Madeleine Westerhout, who left her White House job suddenly on Thursday as President Trump’s personal assistant, was fired after bragging to reporters that she had a better relationship with Trump than his own daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany Trump, and that the president did not like being in pictures with Tiffany because he perceived her as overweight.

Given Westerhout’s sensitive role as a confidante to the president, the few details the White House shared about her abrupt firing had Washington’s political-media class in a quiet frenzy on Thursday night and Friday.

The critical comments happened at an off-the-record dinner, according to two people familiar with the matter, that Westerhout and deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley held earlier this month with reporters who were covering Trump’s vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Westerhout also jokingly told the journalists that Trump couldn’t pick Tiffany out of a crowd, said one of the people. “She had a couple drinks and in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment, she opened up to the reporters,” the person said.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/30/trumps-personal-assistant-fired-ivanka-tiffany-1479226

(WWJ) Keep your eyes on the skies this Labor Day weekend, and you could be in for a spectacular show.

Astronomer Mike Narlock, at the Cranbook Institute of Science, the Northern Lights will be visible from Mackinac City and most places in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Friday night through Monday night.

If weather conditions are just right, he said, some may even catch the show from downstate, including darker placed in metro Detroit.

"They're stunning if you see them, especially if you've never seen one before, or if you're lucky enough to see one that's maybe reddish or even bluish, they're just dazzling to see," Narlock said. "And you can really see some interesting structure, and just the way that they move is really mesmerizing."

https://wwjnewsradio.radio.com/articles/look-northern-lights-visible-michigan-weekend

My mom has been a teacher for 30 years. Now, because of mass shootings, this is part of her back to school training: learning how to staunch a giant sucking bullet hole.



https://twitter.com/tonydokoupil/status/1167088120493481984

President Donald Trump was criticized after a video went viral in which he slapped his leg in an apparent move to summon his wife Melania Trump, much like a dog call.

The video from early this month, shared on Twitter early Wednesday by comedy writer James Felton, shows the president looking in the First Lady's direction and patting his leg with his right hand three times. Melania Trump walks over to him moments later.

It is not clear what the president was signaling with the slaps and whether they were even directed at his wife, but many Twitter users interpreted it as a demeaning way to get the first lady's attention and compliance.

"Donald Trump: 'Nobody respects women more than me,'" Felton captioned the clip. "Also Donald Trump: 'Here girl, come here girl' [pats leg] 'come here wife, there's a good girl.'"

In another tweet implying the president for denying he is sexist, Felton wrote: "'Heel, wife.'"

https://twitter.com/JimMFelton/status/1166595548117446656
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-melania-dog-call-video-1456630

The animated short being shown with “Angry Birds 2” was the brainchild of a former N.F.L. player working with two animation veterans.



The charming animated short “Hair Love,” about a self-possessed African-American girl and her loving if slightly overwhelmed father, is the result of some unusual pairings. It’s an indie distributed by a major studio. And it was written by an ex-N.F.L. player who doesn’t have children and who directed in collaboration with veteran animators who do.

On a special morning, Zuri, who has a winning smile and an exuberant mop of curls, wants to put her hair in a complex arrangement of braids, puffs and twists. Her millennial father, sporting dreads and a small tattoo, has never tried to style her locks. He watches a vlogger explain the necessary steps, then tackles a daunting array of products, combs and brushes to fulfill his daughter’s wish.



“Hair Love,” which is showing with Sony’s “The Angry Birds Movie 2,” is the brainchild of Matthew A. Cherry, who spent three seasons as a wide receiver on various N.F.L. squads before turning to filmmaking. (His directing credits include episodes of “The Last O.G.” and other shows.) He’s not a father himself, but “I have a lot of friends who are young fathers,” he said in an interview. He added that, concerned as he was about the lack of representation in animation, “I wanted to see a young black family in the animated world.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/movies/hair-love.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesarts

Today USCIS issued guidance that DHS "no longer considers children of U.S. government employees and U.S. armed forces members residing outside the United States as 'residing in the United States' for purposes of acquiring citizenship” --

https://twitter.com/TalKopan/status/1166763230703837187

The world needs a safe space to house its growing population of extremely breakable men.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens shattered to pieces because a university professor jokingly compared him to a bedbug. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he won’t take millions of dollars the European Union has offered to help combat Amazon rainforest fires until French President Emmanuel Macron apologizes for past critical comments.

Male fragility seems rampant.

An editor at the New York Times was recently demoted in part because he responded to an author’s correct criticism of his racially insensitive tweets by demanding the author apologize to him.

A sitting member of Congress, Rep. Devin Nunes of California, is suing Twitter and two parody accounts that regularly make fun of him, saying in the lawsuit that their tweets are something “no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life.” One account pretends to be Nunes’ mom and the other pretends to be a cow from Nunes’ family farm. A cow!

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/rex-huppke/ct-bret-stephens-bedbug-trump-warren-male-fragility-huppke-20190828-bym26nfh3vgfreze7zpvqymdzm-story.html