McCain calls for select committee on Trump/Russia probe: ‘No longer does the Congress have credibility

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/mccain-calls-for-select-committee-on-trumprussia-probe-no-longer-does-the-congress-have-credibility/

From the site:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) on Wednesday called for a select committee to investigate Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election and potential ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russian officials, telling MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren that Congress lacks the credibility to “handle this alone.”

McCain was reacting to revelations that House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) met with Trump on Wednesday to brief him on new information suggesting the president may have been monitored—legally—through “incidental collection.”

Nunes informed the president and the press before sharing the details with fellow members of of the House Intelligence Committee, prompting Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) to blast the House Intel chairman’s decision.

In an interview with Van Susteren, McCain called the situation “bizarre,” arguing, “no longer does the Congress have credibility to handle this alone.”

Conservative Fantasies, Colliding With Reality

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/opinion/conservative-fantasies-colliding-with-reality.html

From the site:

Think for a minute about the vision of government and its role that the right has been peddling for decades.

In this vision, much if not most government spending is a complete waste, doing nobody any good. The same is true of government regulations. And to the extent to which spending does help anyone, it’s Those People — lazy, undeserving types who just so happen to be a bit, well, darker than Real Americans.

This was the kind of thinking — or, perhaps, “thinking” — that underlay President Trump’s promise to replace Obamacare with something “far less expensive and far better.” After all, it’s a government program, so he assumed that it must be full of waste that a tough leader like him could eliminate.

Strange to say, however, Republicans turn out to have no ideas about how to make the program cheaper other than eliminating health insurance for 24 million people (and making coverage worse, with higher out-of-pocket spending, for those who remain).

And basically the same story applies at a broader level. Consider federal spending as a whole: Outside defense it’s dominated by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — all programs that are crucial to tens of millions of Americans, many of them the white working-class voters who are the core of Trump support. Furthermore, most other government spending also serves purposes that are popular, important or (usually) both.

Fear of Diversity Made People More Likely to Vote Trump

https://www.thenation.com/article/fear-of-diversity-made-people-more-likely-to-vote-trump/

From the site:

In previous analyses of Trump’s support during the primaries, we showed that racial resentment played a larger role in the 2016 election than economic concerns. Recently released survey data allows us to ascertain in what ways Trump’s general election support compares to previous elections. The data also give us the opportunity to focus in on those voters who switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, and compare them to those voters who did not support Trump in 2016 but voted for Romney in 2012.

We find that opinions about how increasing racial diversity will affect American society had much more impact on support for Trump during the 2016 election compared to support for the Republican candidates in the two previous presidential elections. We also find that individuals with high levels of racial resentment were more likely to switch from Obama to Trump, but those with low racial resentment and more positive views about rising diversity voted for Romney but not Trump.

This Is the Ending Conservatives Always Wanted

"You can draw a straight line from Reaganomics to Trump's budget." So very true!

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53897/trump-budget-meals-wheels/?src=nl&mag=esq&list=nl_enl_news&date=031717

From the site:

Every year, during the run-up to Halloween, when Jim DeMint goes to Hell's mega-mall and sits on Satan's lap, he has a list of things he wants for the holiday. The parents of the assembled demons and imps behind him in line often get frustrated because the list is so long. On Thursday, the Trump Administration released its proposed national budget. It's been a long time coming, but DeMint and the rest of the greasy barbarians at Heritage finally got most of what they asked for.

This proposed budget isn't extreme. Reagan's proposed budget in 1981 was extreme. This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich.

“I think that President Obama is owed an apology”: GOP congressman calls on President Trump to apologize for wiretapping accusation

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/17/i-think-that-president-obama-is-owed-an-apology-gop-congressman-calls-on-president-trump-to-apologize-for-wiretapping-accusation/?source=newsletter

From the site:

Republican Rep. Tom Cole has not seen any evidence that suggests former President Barack Obama wiretapped the Republican nominee during the 2016 presidential election. Cole told a gaggle of reporters Friday that President Donald Trump, who raised the allegation against his predecessor two weeks ago, should apologize to Obama.

“I have seen no indication that that’s true,” Cole said of Trump’s tweets, which baselessly claimed Obama “tapped” him.

“It’s not a charge I would have ever made,” Cole told reporters. “And, frankly, unless you can produce some pretty compelling proof, then I think that President Obama is owed an apology in that regard because, if he didn’t do it, we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did,” Cole said.

Trump is cutting programs that help the Appalachian voters who helped put him in office

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/17/trump-is-cutting-programs-that-help-the-appalachian-voters-who-helped-put-him-in-office/?source=newsletter

From the site:

President Donald Trump may owe his election to white working class voters like coal miners in Appalachia, but so far he hasn’t been serving their best interest. Just look at how his budget proposes to save $340 million by cutting funds to the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

The ARC is particularly important, as it works to diversify the economies in areas hard-hit by the faltering coal industry. Its actions are expected to create or save more than 23,670 jobs and educate over 49,000 students of all ages due to the more than 650 projects that it has managed in 13 states between 2011 and 2015, according to the organization’s statistics.

Trump's Budget Is Pure Cruel Conservatism

https://is.gd/A0ruaQ

From the site:

The last Republican president, George W. Bush, branded himself a compassionate conservative. In many ways Bush certainly did not live up to that principle, but he at least knew to pay lip service to the notion that conservatives should care for the needy while also tending to the free market and national defense.

Now, even that pretense of compassion has gone out the window. Based on his actions so far, and in particular his budget released this week, President Trump seems to be practicing a different ideology: unabashedly cruel conservatism.

A Bill So Bad It’s Awesome

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/opinion/a-bill-so-bad-its-awesome.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1

From the site:

Given the sick joke of a health plan, you might ask what happened to all those proclamations that Obamacare was a terrible, no good system that Republicans would immediately replace with something far better — not to mention Donald Trump’s promises of “insurance for everybody” and “great health care.”

But the answer, of course, is that they were all lying, all along — and they still are. On this, at least, Republican unity remains impressively intact.

Trump Knows the Feds Are Closing In on Him

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/06/trump-knows-the-feds-are-closing-in-on-him/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FP&utm_term=Flashpoints

From the site:

There is a good reason why Trump and his partisans are so apoplectic about the prospect of a special counsel, and it is precisely why it is imperative to appoint one: because otherwise we will never know the full story of the Kremlin’s tampering with our elections and of the Kremlin’s connections with the president of the United States. As evidenced by his desperate attempts to change the subject, Trump appears petrified of what such a probe would reveal. Wonder why?

 The Republican Health-Care Bill Is the Worst of So Many Worlds

Great article / explainer on the ACHA (ACA replacement) bill.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-republican-health-care-bill-is-the-worst-of-so-many-worlds/

From the site:

With the release of the American Health Care Act, House Republicans have pulled off an impressive feat: managing to alienate virtually everybody with a stake in health care. If you liked the Affordable Care Act, you will, unsurprisingly, hate this bill. We’ll get into the details later (the bill is in two parts; the Energy and Commerce Committee text is here, the Ways and Means Committee text here; summaries in plain English here and here), but in short, the subsidies for insurance coverage are stingier, the coverage itself is worse, and the penalty for non-coverage is actually higher.

A Plan Set Up To Fail

The Repub's replacement is here and it reveals, as Krugman points out, that all these years they had no better ideas. Nothing to offer except to take away health care from those who desperately need it. Our clownish President has broken all his promises related to health care.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/03/07/a-plan-set-up-to-fail/

From the site:

Taken together, these moves would almost surely lead to a death spiral. Healthy individuals, especially low-income households no longer receiving adequate aid, would opt out, worsening the risk pool. Premiums would soar – without the cushion created by the current, price-linked subsidy formula — leading more healthy people to exit. In much of the country, the individual markets would probably collapse.

The House leadership seems to realize all of this; that’s why it reportedly plans to rush the bill through committee before CBO even gets a chance to score it.

It’s an amazing spectacle. Obviously, Republicans backed themselves into a corner: after all those years denouncing Obamacare, they felt they had to do something, but in fact had no good ideas about what to offer as a replacement. So they went with really bad ideas instead.

“This presidency is fake and failed”: Mika Brzezinski no longer has hope in President Trump

I am still amazed that even Morning Joe has turned against the clown we have installed in the White House.

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/06/this-presidency-is-fake-and-failed-mika-brzezinski-no-longer-has-hope-in-donald-trump/?source=newsletter

From the site:

A tumultuous two months was all Mika Brzezinski needed to realize that hope in a Donald Trump presidency was futile. On Monday, the co-host of “Morning Joe” said that Trump’s tweeted accusation about an alleged wiretapping ordered by former President Barack Obama shows that the current president is unable to handle such a monumental job.

“I had hope and an opened mind. I have lost hope completely and my mind is closed,” she said to close the show. “This presidency is fake and failed.”

A Conspiracy Theory’s Journey From Talk Radio to Trump’s Twitter

As if we needed any more proof that we have a clown in the White House....

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/us/politics/trump-twitter-talk-radio-conspiracy-theory.html?_r=0

From the site:

WASHINGTON — It began at 6 p.m. Thursday as a conspiratorial rant on conservative talk radio: President Barack Obama had used the “instrumentalities of the federal government” to wiretap the Republican seeking to succeed him. This “is the big scandal,” Mark Levin, the host, told his listeners.

By Friday morning, the unsubstantiated allegation had been picked up by Breitbart News, the site once headed by President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Less than 24 hours later, the president embraced the conspiracy in a series of Twitter posts accusing his predecessor of spying on him, setting in motion the latest head-spinning, did-he-really-say-that furor of Mr. Trump’s six-week-old presidency.

Trump angry and frustrated at staff over Sessions fallout

This is the 'cause' of the bogus charges about Obama's wiretapping. Already a very predictable pattern: create a distraction from bad news by flinging ridiculous charges.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/04/politics/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-reince-priebus/index.html

From the site:

President Donald Trump is extremely frustrated with his senior staff and communications team for allowing the firestorm surrounding Attorney General Jeff Sessions to steal his thunder in the wake of his address to Congress, sources tell CNN.

"Nobody has seen him that upset," one source said, adding the feeling was the communications team allowed the Sessions news, which the administration deemed a nonstory, to overtake the narrative. On Thursday, Sessions recused himself from any current or future investigations into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign after it was reported he had met with the Russian ambassador to the US, something he had previously failed to disclose.

‘The sickness of this man’: Michael Moore blasts Trump for ‘record applause’ boast as grieving widow wept

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/the-sickness-of-this-man-michael-moore-blasts-trump-for-record-applause-boast-as-grieving-widow-wept/

From the site:

Guest Moore was asked by host Chris Matthews, “What do you think about his counting the applause minutes that passed over a very poignant moment with the widow, who looked like a wonderful person, in love with her husband? Then he said ‘He’ll be happy up there in heaven with how many minutes of applause he got.’ Isn’t that strange?” “Ryan Owens, his death came as a result of a dinner Trump had with his son-in-law,” Moore replied. “The widow, that’s why she’s there as sort of an F-you to the people who are criticizing him for this. And this poor women, this widow who has lost her husband is in desperate grief right now.” “And to use that to put another notch on his belt and what is he thinking about?” Moore continued. “‘My ratings, my record applause. I’m going to get an Emmy for this, most applause for a dead soldier on my watch.’ That is the sickness of this man.”

Fact-checking President Trump’s address to Congress

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/02/28/fact-checking-president-trumps-address-to-congress/?utm_term=.d5f58f2fae4e&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

From the site:

President Trump’s maiden address to Congress was notable because it was filled with numerous inaccuracies. In fact, many of the president’s false claims are old favorites that he trots out on a regular, almost daily basis. Here’s a roundup of 13 of the more notable claims, in the order in which the president made them.

No, Trump’s Address to Congress Wasn’t ‘Presidential’

http://prospect.org/article/no-trump%E2%80%99s-address-congress-wasn%E2%80%99t-%E2%80%98presidential%E2%80%99

From the site:

n Tuesday night, President Trump defied critics by proving he could read a teleprompter. In Trump’s hands, any evolution toward mastery of that skill could prove as dangerous as the improvisational oratorical bullying for which he is better known, for Trump’s reading style renders the articulation of evil into a banal-sounding sing-song celebration of resentment, greed, grief, and death.

The consensus forming among political observers on Donald J. Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress is that the president seemed “presidential.” Well, sure, if your idea of presidential is an authoritarian maniac who can read a teleprompter.