Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Josh Barro to the GOP: "Fuck this I'm out"....

By







The most important thing we have learned this year is that when the Republican Party was hijacked by a dangerous fascist who threatens to destroy the institutions that make America great and free, most Republicans up and down the organizational chart stood behind him and insisted he ought to be president.

Some did this because they are fools who do not understand why Trump is dangerous.

Some did it because they were naïve enough to believe he could be controlled and manipulated into implementing a normal Republican agenda.

Of course, there were the minority of Republicans who did what was right and withheld their support from Trump: people like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Hewlett-Packard CEO and megadonor Meg Whitman, with her calling Trump "a threat to the survival of the republic."

I want to focus on a fourth group: Republican politicians who understand exactly how dangerous Donald Trump is but who have chosen to support him anyway for reasons of strategy, careerism, or cowardice.

Cowards and scoundrels

I am talking, for example, about Sen. Marco Rubio, who in the primary called Trump an "erratic individual" who must not be trusted with nuclear weapons — and then endorsed him for president.
I am talking about Sen. Ted Cruz, who called Trump a "pathological liar" and "utterly amoral" — and then endorsed him for president, even though Trump never apologized for threatening to "spill the beans" on Cruz's wife and suggesting Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Most of all, I'm talking about House Speaker Paul Ryan, a man whose pained, blue eyes suggest he desperately wants to cry for help. He's a man who runs around the country pathetically trying to pretend that Trump does not exist and that the key issue is his congressional caucus' "Better Way" agenda. And he's a man who, of his own free will, seeks to help Donald Trump become president.

These men are not fools like Ben Carson.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio looks on during an official photo with Honduran Attorney General Oscar Chinchilla (not pictured) at the attorney's facilities in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on May 31, 2016. REUTERS/Jorge Cabrera/File Photo US Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Thomson Reuters

To borrow a phrase from Rubio, they know exactly what they are doing: They are taking an action that risks the destruction of the American republic to advance their personal interests.

They know what Whitman knows about the risks Trump poses to America. Rubio himself warned specifically of the risk of Trump starting a nuclear war! But they do not care.

I can conclude from the available evidence only that they love their careers more than they love America. And they are why I quit the Republican Party this week.

Why I was a Republican

I'm not a conservative. I know a lot of you already thought my Republican affiliation was a trolling exercise, and honestly, my registration change was probably overdue.

I became a Republican as a teenager because of my upbringing in Massachusetts, a state where the GOP has produced five good governors in my lifetime, from Bill Weld (now the Libertarian Party's vice-presidential nominee) to Charlie Baker. I worked for Mitt Romney when he ran for governor, and while I did not like his presidential campaigns, I think he has a record in Massachusetts he can be proud of.

All four living current and former Republican governors of Massachusetts oppose Trump.

I stayed a Republican because of my background working in state and local government finance, a policy area where a well-functioning Republican Party can bring important restraint. I have voted Republican, for example, in each of the past three New York City mayoral races.

I don't think it was ridiculous to be in a party that I disagreed with on a lot of national issues. Change is made through party coalitions, and I thought the Republican Party was where I was more likely to be able to improve ideas at the margin in the long run. Being a member of a party does not obligate you to vote for its bad candidates in the meantime.

But what this election has made clear is that policy is not the most important problem with the Republican Party.

ben sasse Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska at the CPAC conference for conservatives in March. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

The GOP was vulnerable to hacking

The Republican Party had a fundamental vulnerability: Because of the fact-free environment so many of its voters live in, and because of the anti-Democrat hysteria that had been willfully whipped up by so many of its politicians, it was possible for the party to be taken over by a fascist promising revenge.

And because there are only two major parties in the United States, and either of the parties' nominees can become president, such vulnerability in the Republican Party constitutes vulnerability in our democracy.

I can't be a part of an organization that creates that kind of risk.

What parties are for

My editor asked why I became a Democrat instead of an independent. I did that because I believe political parties are key vehicles for policy making, and choosing not to join one is choosing to give up influence.

I agree with Sasse, the senator from Nebraska, that parties exist in service of policy ends and that loyalty to the party should be contingent on whether loyalty serves those ends. Because of this, it is worth joining a party even if you do not intend to be a partisan, and even if you will often oppose what the party does.

Sasse was one of the earliest and loudest voices of resistance to Trump in the Republican Party, and after the intra-GOP civil war that is sure to ensue from Trump's loss, I wonder whether he will decide remaining in the GOP does a service to the ends he cares about.

Sasse is a lot more conservative than I am, so I don't expect him to become a Democrat. It makes sense for people like him and Kasich to try, after the election, to wrest control of the party away from the conspiracy nuts and proto-fascists.

But I believe they will fail. And I'm not going to stick around to watch.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said Ted Cruz had called Donald Trump a "con artist." It was Marco Rubio who called him that. It's become difficult to keep track of which Trump endorsers said which things about Trump's manifest unfitness to be president.
 
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Insider.

The Simulacron


Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Trump Is Already Guilty Of Aiding Putin's Attack On America

The Trump-Russia scandal is the subject of multiple investigations that may or may not unearth new revelations, but this much is already certain:

Donald Trump is guilty.

Monday, May 29, 2017

‘Tiny hand clenched on top’: Internet hilariously mocks Trump for plagiarizing his family coat of arms

                
News broke Monday that President Donald Trump appears to have plagiarized his family coat of arms that appears outside of the Trump National Golf Club outside of Washington. This weekend the Senior PGA Championship was hosted at the golf club and the “Trump family coat of arms” was featured on signs all over.

The actual emblem features three lions and two chevrons on a shield with a gloved hand gripping an arrow or spear, The New York Times reported. The coat of arms was originally granted by British authorities in 1939 to Joseph Edward Davies. He was the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, the man who built the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Ironically, he once served as the ambassador to the former Soviet Union.

The Trump Organization staged a hostile takeover of the coat of arms and replaced the Latin word for “integrity” with “Trump.”

Davies grandson Joseph D. Tydings, a former U.S. state senator from Maryland, admitted there are members of his family who are ready to sue Trump, but he cautioned against it. Tydings once worked for a large firm that managed Trump. He told his family that the suit would end up costing generations after them money.

“This is the first I’ve ever heard about it being used anywhere else,” Tydings said of the coat of arms placement at the northern resort.

When Trump tried to bring the American version to Scotland for his new development the authorities refused to allow the usage.

The Internet was not necessarily surprised by Trump stealing the coat of arms. Instead of encouraging the lawsuit, the Internet sought mockery instead:

Kushner's Charmed Life Comes To A Screeching Halt

By Taegan Goddard

Walter Shapiro: “Even under the benign theory that Kushner thought that a secret back channel was like a small boy’s tin-can telephone, his life in the coming months and maybe years will be a study in misery. He will probably spend more time with his personal lawyer, Clinton Justice Department veteran Jamie Gorelick, than with Ivanka or his children. Whether it is an appearance under oath on Capitol Hill or the inevitable FBI interview, every sentence Kushner utters will bring with it possible legal jeopardy.”

“Kushner may have once thought that he established his tough-guy credentials when he stared down angry creditors and impatient bankers over his ill-timed 2007 purchase of a $1.8bn Fifth Avenue office building. But the worst thing that can happen to an over-leveraged real estate investor (as Trump himself knows well) is bankruptcy. When the FBI and special prosecutor Robert Mueller get involved, the penalties can theoretically involve steel bars locking behind you.”

Crooks and blackguards should never seek political office

By MineralMan

Miscreants are beginning to learn what happens when one moves into the public political sector. Once you do that, you expose yourself to a microscopic inspection of every detail of your lives. It starts with the media and can shift into law enforcement territory. Things you have done that would have escaped scrutiny in the business world suddenly become of great interest to one and all.

If the underbelly of your operations is caked with muck and excrement from being dragged through untold swamps and garbage pits, all of that will be fodder for the investigators, who now have unlimited access to your every action and subterfuge. Your illegal doings, fraudulent activities and supposedly hidden communications will now see the light of day.

This is why crooks and blackguards should never seek political office. As long as they avoid public scrutiny, they can often carry on with impunity. But, as soon as they are elected by the people, interest in them increases and investigations begin apace, both official and unofficial. Everything will be turned over and what's underneath will be analyzed.

It was not a good idea, Mr. Trump, to run for President and win. Not a good idea at all. Now, everyone around you is subject to close inspection and examination. Some, who you thought were loyal to you, may not be as stalwart as you believed. Once your carefully knitted story begins to unravel, the truth will eventually emerge.

Prepare yourself, Donald, to be fully exposed. Fear is appropriate at this time.

Sunday, May 28, 2017

Mexican Lawyer Markets Trump Toilet Paper

Free advice to Trump


Welcome home, Mr. President.  Happy Memorial Day weekend, and congratulations on an international trip free of major faux pas. Almost forgotten is that within minutes of your wheels-up departure from the United States more than a week ago came yet another revelation pertaining to Russia and the election. It remains to be seen whether you can keep some positive momentum going from your recent voyage. Let me help by giving you some unsolicited advice, pro bono. I don’t know if you’re not getting good counsel, or are ignoring the good counsel you are receiving, but I’m going to assume it’s the former.

First, Robert Mueller’s appointment is the official statement of official Washington that if you broke the law, you’re out, one way or another: impeachment, indictment, or cabinet removal under the 25th Amendment.

I don’t know if you have broken the law, meaning whether you have impeded official investigations, but I don’t agree with you that this is a “witch hunt.” Not when former CIA chief John Brennan last week testified to the House intelligence committee: “I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals.”

Brennan aside, there was already enough evidence relating to Michael Flynn and the Russians to warrant the extraordinary act of the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. After all:

You fired the person who was investigating Flynn (and maybe yourself) after you allegedly first asked that investigator (former FBI Director James Comey) for a loyalty pledge over a Jan. 27 one-on-one dinner at the White House, according to the New York Times.

Then two weeks later, on Feb. 14, according to the Times, and allegedly supported by a contemporaneous memo Comey wrote, you dismissed Vice President Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions from the Oval Office before asking Comey to stop investigating Flynn by saying, “I hope you can let this go.”

And despite your initial contention that you’d relied on a May 9 memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that discussed Comey’s handling of the probe into Hillary Clinton, we know from your Comey termination letter of the same date that you very much had Russia on your mind (“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation…”).

Then in March, according to the Washington Post, you urged Adm. Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, and Daniel Coats, the director of National Intelligence, to “push back” against an FBI inquiry into possible coordination between Russia and your presidential campaign.

The Post said that both refused and at least one of them, Rogers, had his version recorded in a contemporaneous memo. Further, according to the Post, “…senior White House officials sounded out top intelligence officials about the possibility of intervening directly with Comey to encourage the FBI to drop its probe of Michael Flynn.”

That sounds awfully like President Richard Nixon conspiring with chief of staff H.R. Haldeman to get the CIA to persuade the FBI to stop its probe of Watergate.

And of course, just as you departed for Saudi Arabia, the New York Times reported that you told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States on May 10 in the Oval Office that Comey was a “nut job,” and that his termination would relieve “great pressure,” a revelation that your White House did not deny in its written response.

Taken together, that sounds like the behavior of someone impeding an official investigation. And you can’t make what has happened go away. Not by tweeting. Not by rallying the base or having your allies in Congress or the conservative media complain.

We’re beyond that now. You need to hire a criminal defense lawyer and follow that lawyer’s advice, which will no doubt include restraint. You also need to engage a political adviser who will stand up to you — and tell you when you are wrong — and you need to follow that advice.

The road ahead is pretty clear: It is nearly certain that the truth will come out. Mueller is a straight-shooter who will get to the bottom of this, and if you committed crimes, you will be removed. But I’m not prejudging you. It’s premature and inappropriate to talk about initiating impeachment.

Even if you get past your legal issues, the way — the only way — to save your presidency is to stop talking about this issue, stop being controlled by impulse and instead be governed by discretion and the law. Assuming you do not become legally entangled, your presidency can be rescued. After all, President Ronald Reagan faced many dark days in his second term in relation to the Iran-contra scandal, but he got through it by focusing on his work, not complaining, and maintaining discipline.

And pretty much the same thing happened with President Bill Clinton, though that scandal was different.

You can pull out of the downward spiral.  But only if you have it in you to stay focused, stay on message, and follow the rules, the law, and good advice.

Michael Smerconish can be heard 9 a.m. to noon on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124. He hosts Smerconish at 9 a.m. Saturdays on CNN.

Donny Goes To School

During a special trip to an elementary school, Trump reads an incredible book to the students and runs his immigration policy by his new pals.
 

Saturday, May 27, 2017

White House Admits Trump Lied About Bringing Back Coal Jobs

The White House's real position on bringing back coal jobs was revealed after Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn made it clear in a meeting with reporters that coal isn't even good feedstock anymore, and the future of American energy is in natural gas, solar, and wind.

By Jason Easley

Here is what Cohn told reporters according to The White House Press Pool:


Cohn’s comments are the opposite of what Trump promised during the campaign when he said, “We’re going to get those miners back to work … the miners of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, which was so great to me last week, Ohio and all over are going to start to work again, believe me.

They are going to be proud again to be miners.”

The truth is that the coal jobs are gone, and they aren’t coming back. Trump lied to former and current coal miners in places like West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Western Pennsylvania.

Coal company bankruptcies and job losses in the Appalachian region weren’t caused by “federal regulations” as the company owners and Republicans like to claim. Automation within the industry, the natural gas boom, and declining international demand for coal are the real reasons behind the decline.

It was a rare moment of truth from the Trump administration that is likely to be walked back by the White House. The coal jobs aren’t coming back. Trump’s advisers know this even as the President continues to sell a fantasy to a depressed economic region of a coal based revival that is never going to come.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Greg Gianforte cited for 'body slamming' reporter on eve of election

U.S. House candidate Greg Gianforte has been cited for assaulting a reporter from the Guardian at the Republican's campaign headquarters in Bozeman, Montana.

Gianforte was cited for misdemeanor assault, according to the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office.
In a recording of the incident, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs said he was "body-slammed" by Gianforte and wanted to call police.

A Fox News TV crew in the room reported seeing Gianforte grab Jacobs by the neck and slam him to the ground.



http://billingsgazette.com/news/government-and-politics/greg-gianforte-cited-for-body-slamming-reporter-on-eve-of/article_3a6bf896-6c25-5dd9-a4b8-d7e097a950e4.html 

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Government of the Sick Fucks, by the Sick Fucks, and for the Sick Fucks



Tuesday, May 23, 2017

300 of the 800 Jobs That Trump “Saved” At Carrier Plant Are Now Moving To Mexico


Donald Trump championed the 1,100 jobs he saved at a Carrier plant in Indiana, but the real number of jobs saved was 800, and now out of those 800, 300 are moving to Mexico by Christmas, so Carrier got a $7 million taxpayer handout and still shipped jobs to Mexico.

CNN reported, “Donald Trump may have convinced Carrier not to move its Indianapolis furnace plant to Mexico. But the company is still shipping about 300 of its jobs to Mexico right before Christmas. In a formal notice to the state of Indiana, the company detailed its plans to eliminate 338 jobs at the plant on July 20, four supervisor jobs in October and a final 290 jobs on Dec. 22.”

The Carrier deal was a PR scam.

The pro-Trump messaging behind the deal quickly fell apart when it was revealed that only 800 jobs, not 1,100 would be saved. The number was then reduced to 730 jobs that would be saved.

There was a reason why Trump never got a guarantee that the jobs were going to stay in the United States, because the jobs were always destined to go to Mexico or go away. Carrier is a classic example of why Trump will never be able to restore America’s manufacturing sector to its past glory.

Many more of the Carrier jobs that are staying in the US are going to be gone in the future because more factories are moving towards automation. The biggest threat to US manufacturing sector jobs isn’t in a foreign country. It’s technology.

The Carrier scheme was always a fraud that designed to give a corporation millions of dollars while making it look like Trump was saving jobs, but just like everything else in the Trump presidency, the talk never matches the action.

Great news for African American voters in North Carolina!

Supreme Court strikes down North Carolina congressional district maps

Then And Now


Karma! Michael Flynn, Mister 'Lock Her Up,' Takes The Fifth

Monday, May 22, 2017

Trump Completes First Leg Of World Hypocrisy Tour



Trump accused of rank hypocrisy in Saudi Arabia

Donald Trump appears to 'curtsey' to Saudi king after mocking Barack Obama for bowing

On Islam, Trump is consistently inconsistent

Donald Trump drops out of Saudi Arabia event due to 'exhaustion'

Destiny 2 is leading to gold deflation in World of Warcraft

Real-world value of in-game gold dips 7 percent since Battle.net announcement.

Careful, friend... while you were sleeping, the real-world value of that gold pile just went down a bit.
Activision's decision to sell Destiny 2 through Blizzard's Battle.net (or the Blizzard app, if you insist on calling it that) is already having ripple effects throughout the platform. Look no further than World of Warcraft, where the real-world value of in-game gold has sunk quickly in the wake of the announcement, according to the tracker at WoWToken.info.

The in-game auction price of a WoW Token—which can be exchanged for $15 in credit on other Battle.net games—settled at around 120,000 gold pieces on North American servers this morning.

That's up from a price of about 110,000 gold pieces just before the Destiny 2 announcement threw the market into turmoil, causing the Token price to briefly spike to over 140,000 gold on Thursday evening.

The result looks to be about a 7 percent decline in the real-world buying power of a piece of WoW gold in less than a week. Put another way, the functional price of a $60 copy of Destiny 2 in WoW gold jumped from just under 450,000 gold pieces to just over 480,000 in a matter of days. An incredibly focused, min-maxing gold farmer could still earn that gold in a month or two of dedicated WoW play, though.
While WoW Token prices show minor fluctuations throughout each day, the last time the market saw this much turbulence was back in February, when Blizzard first allowed Tokens to be sold for Battle.net credit. Before that, Tokens could only be used to purchase World of Warcraft subscription time and were considered much less valuable at the in-game auction markets.
 Since the change, the in-game value of a Token has slowly grown about 22 percent over the course of about three months, from about 90,000 gold pieces on February 15 up to about 110,000 last week.

Looked at another way, the Destiny announcement condensed about a month's worth of "natural" gold deflation into a single weekend.

As Bungie rolls out suspected plans for microtransaction-based purchases in Destiny 2, we may see in-game demand for the WoW Token increase even further in the coming months. If you're looking to trade one video game addiction for another, we recommend trading in that WoW loot for pre-emptive Destiny funds sooner rather than later.

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Defeated Pro-Trump Democratic Mayor Is Down In The Dumps

By Alex Seitz-Wald 

Last year, the mayor of a seen-better-days steel town in Western Pennsylvania became the poster child of President Donald Trump's appeal to white working-class Democrats. But he'll soon be out of work after a 26 year old assistant band director at the local high school beat him in a Democratic primary.

Monessen Mayor Louis Mavrakis' outspoken support for Trump turned him into a media sensation.

The 79 year old former union organizer helped decode Trump's appeal in the Rust Belt on Sunday political talk shows and for major newspapers, where he was quoted saying things like: "If ISIS was to come to Monessen, they'd keep on going. They'd say someone already bombed the goddamn place."

Trump himself made a high-profile visit to Monessen, a town of just 7,500, on Mavrakis' invitation.

Trump stood in front of a wall of recycled trash to slam free-trade policies and promised to bring back good-paying coal mining and steel-making jobs.
Image: Lou Mavrakis
In this undated image, Lou Mavrakis is shown. Mavrakis recently lost his incumbent bid for the mayoral race of Monessen, PA. Courtesy Observer-Reporter
But Mavrakis' coup in getting Trump to town also helped lead to his downfall.

When a group of residents protested his visit, they were led by Matt Shorraw, a local community activist whose family has been in the town for generations.

"What bothered me the most was Trump's visit got our mayor a lot of press, but he basically used that press to say our city is a dump," Shorraw told NBC News.

Shorraw resolved to run for mayor, even though he had never held public office and was only in his mid-20's.

On Tuesday, he narrowly defeated Mavrakis in the Democratic primary. And with no Republican on the ballot in November, Shorraw is all but guaranteed to be the youngest mayor in the town's history.
Image: Matt Shorraw
In this undated image, Matthew Shorraw is shown. Shorraw recently won the mayoral race for town of Monessen, PA. Courtesy Observer-Reporter
"I think a bit of the Trump phenomenon was that people wanted something completely different. And I think that might have been the case in Monessen, too, with me," said Shorraw.

Biff Rendar, a local Democratic activist who supported Shorraw, said "you cannot find two more opposite people" than Shorraw and Mavrakis.

In photos and videos posted on his campaign's website, Shorraw looks more like the stereotype of a Brooklyn hipster than a Rust Belt worker. His announcement video features him wearing a plaid shirt and blazer with thick-rimmed plastic glasses.

But he got noticed for the community projects he has taken on since he was 18, such as revitalizing an amphitheater. It demonstrated an optimism for the town that voters found refreshing, said Rendar.

The Westmoreland Democratic Party broke its longstanding precedent of not endorsing in primaries in order to back Shorraw after Mavrakis brought Trump to town.

"Mavrakis was already lost to us," said Lorraine Petrosky, the party chairwoman.

‘People Here Think Trump Is A Laughingstock’

On Trump's ill-timed world tour.


“Chaos.”
“Circus.”
“Laughingstock.”

Those were just a few of the comments I heard in Berlin this week from senior European officials trying to make sense of the meltdown in Washington at just the moment when a politically imploding President Trump embarks on what he called “my big foreign trip” in this morning’s kickoff tweet.

For months, the American president has raised unprecedented questions about the future of the American-led alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. He has slagged off NATO, evinced skepticism about the European Union, cheered for like-minded right-wing populists, boosted antidemocratic strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vowed to rip up free trade deals—and Europe’s political class has been outraged, confused and even terrified.

Trump’s tumultuous last two weeks—from firing his FBI director to allegedly sharing highly classified information with Russian officials even as a formidable special counsel was being named to investigate his campaign team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin—has them still confused about his foreign policy. But now they are more appalled than afraid of the man with whom they have no choice but to partner.
 
Many I spoke with said they had made a fundamental mistake of viewing Trump primarily as an ideologue with whom they disagreed rather than what he increasingly appears to be: an ill-prepared newcomer to the world stage, with uninformed views and a largely untested team that will now be sorely tried by a 9-day, 5-stop world tour that would be wildly ambitious even for a seasoned global leader.

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”
 
“The dominant reaction to Trump right now is mockery,” Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, told the meeting at the German Foreign Office here while moderating a panel on Trump’s foreign policy that dealt heavily on the difficulty of divining an actual policy amid the spectacle. Heilbrunn, whose publication hosted Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in Washington during last year’s campaign, used the ‘L’ word too. “The Trump administration is becoming an international laughingstock.” Michael Werz, a German expert from the liberal U.S. think tank Center for American Progress, agreed, adding he was struck by “how rapidly the American brand is depreciating over the last 20 weeks.”

Of course, Americans have had presidential scandals before, and Europe has a long history of substantive clashes with U.S. presidents over everything from the Vietnam war and confronting the Soviets to the widely opposed 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Even Trump flying off on a poorly timed international tour isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory: Many embattled U.S. leaders have hit the road for a dose of statesman-like pageantry, red-carpet receptions and global superpower-style pomp to compensate for pressing investigations and congressional uproar back home. Bill Clinton toured Russia and Northern Ireland after testifying to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky affair and was in Israel when he learned the House of Representatives had the votes to impeach him. Ronald Reagan summited with Mikhail Gorbachev as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings threatened to derail his second-term agenda.
But Trump’s tribulations have confounded the world, and especially America’s closest allies here in Europe, in a whole different way. Never has a U.S. president flailed so early in his tenure at a time when he is still such an unknown quantity in the world. In Trump’s case, he will arrive in a skeptical Europe with an inexperienced or nonexistent staff appointed to deal with global problems and a record of wildly contradictory statements even on matters of core principle. Does he think NATO is still “obsolete” or not? Is he prepared to offer the Russians anything more than the symbolism of his recent, chummy Oval Office visit with its foreign minister? Want to blow up carefully negotiated agreements with Europe on climate change and trade?

No one knows.
***
 
When European diplomats meet these days, they often swap stories about Trump—and how to manage their volatile new ally. “The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a former senior official in April after meeting Trump in the Oval Office. Not only that, this person told me, the president seemed unprepared and ill-informed, turning the conversation to North Korea and apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga.

Such anecdotes have shaped how Europe’s anxious leaders are preparing for Trump’s trip this week – he will come to Brussels for a NATO session on Thursday—and for another one planned for early July, when he visits Germany for a G-20 summit at which he is expected to meet Putin face to face for the first time. 

Some of the reported preparations for the NATO session in Brussels this week suggest just how much the volatile-clown theory of the American president has now taken hold.

NATO has downgraded the May 25 session to a meeting from a summit and will hold only a dinner to minimize the chances of a Trump eruption. Leaders have been told to hold normally windy remarks to just two to four minutes to keep Trump’s attention. They are even preparing to consider a “deliverable” to Trump of having NATO officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as Trump has said his priority is getting NATO to do more in combating terrorism. 
 
“It’s a phony deliverable to give to Trump, a Twitter deliverable,” said a former senior U.S. official, pointing out that the individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition.
A Trump photo-op with a chunk of the World Trade Center has been choreographed in hopes of convincing the president who called NATO “obsolete” to reaffirm the basic principles of an organization committed to the mutual security of its members. The World Trade Center wreckage is part of a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks at NATO’s new headquarters that Trump is set to officially open (though the building is not in fact finished), and NATO observers hope he will use the occasion to finally endorse the principle in Article V of the NATO Treaty that requires countries to treat an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all – an article that has only been invoked once in the organization’s history: after 9/11. “The purpose of the 9/11 memorial opening is to try to get Trump to mention the Article V commitment, since how can he get around it? It’s the only time Article V was ever used,” the former official said.

This is viewed as an especially crucial moment for Trump to do so, given his stated goal of working more closely with Russia even as Russia threatens neighboring states like the three Baltic countries that are now NATO members. But Trump has resisted it, and as Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution has reported, “Trump’s failure to endorse Article V is not an oversight. Members of his cabinet have unsuccessfully tried to insert this language into his remarks, including at his meeting with Stoltenberg.”

Now, they are finally hoping he will do so – but have no promise.

No promises might well be the theme of Trump’s trip. Consider Trump’s original campaign-trail threat to blow up NATO if member states don’t live up to their commitment to put 2 percent of the budget into defense; even that, it appears, might now might be back on the table. Trump has publicly claimed victory on that score, crowing that he had already forced allies to comply, but in fact, few countries have actually raised their spending – and an anonymous senior White House official told a reporter this week that “he is not going to stay in NATO if NATO does not make a lot more progress.”
No doubt jittery officials have reason to be nervous. In an interview as Trump departed, Stoltenberg told Bloomberg TV that “Trump has clearly stated to me in several conversations … that he’s strongly committed to NATO.” As for Thursday’s meeting in Brussels? “I hope and expect that he will reiterate his strong commitment to NATO.”

But will he? And what would it mean if he does?

The question of Donald Trump’s real views on NATO might not be as entertaining as the political spectacle unfolding in Washington, but the answer is just as uncertain.
***
 
On Tuesday night, Germany Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the conference on U.S.-German relations, sponsored by the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brucke think tank here, with a lengthy, serious speech on the Marshall Plan’s legacy, a paean to American leadership in Europe and a rebuttal to Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We associate the United States with the idea of freedom and democracy,” he said, before warning of the erosion of the global order that America made. “A recalibration of the world is in full swing.”
An hour later, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile was taking questions over dinner from a largely German group of current and former government officials and international business leaders.

What did they want to know? 

How does impeachment work? Did James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the Clinton investigation swing the election to Trump? Did the Russians? Oh, and once again: Will Trump be impeached? 

“Well, people seem to think he’s just going to be removed. I don’t know,” Brazile said, after telling the Europeans that she thought Democrats, not Russians or the ousted FBI director, bore more blame for the Trump victory. “He’s the president, he was elected.” Brazile said she prayed for Trump in church. “I want my president to succeed,” she said, before adding, “But no one is above the law.”

A few minutes after she finished speaking, the New York Times posted the latest revelation of a week filled with them: that Comey had kept contemporaneous notes of his meetings with Trump, including the allegation that the president asked him to shut down the investigation of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The Europeans, just like their American counterparts, were glued to their phones.


Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

Comey’s FBI Computer Illegally Accessed: Data Given To Russian Diplomats

Exclusive: Sources close to the intelligence community report that Director Comey’s FBI computer was illegally accessed immediately after he was dismissed from his post. They further report that ‘removable media’ was used in the commission of this crime. ‘Removable media’ is a category describing physical devices that can be placed into a computer, either to download information or to upload it, such as a memory card, a USB stick, a removable hard drive, a thumb drive or similar items.

Sources further report that a person or persons allied to Donald Trump passed data accessed from Director Comey’s computer to Russian diplomats. It is not known when or how this took place. A piece of removable media containing all the data in question has been recovered from hostile actors, sources say, and is now in the possession of the Justice Department.

Director Comey is said to have known in advance that Mr. Trump would dismiss him. He took careful steps, these sources say, to leave not only a paper trail as we have seen in the story of the ‘Comey Memo’ but also a digital one. Director Comey’s own primary work computer, and other computers in and around his former office, were fitted with sophisticated intelligence community software allowing the Justice Department to see precisely how and when they were attacked.
comey fired
The official Foreign Ministry of Russia’s Twitter account posted a tweet showing Foreign Minister Lavarov laughing with Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State who has won the Order of Friendship of Vladimir Putin, over Director Comey’s firing, on the day Donald Trump hosted the Russians in the White House and verbally gave them top-secret allied intelligence, later published by the Russian news agency Tass.

White House sources say Trump has already discussed his resignation more than once. Perhaps when he discovers that the justice and intelligence communities are well aware he breached Director Comey’s computer and handed FBI data to Russia, he may decide to spare the nation further trauma and resign.

If he becomes President, Mike Pence will be unable to pardon Donald Trump for any crimes at the state level.

More on this story as we receive it.

https://patribotics.blog/2017/05/17/comeys-fbi-computer-illegally-accessed-data-given-to-russian-diplomats/

Friday, May 19, 2017

Rep. Joe 'You Lie' Wilson (R-SC) Destroyed By CSPAN Caller


Rep. Joe 'You Lie' Wilson (R-SC) Destroyed By CSPAN Caller

The 2009 State of the Union address by the newly inaugurated (and last duly elected) President, Barack Obama was rudely and historically interrupted by SC Republican Congressman Joe Wilson, something many of us will never forget. This same man has the nerve to insist that Democrats need to give Trump a chance, after months of horrifically…

Republicans Wanted To Impeach Obama Over Something, Anything, But Avoid It For Trump

Posted by Rude One

In 2013, then-Senator Tom Coburn mused at a town hall meeting, "I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ but I think you’re getting perilously close." Coburn, a Republican (obviously) brought up impeachment of President Obama as a possible response to unspecified things that Obama had done. Mostly, presidenting while black, but probably Coburn would have said, "Something, something, something, immigrants."

Around the same time, Republican Representative Blake Farenthold, 100 pounds of shit in a fifty pound bag from Fuck If I Care, Texas, told his constituents, who totally believed that Obama was born in Africa, "If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, we would probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it." Walking cold sore Ted Cruz bemoaned to a bunch of his drooling maniacs, "To successfully impeach a president you need the votes in the U.S. Senate." Neither Farenthold nor Cruz, in course of making Texas even dumber, gave any grounds for impeachment, just a general sense of something not right (see above, "presidenting while black").

In 2013 and 2014, the Tea Party plague rats kept demanding to know why that goddamn Muslim Kenyan who was making us all into healthy gay Communists wasn't being impeached. And their members of Congress were more than willing to indulge their idiot fantasy for a few whoops at rallies and a bunch of votes.

At least pubic hair-topped Rep. Jason Chaffetz wanted to impeach Obama for a reason: the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya (which, as you know, was worse than 100 9/11s times a dozen Pearl Harbors). And skeevy shitworm Steve King was hyped to impeach over Obama not being a complete dick to undocumented immigrant kids.

There's a fuckin' Wikipedia page devoted to all the reasons why Republicans talked about impeaching Obama, eight years worth. And not a goddamned one of them rises to the level of a single thing Donald Trump has done in the last four months.

A couple of Republicans are hinting at being open to impeachment. But the best representation of the cowardice and cravenness that is the GOP right now is that the Republicans in the House just blocked a vote on establishing an independent commission to investigate Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

It's not just hypocrisy by many of the same Republicans who wanted to lynch Obama for every fake scandal they could conjure. Now, with Trump, they are likely aiding and abetting a pile of high crimes and a shit load of misdemeanors.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

If you work for Trump, it's time to quit

After the Comey firing and the Russia intel leak, the I’m-taking-one-for-the-team ship has sailed.

Rick Wilson is a Republican consultant and a Daily Beast columnist.
 
I’ve been a Republican political consultant for almost 30 years, and I’ve dispensed a lot of private advice. But now it’s time for me to reach out publicly to my fellow Republicans working in the Trump administration.

We really need to talk.

Whether you’re a 20-something fresh off the campaign trail, or a seasoned Washington insider serving in the Cabinet, by now you’re painfully aware that you’re not making America great again; you’re barely making it to the end of the daily news cycle before your verbally incontinent boss, the putative leader of the free world, once again steers the proverbial car into a ditch. On every front, you’re faced with legal, political and moral hazards. The president’s job, and yours, is a lot harder than it looked, and you know the problem originates in the Oval Office.

[I was fired for criticizing Trump. Getting rid of people like me hurts his agenda.]

You hate that people are shying away from the administration jobs in droves: Just this week, in rapid succession, both Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Trey Gowdy withdrew their names from consideration as replacements for former FBI Director James Comey, the guy your boss fired. Whatever department you’re in, it’s a safe bet that it’s a whispering graveyard of empty appointments and unfilled jobs.

I know: Many of you serving in Cabinet, sub-Cabinet and White House roles joined Team Trump in good faith, believing you could help steady the ship, smooth the rough edges and, just maybe, put some conservative policy wins up on the board. You could see that President Trump’s undisciplined style was risky, but you hoped the big show playing over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would provide you with cover to work steadily and enthusiastically on the administration’s legislative priorities.

Some of you even bought into the ‘Merica First new nationalism. Many of you quietly assured friends in the Washington ecosystem that Trump would settle into his job — after all, just a few days after taking office, he assured us, “I can be the most presidential person ever.”

You figured Trump would turn his political capital into big wins, and that his lack of interest in policy details would let you and your friends in Congress set the agenda. Sure, you knew you’d have to feed Trump’s ego and let him take a victory lap after every success, but you also thought you might claim a smidgen of credit for a popular infrastructure bill, a big tax cut, repeal of Obamacare or a host of other “easy” lifts. Because we’re all ambitious, right? It’s okay to admit it.

Instead, your president botched Trumpcare 1.0 and contributed little as House Speaker Paul Ryan managed to ram public-relations nightmare, Trumpcare 2.0, through the House at the cost of much political blood and treasure. Instead, Trump’s fumbles have left many members of Congress ducking town hall meetings like they’re in the Witness Protection Program. The DOA tax bill and the rest of Trump’s agenda are deader and more pungent than six-day-old fish. Maybe your particular bureau is still afloat, but you’re really not doing much except playing defense and wondering which of your colleagues is leaking to The Washington Post.

You learned quickly that your job isn’t actually to serve the nation, manage your agency or fulfill the role you ostensibly play according to the White House org chart. In reality, you spend most of your time fluffing Trump’s ego. Either that or you’re making excuses for not being a more aggressive suck-up. If you’ve been ordained to appear on television as an administration surrogate, you know by now that your task isn’t to advocate for your agency or issue, but to lavish the president with praise.

[I support Trump, but firing Comey was wrong]

Now, you see the daily train wreck; you see a White House in turmoil and a president drawing an ever-tighter circle of family and corporate vassals around himself. You worry that the scandals and legal troubles, that have been rumbling on the horizon like a summer thunderstorm, are drawing nearer. You should worry.

Every day you get up, slide into the seat of your Prius or Tahoe (and if you’re senior enough, exchange a few polite words with your driver) and start checking Twitter. Whatever it is that you’re feeling, it doesn’t feel anything like Morning in America. It feels like some faraway kleptocracy where the center hasn’t held, the airfield and radio station have fallen to the rebels, and the Maximum Leader is holed up in his secret bunker waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Soon (and by soon, I mean now) you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide if I’m here to help has morphed into I’m helping this president dismantle the republic. In D.C., principle is as rare as hen’s teeth, but, GOP friends, I’m here to help you.

You already know you can’t save the president because he doesn’t want to be saved. You already know there’s not another, better version of Trump getting ready to show up. You’re smart. You’re loyal. You’re sniffing the wind like a gazelle, nose filled with the scents of predators. You don’t want to break from the pack too soon, but there’s greater risk in waiting too long.

When regimes collapse, dead-enders are the most fascinating to watch — the ones who end up with the profitable concessions and sought-after mistresses. You know already, though, that’s probably not you. So, when this regime falls, ask yourself, do you want to be among those who said not me, or do you want to go out like a Ba’ath Party generalissimo?

Sticking with Trump to the bitter end and pretending the unfolding chaos is just “fake news” won’t save your reputation as the walls close in. It won’t ease the judgment of history. It won’t do anything to polish up your future Wikipedia entry.

Cutting ties with a man who is destructive to our values, profoundly divisive, contemptuous of the rule of law and incontrovertibly unfit to serve in the highest office in the land just might. Do it now.

NATO Tries To Dumb-Down Upcoming Meeting To Better Suit Donald Trump

On May 25th, NATO will be holding a meeting with the heads of all 28 members countries, and they are trying their best to dumb-down the entire meeting so that Trump can keep up.  NATO is reportedly telling speakers and leaders that they need to keep their presentations short, only a few minutes, so that Trump can follow along and will stay focused. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.



https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/15/nato-frantically-tries-to-trump-proof-presidents-first-visit-alliance-europe-brussels/

Tornado Tosses Baton Rouge Firefighter, Truck

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - 


A Baton Rouge firefighter is counting his blessings after a tornado hit his pickup truck while he was in it Friday.




The whole thing was caught on surveillance video at a gas station. You can see the white pickup in the top right corner of the screen sitting in the parking lot before the wind slams a nearby tree to the ground, and a second later, the truck goes flying into the air.   

NewsOn6.com - Tulsa, OK - News, Weather, Video and Sports - KOTV.com |

"It picked up my truck like it was a toy and threw it," said Baton Rouge firefighter Dustin Spiess. "The back of my truck lifted up and I was looking straight at the ground through my windshield."

Spiess said his truck landed fender first on the pavement. He walked away with a few cuts and bruises.

http://www.newson6.com/story/35451939/tornado-tosses-baton-rouge-firefighter-truck

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Trump Asked Comey To End Flynn Inquiry

Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him To End Flynn Investigation

Mick Mulvaney Mocks People With Diabetes, Says They Don't Deserve Health Care



The man-baby's very bad week


Stop giving Trump cover for leaking high level intel to the Russians!

By denbot

He has used subterfuge many times in the past, including the negotiations leading to his acquisition of Mar a Lago. He knows what a secret is, and the value of keeping them close to his vest.

He is not blathering out shit simply because he's a clueless asshole. Since almost to the moment the candidate Trump had access to classified briefings, the Russians have been privy to them. If you doubt me, ask the poor fuck who had a bag dropped over his head during an FSB meeting in Moscow right after Trump's very first intel briefing.

He is a fucking traitor and he knows exactly what he is doing!

Monday, May 15, 2017

Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian diplomats

During the May 10th meeting at the White House with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, Trump began describing details about an Islamic State terror threat related to the use of laptop computers on aircraft, according to current and former U.S. officials.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html

Barack Obama Shits On American Voters While In Italy


Republicans plan massive cuts to programs for the poor

Under pressure to balance the budget and align with Trump, the House GOP has its eye on food stamps, welfare and perhaps even veterans’ benefits.
House Republicans just voted to slash hundreds of billions of dollars in health care for the poor as part of their Obamacare replacement. Now, they’re weighing a plan to take the scalpel to programs that provide meals to needy kids and housing and education assistance for low-income families.

Donald Trump’s refusal to overhaul Social Security and Medicare — and his pricey wish-list for infrastructure, a border wall and tax cuts — is sending House budget writers scouring for pennies in politically sensitive places: safety-net programs for the most vulnerable.

Under enormous internal pressure to quickly balance the budget, Republicans are considering slashing more than $400 billion in spending through a process to evade Democratic filibusters in the Senate, multiple sources told POLITICO.

The proposal, which would be part of the House Budget Committee's fiscal 2018 budget, won't specify which programs would get the ax; instead it will instruct committees to figure out what to cut to reach the savings. But among the programs most likely on the chopping block, the sources say, are food stamps, welfare, income assistance for the disabled and perhaps even veterans benefits.

If enacted, such a plan to curb safety-net programs — all while juicing the Pentagon’s budget and slicing corporate tax rates — would amount to the biggest shift in federal spending priorities in decades.

Atop that, GOP budget writers will also likely include Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposal to essentially privatize Medicare in their fiscal 2018 budget, despite Trump’s unwavering rejection of the idea. While that proposal is more symbolic and won’t become law under this budget, it’s just another thorny issue that will have Democrats again accusing Republicans of “pushing Granny off the cliff.”
“The Budget Committee is trying to force the entire conference and committees of jurisdiction to focus on ways to bring down this deficit,” said senior budget panel member Rep. Tom Cole.

Republicans have long sought to tackle the nearly $20 trillion debt, but Trump has tied their hands by ruling out cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The Oklahoma Republican, however, acknowledged that mandatory spending reductions could become “very tough issues” — though he declined to name which programs would see major cuts:

“These are hard for anybody, no matter where you’re at on the political spectrum.”

While budget writers are well aware of the sensitive nature of their proposal, they feel they have no choice if they want to balance the budget in a decade, which they’ve proposed for years, and give Trump what he wants.

Enraged by Democrats claiming victory after last month’s government funding agreement, White House officials in recent weeks have pressed Hill Republicans to include more Trump priorities in the fiscal 2018 blueprint.

House Budget Republicans hope to incorporate those wishes and are expected, for example, to budget for Trump’s infrastructure plan. Tax reform instructions will also be included in the budget, paving the way for both chambers to use the powerful budget reconciliation process to push a partisan tax bill through Congress on simple majority votes, as well as the $400 billion in mandatory cuts.
“The critique last time was that we didn’t embed enough Trump agenda items into our budget,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), a budget panel member. Trump has "made it clear it will be embedded in this budget. … And so people will see a process much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda in this forthcoming budget.”

New spending, however, makes already tough math even trickier for a party whose mantra is “balance the budget in 10 years.” Lawmakers need to cut roughly $8 trillion to meet that goal, budget experts say. And while a quarter of their savings in previous budgets came from repealing Obamacare and slicing $1 trillion from Medicaid, Republicans cannot count on those savings anymore because their health care bill sucked up all but $150 billion of that stash — relatively speaking, mere pocket change to play with.

Republicans’ first reflex would be to turn to entitlement reform to find savings. Medicare and Social Security, after all, account for the lion’s share of government spending and more than 70 percent of all mandatory spending.
But while former Freedom Caucus conservative-turned-White House budget director Mick Mulvaney has tried to convince the president of the merits of such reforms, Trump has refused to back down on his campaign pledge to leave Medicare and Social Security alone. (He’s reversed himself on a vow not to touch Medicaid, which would see $880 billion in cuts under the Obamacare repeal bill passed by the House.)

Mulvaney, sources say, has been huddling on a weekly basis with House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black (R-Tenn.) and Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) to plot a path forward. There appears to be some common ground to consider cuts to other smaller entitlement programs: While the Office of Management and Budget would not respond to a request for comment, CQ reported Tuesday that the White House was also considering hundreds of billions in cuts to the same programs being eyed by House budget writers.

“I’ve already started to socialize the discussion around here in the West Wing about how important the mandatory spending is to the drivers of our debt,” Mulvaney told radio host Hugh Hewitt in March. “There are ways that we cannot only allow the president to keep his promise, but to help him keep his promise by fixing some of these mandatory programs.”

Final details of the GOP’s budget plan aren’t expected until June, and specific language mandating the mandatory cuts still hasn’t been written, according to one aide familiar with the process.

Committees would then have several months to put together the department-by-department details on what exactly to cut, proposals that probably won’t land until the fall at the earliest, given the legislative calendar.

The idea could run into problems: It is unclear whether such cuts would be acceptable in the more moderate Senate. In order for the proposal to actually move, Senate Republicans would need to include the same instructions in their own budget.

In the House, Republican leaders hope the moves toward deficit reduction will buy them some good will with conservatives going into September, when the party’s right flank will have to swallow difficult votes to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government.

Cole argued the deficit-trimming push will appeal to the House Freedom Caucus, which blocked the House GOP’s budget on the floor last year in protest of spending levels its members considered too high.

But pleasing conservatives this time around will fuel anxiety on the other end of the conference. Endorsing cuts to programs for the poor will certainly make centrist House Republicans — many of whom were uncomfortable voting to slice Medicaid just weeks ago in the Obamacare repeal bill — very uncomfortable.

Rep. Charlie Dent, a centrist and senior Appropriations Committee member, said budget reconciliation instructions should center solely on tax reform, which “is complex enough on its own,” he said.

“All I can say is: Tax reform by itself is very complex and controversial,” Dent (R-Pa.) said. “Adding some of these other changes will only make the tax reform more difficult.”

Asked about mandatory programs that might be cut, he added: “This will create challenges, no question about it. When so many of the entitlement programs are taken off the table for discussion … that limits our ability to fund the non-defense discretionary programs and other mandatory programs that affect a lot of people.”

GOP backers of the idea will argue in the coming weeks and months that moderates have voted for GOP budgets that included similar cuts in the past — so they should be able to support them again.

But if House GOP leadership has learned anything from the Obamacare repeal debacle, it should be that voting for something that has no chance of becoming law and makes for great campaign fodder is much easier than backing a bill that could be enacted.