections. As officials on both sides of the Channel mud-wrestle over the logistics and implications of untangling Britain from Brussels, Brexit becomes the EUs obsession, with negotiations threatening to drag on well past the two-year limit set out by Article 50.

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The rise(s) and fall(s) of the European Union - POLITICO.eu

Britain could face $62B penalty for leaving European Union – The Providence Journal

By Tim RossBloomberg News

Britain will have to pay a bill of about $62 billion when it leaves the European Union, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned as Britain prepares to trigger the start of Brexit negotiations.

While there is no desire to punish Britain for leaving the bloc, the EU must deter other countries from following, the head of the EU's executive arm told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday. British Prime Minister Theresa May's government knows they'll have to pay what they owe, he said.

"We have to calculate scientifically what the British commitments were and then the bill has to be paid," he said. Asked if the bill will be $62 billion or about 50 billion pounds which is about 58 billion euros, Juncker replied: "It's around that."

May plans to launch Britain on a two-year process of negotiations to quit the EU on March 29, by triggering Article 50 of the bloc's Lisbon Treaty. The size of Britain's exit bill will be among the first and most contentious topics for discussion, with British ministers indicating they do not believe Britain is liable for such a large sum.

Juncker's statement is the clearest indication from the commission of the size of the bill, and is in line with an estimate cited by Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern last month. So far, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has argued that the terms of the divorce, including the size of the bill, must be settled first, before any negotiations over the new trading relationship between Britain and the EU can begin.

Britain wants talks on the exit and a new free-trade deal to run simultaneously and its argument received a boost on Friday when the Italian government said the two sets of talks could "overlap" to some extent.

"We will be at the end of the exit negotiation and at the same time we can start the new deals on trade, and we hope also for example on security," Italian junior minister for European Affairs Sandro Gozi said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

The EU's remaining 27 member states are preparing to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the bloc's founding Treaty of Rome, without Britain, on Saturday. Asked if May's absence from the gathering would be an elephant in the room, Juncker responded: "She is not an elephant," adding that he likes her "as a person."

Juncker insisted the EU is not "in a hostile mood" on Brexit because it wants "a friendly relationship" with Britain. "But I don't want others to take the same avenue because let's suppose for one second that others would leave two, three, four, five that would be the end."

The clash between Britain and the EU over the size of Britain's exit bill covering liabilities such as pensions for EU officials, infrastructure projects, and the bail-out of Ireland is shaping up to be one of the first major obstacles in the talks.

The British government has floated the idea that Britain could leave the bloc without paying anything at all and Liam Fox, one of May's most senior ministers, described the notion of a 60 billion-euro exit charge as "absurd." Her aides have said any payment will have to be negotiated.

An early deal to guarantee the rights of Europeans living in Britain, and British nationals in the EU, is also a key priority for Juncker. "This is not about bargaining, this is about respecting human dignity," he said.

May has also promised to work for an agreement as soon as possible to end the uncertainty of millions of EU nationals living in the Britain who fear they will be forced to leave the country after Brexit.

The EU 27 member states will find ways to separate with Britain in a peaceful, friendly and mutually beneficial manner, Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian President said before leaving for the Rome celebrations. "True, it is hard to talk when we lose one member state but Britain will remain our partner, the country will never become our foe," she said in an interview to LRT, the Public TV channel, broadcast on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, the European Central Bank downplayed talk of risks to financial stability from Brexit but raised concerns about the costs to Britain of withdrawing from the bloc. "We have learned from the crisis how to handle dangerous situations," ECB Executive Board member Peter Praet said in interview with VDI Nachrichten. "What concerns me are the massive costs that the withdrawal will cause for the EU27 and, above all, for the U.K.," Praet said.

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Britain could face $62B penalty for leaving European Union - The Providence Journal