The Obamas just bought their rental home in Washington for $8.1 million https://t.co/CMww6FfEdo
— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) May 31, 2017
Count on a Grey Lady employee to step in it right up…
I get the practical concerns. But Barack Obama buying schmancy DC house in nabe thick w lobbyists just feels weird https://t.co/xAODd9LQrA
— jodikantor (@jodikantor) May 31, 2017
Don’t worry, fellow white lady, I’m sure you can find an ‘economically anxious’ surrogate to scrawl racial obscenities on their walls!
LeBron James responds to the vandalism incident at his home pic.twitter.com/goMoicIIit
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) May 31, 2017
Hasty visit from the Phrasing Fairy:
I think he'd agree that DC sucks, but their kids go to school there, have friends, etc…Mundane, practical stuff.
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) May 31, 2017
To clarify, I meant Obama disliked DC (& its lobbyist $ culture) for so long. No other implication intended, apologies if it read otherwise.
— jodikantor (@jodikantor) June 1, 2017
It’s not like professional reporters should’ve figured out by now that Twitter is *not* a medium that rewards the careless comment…
NotMax
There goes the neighborhood…
:)
ruemara
Many, many poor white persons have mused about why the negroes are doing things that said white person does not approve of on the twitters and done an embarrassed 2 step back from the ledge when they get properly roasted.
This bitch…
Citizen Alan
I don’t believe her. I’m sorry, but I just don’t. I think her original meaning is exactly what we all thought it was: a mean-spirited attack on Barack Obama. And she started backtracking desperately as soon as people started calling her out on it. I’ll say though, I don’t even think it was racism so much as “how dare a Democrat have and/or spend money.”
ruemara
@Citizen Alan: Ok, when was the last time the Clintons or the Kerry’s got shit for buying a house once out of public service. When did Bernie Sanders get lit up for his vacation house purchased during the primaries?
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Monthly rent was $22K. That’s $528,000 over the next 2 years. That’s a lot of money they would never get back.
They buy now, sell in 2 years, they recoup their money and probably turn a profit as DC is a red hot market cuz of all the money dropped on defense since 9/11.
Defense budget
2000: $301 Billion
2015: $600 Billion
That doesn’t even include the jump in budget for IC or the entirely new budget for Homeland Security, a department that didn’t even exist in 2000, which altogether is probably another $200 billion on top of pentagon spending.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Would they be happy if the Obamas went back to living in public housing like they did the past 8 years?
P.S. Somebody should tell Trump that he’s living in a public housing project.
Villago Delenda Est
Her failure to be even slightly discomfited by Donald and family looting the treasury and selling the country to Vlad should be noted. After all, “both sides do it.”
Broderism needs to be eradicated. It is a lethal cancer on the body of the Fourth Estate.
Roger Moore
I don’t think there’s any medium that rewards careless comments. The thing about Twitter is that it makes it so damn easy to make a careless comment and share it with the whole world. The only editor who can stop you from tweeting something stupid is your own self control, and people who are used to having a whole editorial staff to make sure no careless wording gets through- and to take the blame if it does- have trouble doing without.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Shockingly the Times has never complained about the millions spent everytime Trump goes golfing in Florida or the millions being poured down the drain to protect his estranged wife in Manhattan.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
Man, that white lady sure used up a lot of characters to say “uppity.”
Chet Murthy
@Villago Delenda Est: Sorry VDE, but this isn’t Broderism. This is straight-up racism. If this were (say) Al Gore buying a mansion in Los Altos (fancy part of Sili Valley), she wouldn’t be batting an eye. It’s b/c it’s PBHO (PBUH) and Michelle that it’s problematic.
nightranger
Jesus christ. Oompa Loompa is going to spend more in his first year going back and forth to Mar-A-Lago than Obama spent it 8 years.
Now some people are going to raise their eyebrows over a house the Obama’s bought in an exclusive neighbourhood when they have legit concerns about security and various other things.
Fuck anyone who questions anything they do financially….ever. Fuck all of them. Immediately and directly and highly judgementally.
I hope the Obama’s rake in the money…big time. They are probably already worth more than the orange fart sack. We will never know because he will never release his tax returns..
BG
The Obamas shouldn’t buy a house with money they earned legally that will be a good investment, and Hillary should just stop talking. I see a pattern here….
Calming Influence
I so wish I had $8 million to buy the house next door. Can you imagine the backyard fence chats?
Chet Murthy
@Calming Influence: So say we all, so say we all.
Calouste
@Calming Influence: I don’t think secret service agents are very talkative as a rule.
Roger Moore
@Calming Influence:
Unfortunately, my imagination has them with humorless Secret Service agents unhappy with anyone looking over the Obamas’ wall.
hovercraft
@NotMax:
No the neighborhood went downhill when Javanka and the Secretary of Exxon move in.
Gretchen
@ruemara: The Clintons got lit up all the time for everything they did and everything they spent, like they thought they ought to have nice things or something. That house in New York suburbs caught a lot of criticism. Democrats should stay in a modest apartment in Harlem.
Citizen Alan
@ruemara:
I distinctly remember the Clintons getting s*** for moving into the upscale neighborhood of Chautauqua (sp?). Just as I remember the visceral disgust a lot of people had towards John Kerry simply because he married a woman much wealthier than himself.
Gretchen
For some reason Kerry was immune – patrician roots were patrician. But Al Gore got tons of criticism for what a big house he had when he was telling everyone to keep a small carbon footprint. Hypocrite! Why wasn’t he living in a tent with a campfire?
amk
can’t wait for jodi’s jealous head to essplode when she learns the kenyans signed a 60 mil book deal.
hovercraft
@Citizen Alan:
Don’t you just love how they never meant it like “that”, but somehow they never say it about white people.
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
THIS!!!
Gretchen
@ruemara: Bernie Sanders will never get lit up because he’s a saint with a pure heart. Unlike those people who were calculating enough to actually join the Democratic Party.
Peale
@ruemara: Al Gore got shit for flying on airplanes to give speeches on Global Warming. And accused of making it up because he invested in, presumably to make money, companies that were developing green tech. No one to my mind complained that Dan Quayle spent the last 25 years as a bigwig at a private equity firm.
NotMax
Same neighborhood as Ivanka and Jared, BTW.
Also where what was at one time the largest mosque in the Western hemisphere is located.
That alone ought to make RWNJ noggins explode.
Citizen Alan
@Gretchen:
My boss back in 2004 utterly hated Kerry, literally HATED him, for marrying Teresa Heinz Kerry. The word he used to describe John Kerry was gigolo. Sadly I left that job soon after, and so never had the chance to ask him whether John McCain was a gigolo because Cindy McCain owned all 8 of their houses.
BlueDWarrior
Remember, Republicans can be a rich as they can be, and flaunt thier wealth as much as they want. Democrats must live in hovels, and wear only the most gnarly of sackcloth.
Redshift
Also, fuck this:
Because of course a New York reporter can’t imagine that “DC” consists of anyone but government and lobbyists (and she’s the one who decided his “nabe” meant lobbyists.) In fact, the Obamas have shown on numerous occasions that they do like the real DC and DC region, not the cartoon version she imagines. They visited churches and schools and restaurants, had events at the White House for local kids and families, and more.
Peale
@Roger Moore: Obama at fence: “Wilson, is that you?”
“Hi de ho, neigh…”
Bang bang bang.
hovercraft
@Gretchen:
Most of them couldn’t afford it. Don’t you love gentrification, in a few more years there won’t be any black people left. I’m exaggerating but only slightly.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chet Murthy: There is a racial element (always is with the Obamas) but also, too, how DARE a Democrat buy a fancy-schmanzy house in an upscale neighborhood, as numerous commenters have noted.
This is not just racism, but more Broderism.
Peale
@NotMax: what disturbs me is that I don’t remember Joe Lockhart and he was apparently a good press secretary as he could afford a 9 bedroom house in Kalorrama.
Redshift
@BlueDWarrior:
Well, that’s because, as everyone knows, Democrats support progressive taxation just because we hate rich people, so if a Democrat is rich they’re a hypocrite, even if they have no argument with paying those tax rates and are actually not a hypocrite at all.
Calming Influence
Dear WaPo Sunday gardening section:
I borrowed a hose from Obama and when I returned it I think it had a leak in it. Should I be worried?
-Nervous In DC.
scav
Amazing how the both sides do it crowd get so so indignant when certain of one of the sides does certain normal things.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Peale: I remember Joe Lockhart, but… wow. Sheds light on Spicey’s willingness to degrade himself in that job
Steeplejack (phone)
@Chet Murthy:
What is PBUH?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I can’t remember who tweeted today that eight years ago Washington was very Concerned about the optics of the Obamas having their “date night” in Manhattan.
Peale
@Steeplejack (phone): president before utter Hell?
hellslittlestangel
Clearly what she’s trying to say is that you’d think they’d be more comfortable around their own kind.
1stgengirl
But are the toilets and fixtures gold-plated?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and trump’s old tweets continue to make us wonder if there isn’t some kind of time travel involved
April 2012
Gretchen
@hovercraft: I know. My daughter had an apartment in Harlem a couple of years ago and paid, I think, $1100 a month for her third of a 3 bedroom apartment. I’ll have to think of somewhere else that’s low-rent enough to be acceptable for the Obamas to retire to. A trailer park in suburban Omaha, maybe?
Calming Influence
I think Obama should ask $2 million for every speaking engagement, and then talk about nothing but how he likes watching the gardeners mow the lawn on his $8.1 million property. White gardeners.
ruemara
@Peale: As of yet, though, no one says he shouldn’t buy a large house. So I’m gonna stick with the economic anxiety that’s expressed as racism on this.
EBT
There I now have the current total of 1141 narrative sections all sewn in to my new data format. I can now use visjs to make a rocking kickass flow chart visualisation of it too.
hovercraft
@NotMax:
Joe Lockhart is managing director of a consulting firm and his wife Giovanna:
Via Rollcall
So between them they can afford it. I remember reading last year that the house was bought for 5 million.
Morzer
@Gretchen:
“Obamas move into Buffett’s neighborhood – is this a good look for a former president?”
hovercraft
@Gretchen:
Nah, Malia is in New York, they can move to Brownsville, they’re from Chicago so they should fit right in, and they’ll be more comfortable with the people there.
El Caganer
I dunno. It’s a nothing story – they were living in a nice house and planned on staying in DC for a while, so they bought it. Big fucking deal. My question is: how much money does a press secretary make? Eight million is a lot of money, at least to me.
EDIT – see my question was already answered.
Chet Murthy
@Citizen Alan: My memory is, it was the RW assholes who lit up the Clintons (and Gore, and Kerry). Not the (ostensibly) objective FTFNYT.
Chet Murthy
@Steeplejack (phone): “Peace Be Unto Him”. You know, the Islamic standard-prophet-praise thing. It’s (a) my way of twitting Islamophobes, (b) my way of twitting people who think PBHO is a “secret Muslim”, and (c) just b/c he’s the only President I really wanted to vote for, I mean -really-.
As I understand it, in Shia Islam, there’s a concept of “Object of Emulatoin”, which is a rank of cleric, where rank-and-file believers should look up to them as well, objects worthy of emulation. And if there are people like that in America today, PBHO and Michelle are definitely there for me.
[I’m about as rabid an atheist as you can be, so all this is just me playing around with religious symbolism.]
ruemara
Trying to write my roommate and I will not renew with you letter and I’m dithering. And sleepy as hell. I need to be much meaner.
TenguPhule
@Villago Delenda Est:
Take a number and get in line.
Do you have any idea how expensive it is to get a radiation machine capable of dealing with Broder sized cancers?
And don’t even get me started on the permits involved.
Morzer
@Chet Murthy:
Android clerics? Now that’s what I call modern religion!
TenguPhule
@Gretchen:
Under a bridge with a cardboard box and a rod with a sparrow cooked on it.
And then the fuckers will still complain he gets a sparrow.
Morzer
@TenguPhule:
Obamas hog cardboard box as real Americans go homeless.
NotMax
@TenguPhule
And that both the box and the curtain rod are made in China.
Calouste
In case there was still any doubt which side of the political spectrum WikiLeaks is on:
Julian Assange considers offer to guest host Sean Hannity radio show
sigaba
“I don’t know how it looks, for Ivanka and Jared to be renting a big house in a schmancy part of DC among the lobbyists. Optics are terrible, given Trump’s promise to drain the swamp.”
No reporter will ever say this, because when you take a Republican in general and Trump in particular at his word you look like a naive moron.
Elizabelle
@El Caganer: Yeah. The part that leapt out at me was Joe Lockhart owning a house that sold for $8.1 million.
Politics been bery, bery good to him. The amount of money washing around among Washington’s media elite — that’s the scandal here (as if they stay objective. Which they don’t.) Not the Obamas buying a home.
PS: Jodi Kantor stepped in it but good. Awful tweet. I will look at her reporting more cynically in the future.
sm*t cl*de
@Chet Murthy:
Like DOS-Box, for running those old games that Windoze no longer supports.
EBT
@sm*t cl*de: SCUMMVM where applicable please.
Morzer
Something that made me laugh:
https://twitter.com/ThePaulBergman/status/869186140191858688/photo/1
Frankensteinbeck
@Calouste:
I read a lengthy article by the ghost writer of Assange’s memoirs. Assange is a paranoid, self-obsessed fruitcake. He might be in Russia’s employ now, since he’s prone to spending money he hasn’t got, but it’s an unnecessary explanation. In his obsessive victim fantasies, he decided Obama and especially Hillary Clinton are out to get him. He’s like emotionally twelve. He sees the world as an epic Good vs Evil struggle, where he is the hero. Whoever was her enemy is now his friend.
For all these reasons and more, putting him in charge of a radio show is risky. The writer did say he can be super charming for short periods, until the crazy gets loose.
Keith P.
Has anyone actually *seen* Trump since “Covfefe”? Just wondering, since I never outright heard “The President is not in a vegetative state” from Spicer today.
Betty Cracker
Additional data point to add to the “Reciprocity” discussion from last night:
Russia: Jump!
Trump: How high?
Jack the Second
@Citizen Alan: Remember the whole “Clintons steal White House furniture” bit?
For anyone who doesn’t or who didn’t pay attention past the headline, Presidents can’t receive gifts, the whole emoluments thing, so anything given to the Presidential family becomes property of the White House. (Rewatch that video of the Trumps giving Mrs Obama a present with that in mind.)
So when the Clintons left the White House they took with them some things that arrived February 1993. Clintons said, these were gifts given to us before that only arrived in February, White House staff claimed otherwise, Clintons ended up paying for the furniture.
Press reported it like they were stealing the bed from the Lincoln bedroom.
Kansi
Jodi Kantor fits right in with the rest of the smug, look-how-cynical-I-can-be political press.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s great. Trump thought the public would love him as President. No wonder he’s so angry all the time. Bush got like that the last year of his Presidency. He was mad no one liked him anymore after all he had done for us.
NorthLeft12
We have a program at work where every employee is required to have twelve safety interactions each year. An interaction needs to occur between at least two people and involve a discussion wrt safety in the workplace. Ideally it is between an activity that one person observes happening. I have to document it and submit it for review. It becomes an important part of our year end performance review.
I am wondering if the NYT has a similar program except you have to demonstrate so many instances of “both siderism” or hippie punching or Republican tongue bathing? It would explain a lot.
NorthLeft12
@Gretchen: Yes, my daughter lives in London, England near London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames and must share a flat with two other professionals. She told us how much she pays and it still shocks my small town, house owning brain.
I love being in London, but gads how do people live there?
NorthLeft12
@nightranger: Agreed. It just burns the Republicans’ asses to see how popular the Obamas are, and how successful they are. They just can’t fathom how a “community organizer” can rake in so much dough. It killed them when he was in office and it is absolutely driving them buggy now that their own incompetence, greed, racism, and hypocrisy is being laid bare for the world to see.
The more I think of it, I am now understanding that the Repubs needed Obama to save them from themselves. Without him to stop their worst impulses, they are going to eff up brilliantly.
Kay
I know everyone here disagrees with me but you have NOT persuaded me, so here goes :)
There is something wrong with a former press secretary making this much money in politics. I know where the Obama’s made their money because I’ve seen their tax returns, so I have no issue with anything they buy.
The huge amounts of money washing around politics erodes credibility. The Clinton speeches harmed her. Maybe it isn’t fair they harmed her particularly and of course the standard should be applied across the board, but there is TOO MUCH MONEY in this public service business. Somehow it has to stop rising.
Ivanka and Jared’s lawyer has been cashing in for 30 fucking years after her stint in the DOJ.
Before this gig she was a lobbyist on behalf of for-profit colleges. It just never ends. They cash in for decades. It’s like hitting the lottery.
Chris
@Redshift:
As a longtime resident of the area, the general tendency to assume that the only people in DC are the politicians the rest of the country sends there and the various parasites (lobbyists, pundits) that attach themselves to them is a chronic pain in the ass.
Chris
@Gretchen:
If Obama buys an expensive place, he’s just proving that he’s uppity and also out of touch with the working class, but if he buys a cheap one, he’s just proving that he’s trash that wants to live near his street thugs. And if he buys cheap in a white heartlandese neighborhood, i.e. your trailer park in suburban Omaha hypothetical? That’s the worst: he’s an evil gentrifier, not to say carpetbagger, driving the poor hard-working whites off their land so he can build himself a palace to entertain all his fancy big city friends.
Heads I win, tails you lose, coin-landed-on-its-side you cheated.
Kay
If we want to talk about how money has to be pushed down to the worker level in business and too much goes to the top tier we can’t replicate that model in a political party! We can’t! You can’t ask people to knock doors when you’re paying consultants and media people this much in campaigns!
Take some of the money out of the ad budget and the consultant budget and hire organizers. Unpaid interns is a crap business model! It goes against the stated values of the Democratic Party. If they’re spending A BILLION DOLLARS in donations (and they are) they can hire some people who make 30k.
Media hate them anyway. Why are they pouring money into ads?
Aleta
We should be so lucky if the Obamas spend any of their resources on lobbying for the overthrow of this Congress.
Chris
@NorthLeft12:
My pet theory when it comes to Clinton-hate is that the reason it’s so strong is that the Clintons are exactly the success story that Republicans claim to revere – working-class or at best middle-class people who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but rose to the top through talent and hard work – the story they revere, but that none of them, or at least none of their politicians, actually are. If that chaps their ass so much, how must worse must it be when it’s a black immigrant’s kid, raised in a non-traditional family, that half of them think is Muslim, who rises to the top?
Well, the explanation, of course, is that he did it through graft and corruption and mob ties. Like any big city boss raised through machine politics. In Chicago, how could it be otherwise?
There is nothing these people hate more than defining the rules of the game and then watching someone else win it anyway. (See above in re Clinton/Obama Derangement Syndrome).
The more I look at them, the more I realize that this captures a huge amount of the Republican pathology – all across the board. The hatred for the Clintons and Obamas is just a small-scale version of it, when things get personal. Republicans look at a domestic economy that’s been thoroughly Reaganized over thirty or forty years, just like they wanted, and they see that despite that, big blue cities full of “moochers” and “parasites” are doing okay, while the rural areas where all the “good people with honesty and dignity” live have been fucking destroyed. It makes them go mad, and start spouting about how there must be a conspiracy and the game must be rigged by socialists – it’s simply not possible that they could have lost this game! They were supposed to win! Same thing abroad – they look at a world system that since 1945, no one has had more influence in shaping than the U.S, and no one has more built-in advantages in than the U.S, and yet they see that other countries are doing as well as the U.S. or better. So again they fly into a rage, and start looking around for the traitors and backstabbers who made America fall behind, because they can’t possibly admit that other people played their game as well as they did. And so on, and so forth.
chopper
“look, I understand that obama has to poop like everybody else. I’m just saying, why did he have to poop this morning at 7:12? couldn’t he have taken a dump closer to 7:30?”
MoxieM
I agree 1000% with Ruemara and everyone else who has underlined the straight-up racism of this stuff. Totally.
I’ll point out for the record that John Kerry & Teresa did get local (Boston-based) hot criticism for buying a super-toney house in the super-toney neighb of Louisburg Sq. on Beacon Hill (where they only allow plebes to come and entertain them with Christmas carols…it’s so…Dickensian! blech. ) But they had a fire hydrant and a “No Parking” sign moved from in front of the house, so they could park the giant black SUV. That garnered a ton of typical Boston “we hate whatever because we hate it”/culture wars stuff.
Marguerite
@Citizen Alan: Oh it was racism, Jim Crow dressed in an Ivanka Trump suit with Hermes accessories. Acknowledge it. Accept how uncomfortable it makes you feel. An educated person who has achieved success in her chosen field is as racist as a 4th grade dropout redneck cousin-lovin’ nitwit from the backwoods of Alabama!
J R in WV
@Kay:
Because they get a
kick-backcommission on selling those ads from the political entity who hired them.Right??
And the monumental size of that
kick-backcommission is how they wind up able to live in a $$$$$5,000,000 house.Neldob
@Kay:Yes, yes, yez.
JustRuss
@Jack the Second: Yep. I have a friend who’s a Rockefeller Republican-type who refused to vote for Hillary because of that BS. At least he didn’t vote for Trump either.
JaneE
In 73 I bought my first home after renting for a little over a year. I just couldn’t see throwing money away month after month. My timing was good, and values doubled in the next two years. Sold it after 39 years, almost all of them with lower housing expenses than anyone I knew. To me, it just sounds like good financial sense for the Obama’s to buy. I don’t know what DC property sales are like, but after living there they should know every defect that needs to be fixed or discounted for, and to know if they do like the house and neighborhood. Sensible people, no wonder they get so much criticism from the GOP.