Will The Results Of Trump's Economic Policies Destroy Him Even Before Mueller?

Do you remember Marc Thiessen? From his days working for George W. Bush? From his many appearances on Fox? For his deranged book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, a defense of torture and war criminals? Yes, a truly horrid person. His OpEd in the Washington Post a few days ago, The Mueller probe could turn out to be a disaster-- for the Democrats is taking hold among some idiots on "team blue" in Washington. In short, it warns Democrats not to impeach Trump because his supporters won't like it. Thiessen focuses entirely on Trump's vulnerabilities based on the Mueller investigation, rather than on the likelihood Republican senators will desert him in a severe economic downturn. "If Mueller finds incontrovertible evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin," grants Thiessen, "then the president will be-- and should be-- removed from office. But it is also possible that Mueller will not find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia, and that Mueller or federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District will find evidence for some other charge unrelated to a conspiracy with Russia-- such as Trump’s hush-money payments to alleged former mistresses or crimes related to Trump’s family business."

The Trump Economy

That would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats, for three reasons. First, their base would demand that the new Democratic House majority impeach Trump, even if the charges have nothing to do with Russia. The “resistance” does not care about Russia; it cares about getting rid of Trump, and any pretext will do. The pressure from the grass roots to impeach the president would be hard, if not impossible, for the new Democratic majority in the House to resist.

Second, such an effort to remove Trump from office would fail. Even if House Democrats managed to pass articles of impeachment, there is zero chance that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to convict Trump for paying hush money to an adult-film star and a Playboy playmate or for pre-presidential financial improprieties. And Americans-- who rightly thought the purpose of the Mueller probe was to find out if Trump committed treason by working with Russia to steal the election-- would see Democrats engaged in a pointless effort to remove the president over completely unrelated allegations.

Third, such a failed impeachment effort would backfire on Democrats just as the impeachment of Bill Clinton backfired on Republicans in the 1990s. At the same point in his presidency, after Republicans won the House in 1994, Clinton’s approval was stuck in the low 40s-- only a few points better than Trump today. But two years later, after House Republicans approved articles of impeachment, Clinton’s approval rating soared to 73 percent. Despite incontrovertible evidence that Clinton had sexual relations with a White House intern and lied about it under oath, Clinton left office with the highest Gallup approval rating of any president since Harry Truman. If Democrats want to give Trump’s approval a similar boost, there is no better way to do it than to impeach him for something unrelated to a criminal conspiracy with Russia.

Impeachment would not only raise Trump’s approval with the very suburban voters Democrats just peeled away from the GOP in the 2018 midterms, but it would also energize his base as never before. Trump’s supporters knew about his affairs and shady business dealings in 2016. They knew about the Access Hollywood tape, where he bragged about grabbing women by their private parts. They knew he boasted about ogling Miss Universe contestants as they were getting dressed and publicly fat-shamed a Miss Universe winner for gaining weight. They knew about the evidence that students were ripped off by the for-profit Trump University (which was not actually a university). They knew that he has been credibly accused of using his charity, the Trump Foundation, to self-deal, including using $258,000 from its coffers to settle legal disputes. They knew about the bankruptcy of his Atlantic City casinos and the allegations that he failed to pay workers and contractors.

They knew all this-- and voted for him anyway. Impeaching him over pre-presidential conduct unrelated to Russia would be seen by Trump voters as an effort to invalidate their votes. It would be received in Trump country as nothing short of an attempted coup. That could provoke a massive backlash. Just as the Democrats’ campaign to destroy Brett M. Kavanaugh cost them the chance to take back the Senate in 2018, a campaign to impeach Trump could very well cost them the chance to take back the presidency in 2020.

In other words, Democrats hoping that the Mueller probe will be Trump’s undoing could find it is their own undoing instead.

A few days ago Alan Grayson told me that "Trump said on national TV that he fired Comey because of 'that Russia thing.' He exchanged information with Manafort and dangled a pardon after Manafort signed a plea agreement. That’s obstruction of justice. Trump called on Russia to hack Democratic e-mails, and Russia did so. Russia also ran a social media campaign to suppress votes for Clinton. Trump paid back Russia by removing Ukrainian support from the GOP platform, appointing a National Security Advisory on Russia’s payroll known as 'Misha' [Flynn], giving state secrets to the Russian Ambassador in the Oval Office, refusing to implement sanctions on Russia, and now withdrawing US troops from Russian ally Syria.  That’s collusion and treason. Trump should be impeached and removed from office because he has committed impeachable offenses, in broad daylight. Q.E.D."

Yesterday he sent me this Teddy Roosevelt meme during a discussion on impeachment after we had both read Thiessen's stupidity. "For some people," he noted, "no matter what the question, the answer is always 'do nothing.'  As TR said, those people are 'timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat'":

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

For President's Day: Teddy Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Eisenhower, was a Republican. All three are in the conversation when it comes to the discussion of who makes the list of our greatest presidents. That alone is a wonder in the world of 2018. They weren't faultless as human beings or as presidents, but they were men with souls and some sense of decency and vision for the future of their country. As such, they would never fit into today's Republican Party.

The full Roosevelt quote reads as follows:

Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, it's riches, its romance.

In today's meme, the first President Roosevelt is talking about the conservation of our natural wonders and our natural parks in patriotic terms; things today's Republicans, led by Señor Trumpanzee and his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, feel should be sold off to the highest bidder for oil or development rights. Republicans view the beauty of natural wonders such as Yosemite and the Grand Canyon as useless obstacles to profits and personal financial gain. Roosevelt saw our wonders as treasures of a different sort, and sources of pride in their own right. Today's republicans are nothing more than parasites that see our national parks as "hosts" to be sucked dry.

If it were possible, I would love to see Señor Trumpanzee locked in a room with Teddy Roosevelt for five minutes.

Once There Were No Primaries-- And The Party Bosses Just Picked The Presidential Nominees

There dream of the Republican establishment this year-- stopping Herr Trumpf and the hated Ted Cruz with a deadlocked, brokered convention-- looks pretty moribund at this point. It looks like Trumpf is on the way to be able to march into Cleveland with all the delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. And the Establishment seems resigned to convincing themselves that the world is wonderful because at least they won't have to deal with Cruz. But deep in their hearts I bet they're longing for another era, when party bosses picked presidential candidates, not primaries and caucuses. The interview with Geoffrey Cowen, author of Let the People Rule, gives you a good look into how presidential candidates were picked irrespective of the will of ordinary voters up until quote recently.

A few days ago Ari Berman, author of Give Us The Ballot, penned a review of the book for the NY Times and, with the threat of a Mike Bloomberg third party presidential run, a look at the 1912 presidential race Cowen highlights is well worth reexamining. The election itself pitted Republican President William Howard Taft against Democrat Woodrow Wilson, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt running as a Progressive, and Socialist Eugene Debs. Before we get into Berman's review of Cowan's book, let's get the results out of the way:

• Wilson- 6,296,284 (41.8%)-- 40 states, 435 electoral votes
• Roosevelt- 4,122,721 (27.4%)-- 6 states, 88 electoral votes
• Taft- 3,486,242 (23.2%)-- 2 states (Utah and Vermont), 8 electoral votes
• Debs- 901,551 (6.0%). no states, no electoral votes

At the Democratic Party convention, Gov. Wilson was nominated on the 46th ballot-- beating the Wall Street candidate (Champ Clark). At the Republican convention, Taft beat Roosevelt with the help of the conservative GOP establishment that hated Roosevelt for his anti-trust policies. The GOP nomination battle was further complicated by Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette, who was further left than Roosevelt. La Follette won 2 primaries, Roosevelt won 9 and Taft won 1. The rest of the states didn't give voters a role in picking the party nominees. As Berman reminds us in his review, Roosevelt said, in finally coming around to backing primaries, that "The right of the people to rule is the great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party."

But at 9:28 p.m. on June 22, 1912, William Howard Taft was renominated by Republicans at their presidential convention in Chicago. Only minutes later, 150 delegates loyal to Teddy Roosevelt marched out of the Chicago Coliseum, mimicking the rumbling sound of a steamroller, and headed for Orchestra Hall, where thousands had raucously gathered to inaugurate Roosevelt as the leader of the new Progressive Party. “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord,” Roosevelt proclaimed. The machinations that led to Roosevelt’s exit from the Republican Party and the creation of what became known as the Bull Moose Party is the subject of Geoffrey Cowan’s Let the People Rule.

After leaving the presidency in 1908, Roosevelt had named Taft as his handpicked successor. Yet, upon returning from a lengthy trip to Africa and Europe, Roose­velt grew disillusioned with Taft and decided to challenge his former secretary of war.

Cowan explains how Roosevelt’s shrewd support of primaries gave him an opening against Taft while co-opting the message of more radical reformers like the Wisconsin governor Robert ­LaFollette. Roose­velt’s campaign “popularized presidential primaries and increased the number of states that embraced them,” Cowan writes. “His rhetoric helped to enshrine the cause of popular democracy in the nation’s vocabulary.” But Taft still maintained a huge lead in delegates chosen by the party machinery from states that did not hold primaries, which forced Roose­velt to bolt the party after the Chicago convention.

In many ways, Roosevelt’s Progressive candidacy was ahead of its time. It promulgated innovative ideas like social security and a federal minimum wage that were later adopted by Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin in the New Deal.

Yet the primary system wouldn’t be reformed until after 1968, when Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic nominee at his party’s disastrous convention, also in Chicago, despite not having won a single primary. Chaos in Grant Park was the result, forcing both parties to change their rules and become more democratic.

...Cowan paints an admirably nuanced picture of Roosevelt, exposing the hypocrisy of his call to “let the people rule.”

Though the Progressive Party endorsed woman suffrage and welcomed black delegates from the North, Roosevelt, in a bid to woo conservative white Southerners, refused to seat African-Americans from the South at his convention. “I believe that the great majority of the Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for suffrage,” Roose­velt said, echoing the Southern white supremacist sentiments of his day.

His gambit failed in the general election, when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson carried every Southern state, winning 435 electoral votes and 42 percent of the popular vote. Roosevelt won 88 electoral votes and 27 percent of the vote. Taft garnered only eight electoral votes and 23 percent of the vote. But the Progressive Party collapsed soon after. “The dog has returned to its vomit,” Roosevelt said of the Republicans in 1914.

Primaries have not become the democratic remedy Roosevelt was hoping for. Yes, voters have much more say now than they did in 1912, but primary contests have often pushed the parties toward their respective extremes, particularly the Republican Party, while the cost and length of campaigns skyrocketed. “Let the people rule” remains more an aspiration than a reality in American politics today.

For the political history junkies, since I mentioned that Taft only won Vermont and Utah, the 6 states that Roosevelt won were California (by just 200 votes), Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Washington. People interested in where Debs did best-- and 1912 was his best run of his 5 presidential campaigns-- may be surprised to see that all the double digit states were out west:

• Nevada- 16.47%
• Oklahoma- 16.42%
• Montana- 13.64%
• Washington- 12.43%
• Arizona- 13.33%
• California- 11.68%
• Idaho- 11.31%

In an unrelated post in The Atlantic Sunday, David Greenberg pointed out that Teddy Roosevelt "ushered in an age in which presidents would be perpetually engaged in the work of publicity and opinion management-- the work of spin" and he illustrates it with Roosevelt's "historic 1906 quest to clean up the shoddy and predatory practices in the stockyards and meatpacking houses where Americans got their daily diet of beef." This is exactly the kind of thing that earned him the undying enmity of the Big Money Republican Party establishment and why they stuck with the unpopular Taft rather than embrace Teddy Roosevelt in 2012.

After decades of unchecked industrial growth, American businesses and industries were in need of federal regulation—to protect workers, consumers, farmers, or simply other competitors in the marketplace. Addressing the issue of unregulated meatpacking and other foods had been on Roosevelt’s to-do list for some time when he raised it in his December 1905 message to Congress. “Traffic in foodstuffs which have been debased or adulterated so as to injure health or to deceive purchasers,” he declared, “should be forbidden.” The Senate, dominated by business interests, resisted, but Roosevelt hoped to prevail by enlisting public support. To do so, he seized on a popular outcry triggered that spring by the reporting of a crusading, 27-year-old socialist with whom, despite profound ideological disagreements, Roosevelt locked arms.

 ...When his book appeared, Sinclair undertook a promotional campaign. That effort included writing a slew of pieces about the sordid state of Chicago meatpacking for a variety of magazines. It also entailed mailing out copies of The Jungle to important people. One recipient was Theodore Roosevelt, who, fortuitously, was just then considering how to marshal public support for regulation of the so-called Beef Trust.

 Never one to mince words, the president deemed Sinclair a “crackpot.” But he shared the novelist’s dim view of the meat moguls. He wrote Sinclair a three-page letter that mocked the young man’s “pathetic belief” in socialism and offered a critique of The Jungle-- but one that concluded with: “The specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have the power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt extended an invitation to the White House.

By this point, Roosevelt was at work on his own plan. He had previously asked the Agriculture Department to investigate conditions in Chicago. The president thought that if he could confirm even a portion of Sinclair’s report, he could galvanize public opinion and force the balky Congress-- which was warring with TR over his reform agenda-- to move on meat-inspection legislation. When Roosevelt shared the news of this preliminary step with Sinclair, the novelist demurred, fearing, as he told the president, that having the Agriculture Department examine the issue “was like asking a burglar to determine his own guilt.” Instead, Sinclair urged Roosevelt to open “a secret and confidential investigation” by a disinterested party.

...Public support for reform was building. With Roosevelt’s backing, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana introduced an amendment to the agriculture appropriations bill that imposed stringent rules on meat inspection, including dating canned meat, with meatpackers forced to pay the costs. Spurred by this flurry of activity, the Pure Food and Drug bill-- which prohibited the adulteration and mislabeling of foods, beverages, medicines, and other drugs-- also now started to advance, separately, toward passage.

On the defensive, the meatpacking and livestock industries joined forces. They warned that any legitimation of Sinclair’s charges would dry up foreign markets for U.S. meat; federal regulation, moreover, would shift control of the industry from the businessmen with the relevant know-how to “theorists, chemists [and] sociologists,” as one spokesman said. When it became clear that some version of the bill was likely to pass, the industrialists switched to trying to strip out the most severe provisions. The beef companies even placed newspaper ads inviting readers to visit the packinghouses and judge for themselves.

The beef industry had been routed in the court of public opinion. As the packinghouses literally whitewashed their facilities as part of a desperate cleanup job, the press grew withering. The New York Evening Post offered doggerel: “Mary had a little lamb/And when she saw it sicken/She shipped it off to Packingtown/And now it’s labeled chicken.” Before a House committee, Neill and Reynolds rehearsed with fanfare their gory findings, including an account of a pig carcass that fell into a urinal before getting hung, unwashed, in a cooling room.

House conservatives made a defiant stand, and Roosevelt and Beveridge ultimately made some concessions. But the Indiana senator proclaimed the final bill “the most pronounced extension of federal power in every direction ever enacted.” Its achievements far outweighed its deficiencies, and it established important standards and precedents. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt, with a stroke of the pen, made meat inspection the law of the land—and with another stroke signed into law the Pure Food and Drug bill. “In the session that has just closed,” he said to the press, “The Congress has done more substantive work for good than any Congress has done at any session since I became familiar with public affairs.”

The meat-inspection episode showed the president’s skill not only at discerning public opinion aroused by the press but also at using statements, leaks, and the cultivation of journalists to pass his progressive agenda. In an article hailing “The Reign of Public Opinion,” the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens called it “the real power behind Theodore Roosevelt.” Congressmen submitted to the presidential will, Steffens said, because he was “the leader of public opinion” and they feared popular retribution if they defied him. Even Sinclair, who had wanted a stronger bill than the final compromise, praised TR: “He took the matter up with vigor and determination, and he has given it his immediate and personal attention from the very beginning.”

Roosevelt is remembered as the first president of the modern age not simply because he used presidential power on behalf of sweeping reform-- a feat in itself-- but because he redefined the president’s job by governing with an acute consciousness of his power to reach the public.

If you want to visit the museum on the site of Teddy Roosevelt's birth and boyhood, you'll have to wait a year

Regardless of what the National Park Service says, Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace hasn't existed for nearly 200 years. For the next year, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site -- on the site of TR's birthplace -- will be closed for renovation.

GRAMERCY -- Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace is getting a major renovation to upgrade its fire and electric systems and make the museum more ADA accessible, officials said.

-- the start of a DNAinfo NY report, "Teddy Roosevelt's
Birthplace Closing for $3.7M in Renovations"

by Ken

Since all things Roosevelt are hot now, in the wake of the most recent Ken Burns docu-series, I thought fans would want to know about this not-quite-breaking news. But before we proceed, we have to correct something the writer of DNAinfo New York piece herself knows is incorrect, as she makes clear deeper into the piece.

The brownstone — which features five period rooms, two museum galleries and a bookstore — had been demolished in 1916. It was then rebuilt in 1919 by the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association with the help of Roosevelt's widow and sister in a bid to look as similar to the original as possible.

So, notwithstanding the heading you'll find at the National Park Service Web page linked in that DNAinfo NY opening paragraph, as illustrated above, what has been closed is not TR's birthplace, which hasn't existed for almost a century -- and even then what stood on the site didn't bear much resemblance to the "birthplace" as young Teddy would have known it.

What's more, half of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site was ever the site of TR's birthplace, though the other half of the site does have a historical connection. The National Park Service knows all about this too, because within its "Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace" Web page, there's a page that gets the story pretty much right, as far as I can tell. (This is the page linked at "Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association" in the later paragraph above.)

On November 30, 1919, the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association paid off the $25,043.63 mortgage on 28 E. 20th Street, thereby acquiring ownership of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace, as well as the adjoining 26 E. 20th St. property that was once owned by Theodore's uncle, Robert Roosevelt. This transaction completed the first step in a long process of restoring and renovating the late president's childhood home into a memorial. However, 28 an 26 E. 20th Street in 1919 was a much different place than it had been when Theodore was born there in 1858.

With the evolution of the Gramercy area into an increasingly commercial district in the mid-late 19th century, the Roosevelts decided to move uptown to 6 W. 57th Street in 1873. By 1898, the once neo-gothic brownstones of 20th Street had been transformed into storefronts. While celebrating TR's 47th birthday in 1905, the Roosevelt Home Club decided to buy 28 E. 20th Street, in hopes of preserving its initial structure from further renovations and maintaining the site as a National Landmark. However, in 1916, the group let go of the building, and it was then transformed into a two-story café. Roosevelt declined the opportunity to preserve the mantelpieces or any other part of the house before its demolition.

In 1919, shortly after TR's death, the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association purchased the 20th street properties and established very specific plans for the buildings' restorations. 28 E. 20th Street was to be a meticulous reproduction of Roosevelt's home as it was in his childhood, complete with family portraits, original furniture, and other Roosevelt heirlooms. Any original pieces that could not be salvaged were to be reproduced exactly. The 26 E. 20th Street home would be renovated into a museum and a library, holding influential works in addition Theodore's own writings. The fourth and fifth floors of both buildings would hold auditoriums where New York school children could attend assemblies on the history of the country and the state, as well as the life and work of the Theodore Roosevelt. The Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association wanted to transform the buildings into more than just museums; they wanted to create an interactive experience to promote the principles that helped shape Theodore's strong character.

On January 6, 1921, the second anniversary of Theodore's death, General Leonard Wood, former commander of the Rough Riders, laid the cornerstone of the Roosevelt House, officially marking the renovation commencement. The memorial was formally opened to the public on October 27, 1923, which would have been Theodore's 65th birthday. Three hundred people attended the opening ceremony inside the newly restored house. Tributes were made from General Wood, President Calvin Coolidge, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Cabinet; Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania, Chief Forester during the Roosevelt presidency; and Theodore Roosevelt, TR's eldest son.

As articulated by the Woman's Roosevelt Memorial Association, the Roosevelt house was to be a living testament to the president's great American spirit; "a place where his voice may, year after year, be clearly and strongly heard". The association hoped the late president's former home would promulgate Theodore's ideals of courage, fairness, service, and perseverance, especially to the country's youth. The memorial would be national center for Americanization and an inspiration of greatness for generations to come.

So the cumbersome verbiage of the name "Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site" actually makes the thing correct, in the same way that the cumbersome name "Federal Hall National Memorial," for the building at the intersection of Wall, Nassau, and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan's Financial District, is a correct designation for the building that now stands on the site of the Federal Hall where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States in 1789 -- but "Federal Hall" is not correct.


Standing there on his pedestal in front of Federal Hall National Memorial, George Washington is probably wondering what happened to the "Federal Hall" on whose balcony he famously took the presidential oath of office.

And here there's no issue of "look-alike" reconstruction. It's hardly a secret that the building that was known as Federal Hall in 1789 (built in 1700 in smaller form as NYC's second City Hall was torn down, after going through several other uses (there was hardly any call for a Federal Hall in NYC once the capital was moved to Philadelphia and then Washington, DC),  including once again serving as City Hall, in 1812, when the new City Hall (still in service) opened. The building that replaced it, a decade in the building before its opening in 1842 as the first U.S. Customs House, was never meant to bear any resemblance to Federal Hall; its significance-by-location was recognized only much later, with its designation in 1939 as Federal Hall National Memorial National Historic Site. (Now there's a mouthful.)

No, the cars aren't original either.

The "TR's birthplace" situation more closely resembles that of a different famous Lower Manhattan site, also associated with George Washington, "Fraunces Tavern." Visitors flock to the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets, maybe a quarter-mile south of Federal Hall National Memorial, and often think they're looking at the historic tavern that was a favorite haunt of George when he was in New York, the Queen's Head (for the portrait of Queen Charlotte on the building front), run by his supporter Samuel Fraunces. The thing is, the building that housed the historic tavern, after an additional century-plus of extensive damage and alteration, was finally slated for demolition. What's there now, completed in 1907, is a purported "replica" of the original -- a neat trick considering what sketchy knowledge there was of what the original looked like. (Just to confuse matters further, the building-that-isn't-Fraunces Tavern was designated as a NYC landmark in 1965. Since 1977 so has been the lovely block of old buildings it anchors on Pearl Street.)

No doubt the replica of TR's birthplace is a good deal more plausible, since presumably better information is available, and/or more plausibly conjecturable, about the actual birthplace, including its state when the future NYC police commissioner, NYS governor, and U.S. president was born, in 1858.

AS FOR THE RENOVATIONS TO THE SITE --

National Park Service spokesman Liam Strain describes the rehabbing of the TR birthplace site as "very delicate work," reports DNAinfo NY's Sybile Penhirin.

Strain said crews began removing artifacts from the home and relocating them to a secure facility and plan to begin renovation work this summer.

"We need to do work that doesn’t destroy the fabric of the home, it’s not like a private home where you could just remove walls. We have to be as minimally invasive as possible." . . .

The federal agency, which had been wanting to do the renovation work for the past several years, recently received 3.7 million to conduct "necessary and important improvements" at the historical site, officials said.

The museum's entire electric system, which dates back to when it opened to the public in the 1920's, will be replaced, Strain said. The fire alarm and sprinklers will also be swapped out for modern ones, which will be less likely to damage the museum's collection in the case they go off, he added.

The changes will also make the house more accessible to mobility-impaired visitors by adding two chair-lifts, one on the stairwell at the entrance level and another one that will go from the third floor to the auditorium on the fourth floor.

There is currently an elevator in the building, but it only goes up to the third floor of the four-story building. In addition, the auditorium hasn't been used for at least three years because the space wasn't accessible to everyone, Liam said.

A contractor for the work hasn't been chosen yet. NPS will put out a request for bids in July, with work expected to commence in August, Strain said.

Roosevelt, the only United States President born in the city, was born in the brownstone in 1858 and lived there until he was 14 years old.

#

No More Teddy Roosevelts in The GOP-- and Too Few Franklin Roosevelts Among The Beltway Democrats

Last night I was watching a PBS showing of Ken Burns' The Roosevelts-- An Intimate History, when J.P. Morgan's ugly mug popped up on the screen. A social parasite who our political elites failed to protect society from, Morgan blurted out, "I owe the public nothing" ... which is pretty much the way Wall Street still feels. Today's Republicans are not Teddy Roosevelt and they are not going to hold to fire to the feet of predators like Morgan. Alas, neither are most Beltway Democrats. Sure, you have a few good guys-- like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, Brian Schatz in the Senate, and Alan Grayson, Donna Edwards, Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, Ted Lieu, Judy Chu, Keith Ellison, Jan Schakowsky in the House. But power in Congress is in the hands of Wall Street-owned shills like Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel who will never take the side of their own constituents over the interests of the big Wall Street banksters.

That helps explain why Schumer hand-picks Wall Street-owned hacks like Patrick Murphy (FL) and Ted Strickland (OH) to run for Senate seats and why Israel is always finding opportunistic Republicans to "switch" parties and run as though they were Democrats (the way Murphy did and they way Michael Derrick is trying to do in New York's North Country). Schumer and Israel are responsible for bringing in cash from the crooked banksters, and the crooked banksters are freaking out over Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders and warning the Beltway power brokers that they're going to cut the DSCC and DCCC off. 

Yesterday, for example, Bernie sent this message to his supporters about this era's JP Morgan, which is to say Goldman Sachs. It was clear and straightforward-- and exactly what the banksters come crying about to their allies Schumer and Israel.(Keep in mind, Wall Street has given Schumer bigger bribes than anyone else in the history of Congress who hasn't run for Congress-- $21,052,681-- and given Israel $4,068,416.) The banksters are demanding they make stuff like this go away. But here's Bernie:

It's time to break up the banks.

The greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Their casino-style gambling has helped divert 99 percent of all new income to the top one percent. And it has contributed to the most unequal level of wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth.

In the midst of all of this grotesque inequality sits a handful of financial institutions that are still so large, the failure of any one would cause catastrophic risk to millions of Americans and send the world economy into crisis.

If it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist. That's the bottom line.

I introduced legislation in Congress that would break up banks that are too big to fail... Banking should be boring. It shouldn't be about making as much profit as possible by gambling on esoteric financial products. The goal of banking should be to provide affordable loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the productive economy, and to Americans who need to purchase homes and cars.

That is not what these financial institutions are doing. They're instead creating an economy which is not sustainable from a moral, economic, or political perspective. It's a rigged economy that must be changed in fundamental ways.

Let's be clear who we're talking about: JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and other institutions; they're all too big to fail. So they must be broken up.

Wall Street can't be an island unto itself separate from the rest of the productive economy whose only goal is to make as much money as possible. I fear very much that the financial system is even more fragile than many people may perceive.

Millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, while virtually all new income goes to the people who need it the least. In fact, the top 14 wealthiest people saw their wealth grow more last year than the bottom 130 million have in total.

...I'm running for President of the United States because I believe that it is incumbent on us to try to take back our country from the billionaires and make it thrive again for the working and middle class. Breaking up the banks is a critical part to making that a reality.

Thank you for all of your support.

Senator Bernie Sanders

If you'd like to see Bernie in the White House, rather than another Wall Street-financed Bush or Clinton-- you can contribute whatever you feel you can afford here via ActBlue. And if you want to help congressional candidates who will put working families before banksters, here are the Senate candidates and here are the House candidates.