CNBC Host Calls Out DNC Chair Over Primary Corruption

Is Bernie Sanders A Russian Puppet? Unhinged Hilary Supporters Think So

A collection of regretful Trump voters

http://www.areyousorryyet.com/

What A Fucking Day

By TheFerret

Oh wow.

Shit be cray, people. Shit be cray.

Today's news was like if a Tom Clancy novel fucked the notebook where Hunter S. Thompson kept the ideas he thought were "too weird" on top of a big stack of Frank Miller comics. Not the good ones, the recent, shitty, super-racist ones.

We started with news of Devin "Pigfucker" Nunes recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Word is, he was forced out by Paul Ryan and the Shart House, not for being a stooge, but for being an exceptionally shitty stooge. Like so many of the shitbags caught up in this mess, he got caught in a number of easily disproven lies, apparently used by a handful of morons in the executive branch to "leak" information...back to the executive branch. Don't look at me brother, figuring out why these people do the things we do is like hosting trivia night in Arkham Asylum.

Anyhow, Nunes released a feeble little statement blaming "left wing activists" or some such nonsense, which fell apart about thirteen seconds later when it was revealed he was under investigation by the ethics office (the same one the House GOP tried to drown quietly in the outhouse out back while nobody was looking, remember that?) for revealing classified information, for the TOTAL BULLSHIT REASON that...he appears to have revealed classified information. Devin Nunes was not built for high-stakes politics, friends. He was built solely for the fucking of pigs.

And we celebrated Nunes' downfall for a hot ten minutes before we realized he was just going to be replaced with stooges who wouldn't be so obvious/stupid about being stooges, i.e. are less likely to call dumb fuck press conferences where they entrap themselves for no discernible reason beyond incurable idiocy. The new chair of the investigating committee is some doorknob who said some shit about how watching a Mexican Soap Opera is basically the same thing as collaborating with a hostile foreign power to influence the American Presidential election, I don't remember his name, look it up your own damn self. (He will be assisted in his abuse of power by Trey Gowdy Doody, he of the Hundred Years War, excuse me, the Benghazi investigation. I would love to rewarded similarly for a history of failure. In that scenario, my 0-for-the-entire-fucking-season in little league would land me a multi-million dollar contract with the Yankees.)

Meanwhile the Senate went Nuclear, which, calm down, doesn't mean what you were hoping it did. There was much hemming and hawing about the ugliness of partisan politics by men and women who spent the day facilitating the ugliness of partisan politics. In the left-wing media, there was a masochistic joy in trudging up past quotes from Death Lord Of All Tortoises Mitch McConnell as proof of his hypocrisy. As if hypocrisy bothers Mitch McConnell one bit.

Let me tell y'all something very important about Mitch McConnell: he doesn't give a shit about anything but winning. He will gleefully tell you on Monday that eating sandwiches is sinful, and then when you catch him eating a big fat fucking reuben on Tuesday, he will laugh in your face as you triumphantly point out his hypocrisy.

Laugh in your face, kick you in the junk, steal your wallet, use your money to take your mom out to dinner* and fuck her in your childhood bed, and it won't bother him one tiny little bit because his job isn't "being consistent," his job is "winning" and he won this one and yeah, fuck him, but it sucks and now we just have to send his terrapin ass back to the minority for the rest of his life so he can flail helplessly on his back while we replace Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy with Rachel Maddow maybe Sarah Silverman.

*Where he orders another sandwich because fuck you that's why.

In the background there's another wave of stories about Shart House infighting. People are screaming "CUCK" at each other, Bannon's down, demoted from the National Security Council, and Kushner's up, apparently single-handedly responsible for 87% of the executive branch's duties. Why does a kid whose resume reads "got daddy's money when daddy went to jail, bought a newspaper and wrecked it" get so much responsibility? Well, because our idiot president has mad respect for the dude who gets to do the one thing he's ever wanted that he can't do, (NUDGE NUDGE FUCK HIS DAUGHTER) and therefore he's in charge of China and peace in the Middle East and reforming the government and Veterans affairs and The Vending Machines in the West Wing Don't Have Zagnuts Can We Get Some Fucking Zagnuts in There Jared and god knows what else.

And we maybe breathe a sigh of relief that Bannon's role in the administration is diminishing because this is a man who boos the ending of Schindler's List, but then you realize that the GODDAMN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED GODDAMN STATES is only swinging from white supremacy to nepotism, and you wonder why he doesn't think, "Hey, maybe try somebody with some relevant experience?" And you know that once Kushner makes a mess of everything, Il Douche is just gonna turn to Gordon Ramsey or that One Girl Who Yells at Baristas in Chicago to run the government for him.

And at this point in the day, you're getting a bit overwhelmed, so maybe you don't notice that the Yokel, I mean "Attorney" General, our President's Loyal Huntin' Dawg Beauregard, has decided to take himself a long leisurely look at all them police abuse settlements arrived at under those colored folks who previously held his office. To Ol' Beauregard, decades of rampant police abuse? Why, that ain't nuthin' atawl, an' if an unarmed black fellah gets shot every couple weeks or so in Baltimore, well, that's jus' the price of law and orduh, don' ya see, and honestly, what's one more or less black fellah, am I right?

By now, the madness has started to settle in. You're seriously thinking rubbing cake frosting all over your otherwise naked body and running around downtown throwing poop and screaming. Maybe you catch a few human interest stories. About Rachel Dolezal going to South Africa to talk about "racial transitioning." About a shocking number of iPhone users desiring a sexual relationship with Siri. About somebody making beer that tastes like Cap'n Crunch. (All of this really happened, I swear to you.)

And in the background you start to see more and more stories about Dorito Mussolini thinking about maybe starting a War of His Very Own in Syria.

And we learn that the Shart Administration is trying to force twitter to reveal (ahem, UNMASK HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH OH GOD THE IRONY) of an anonymous user who has been criticizing them, which is a not-at-all-terrifying police state move, oh wait. And we find our the CIA was sounding alarm bells on the Russian interference/possible collaboration LAST SUMMER but somehow James Comey only thought the American people needed to know that Anthony Weiner's personal laptop may've contained the name, location, favorite color and Most Embarrassing High School Moment of every undercover agent in the world. And we even had a quick laugh at Spraytan Zartan bragging about having had the best first thirteen weeks in human history...eleven weeks into his term.

And then things were quiet for a couple hours.

And then the missiles started flying.

Without seeking authorization from congress, without consulting allies, without a strong/competent state department to give advice, without civilian leadership in the defense department, without a single voice in the executive branch any rational human being would consider qualified to weigh in on a decision so large, a military strike on a foreign government backed by Iran and Russia was ordered and executed.

And nobody seems to know what, precisely, is going on, what the long-term plan might be (SPOILERZ, there totally isn't one.). McCain and Graham are jubilant of course, nothing delights that duo quite so much as other people's children dying. Some folks are talking about regime change, but it doesn't seem like anybody thought making those kind of decisions was important before pushing the button.

There's a lot we don't know right now. If there were significant civilian casualties (a distressingly irrelevant factor to the military under the Shart Administration), if more strikes are coming, if there were Russian nationals on the base we hit. What happens next. And yes, in the background you wonder how much of the decision was made to distract the American populace from domestic scandals...nearly every president of my lifetime has played that card.

I confess I'm worried. Our President, as we've learned, doesn't know Shit about Shit, doesn't know what he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, and, importantly, is infinitely persuadable. He blindly followed Bannon into the travel ban debacle, and Ryan into the health care clusterfuck. Why? Because he doesn't know Shit about Shit, and anybody who kisses his ass and tells him what a Big Boy With Big Strong Hands he is can, we have seen time and again, manipulate him into doing whatever they want him to do.

And when it comes to war? Wow. Bannon's an apocalyptic lunatic. Tillerson is hopelessly out of his depth. Mattis seems well-intentioned enough, but don't forget that there is a reason why we don't put generals in charge of the defense department, and Mattis needed a waiver to be confirmed in the first place. Priebus is sniveling toady with no stature on this turf. Kushner also doesn't know shit about shit, and early indications are that the brass is manipulating him, and like his father-in-law I don't credit him with the brains to understand he's being manipulated. The institutional GOP defers to McCain and Graham on matters of war, and again those two sprinkle the blood of young men on their breakfast cereal whenever the opportunity presents itself. And Pence of course is a hairshirt-wearing religious fanatic who'll play the role of Crusader with a crazed grin on his face.

Basically we have a bunch of malicious fools making these decisions. I wish I could find a way to laugh at all this, but I can't. Heaven help us all. 

He’s just a gross, crook, dirty, rotten lying sack of shit

Louis CK regrets comparing Donald Trump to Hitler. But he's not going to take it back.

Yes, Paul Ryan Actually Did Bend The Knee.

By Cyra Master

 

The Washington Post detailed the House GOP’s fight over the ObamaCare repeal and replacement plan this week, rounding up the dramatic details of leadership’s fight to win support for the measure.

At one point, the paper said, House Speaker Paul Ryan (Wis.) got down on one knee to plead with Rep. Don Young of Alaska – the longest-serving Republican in Congress -- to support the bill.  (He was unsuccessful.)

The moments highlighted by the Post during the Republican conference negotiations show what a tough battle Ryan and his deputies faced in whipping the vote.

But they also show the fierce support some offered to leadership - like freshman Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, who lost both legs in 2010 in Afghanistan and called on colleagues to unite behind the bill as he and his Army colleagues had done on the battlefield.

At another point, a Republican shouted, “Burn the ships” to Majority Whip Steve Scalise, invoking the command a 16th century Spanish conquistador gave his crew when they landed in Mexico.

The message was clear, the Post said –- the Republicans felt there was no turning back.

The GOP was ultimately unable to coalesce around the party’s plan and Ryan pulled the bill from the floor Friday, when it was clear it did not have the votes to pass.

Mitch McConnell Goes Down In Flames Defending His Merrick Garland Hypocrisy

How the fuck does Kentucky keep re-electing this guy?  dlevere.

By David



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Sunday blamed the American people for the decision of Senate Republicans not to grant President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Judge Merrick Garland, a hearing.

"The tradition had been not to confirm vacancies in the middle of a presidential [election] year," McConnell told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. "You'd have to go back 80 years to find the last time it happened... Everyone knew, including President Obama's former White House counsel, that if the shoe had been on the other foot, [Democrats] wouldn't have filled a Republican president's vacancy in the middle of a presidential election."

"That's a rationale to vote against his confirmation," Todd argued. "Why not put him up for a vote? Any senator can have a rationale to not to vote for a confirmation. Why not put Merrick Garland on the floor and if the rationale is, 'You know what? Too close to an election,' then vote no?"

McConnell laughed defensively.

"Look, we litigated that last year," the Majority Leader stuttered. "The American people decided that they wanted Donald Trump to make the nomination, not Hillary Clinton."

McConnell argued that Democrats should focus on the issue at hand, the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, Trump's Supreme Court pick.

"There's no rational reason, no basis for voting against Neil Gorsuch," McConnell opined.

"You say it's been litigated, the Garland situation," Todd replied. "For a lot of Senate Democrats, they're not done litigating this... What was wrong with allowing Merrick Garland to have an up or down vote?"

"I already told you!" McConnell exclaimed. "You don't fill Supreme Court vacancies in the middle of a presidential election."

"Should that be the policy going forward?" Todd interrupted. "Are you prepared to pass a resolution that says in election years any Supreme Court vacancy [will not be filled] and let it be a sense of the Senate resolution, that says no Supreme Court nominations will be considered in any even numbered year? Is that where we're headed?"

"That's an absurd question," McConnell complained. "We were right in the middle of a presidential election year. Every body knew that either side -- had the shoe been on the other foot -- wouldn't have filled it. But that has nothing to do with what we're voting on this year."

White House Staff Turns On ‘Out Of His Depth’ Jared Kushner Amid Chaos And Turmoil

Kushner is arguably the president’s closest adviser.

By David Ferguson / Raw Story

April 2, 2017

Photo Credit: Ovidiu Hrubaru / Shutterstock.com

Thus far, in the scandal-plagued, chaotic presidency of Donald Trump, the chief executive’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has enjoyed a kind of unsinkable “privileged status.”

According to Politico, however, resentment is growing against Kushner in an already factionalized and strife-torn White House. Hardline conservatives see the moderate-minded, 36 year old Kushner as an obstacle to their agenda and worry that Kushner ally Gary Cohn — a Democrat — will pressure Kushner to steer the administration toward the middle.

Thus far, Pres. Trump has tasked his daughter’s husband — a government neophyte with no previous policy or legislative experience — with solving the crisis in the Middle East and overseeing the U.S. relationships with China, Canada and Mexico. On top of that ambitious portfolio, Kushner and Cohn this week established the White House Office of American Innovation, an initiative to modernize and streamline the operations of the federal government.

“But Kushner’s status as the big-issue guru has stoked resentment among his colleagues, who question whether Kushner is capable of following through on his various commitments,” wrote Politico’s Josh Dawsey, Kenneth P. Vogel and Alex Isenstadt. “And some colleagues complain that his dabbling in myriad issues and his tendency to walk in and out of meetings have complicated efforts to instill more order and organization into the chaotic administration. These people also say Kushner can be a shrewd self promoter, knowing how to take credit — and shirk blame — whenever it suits him.”

“He’s saving the government and the Middle East at the same time,” one administration official quipped to Politico.

Kushner is arguably the president’s closest adviser — the last person to speak to him each day and also the administration’s hatchet man. During the 2016 campaign, it fell to Kushner to fire campaign managers Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort. It was also Kushner who axed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) from the Trump transition team.

Lewandowski in particular is rumored to be pursuing a vendetta against Kushner, planting anonymous stories about the president’s son-in-law with conservative media outlets. Other campaign officials who didn’t get hired by the administration are reportedly aligned with Lewandowski and believe that Kushner is insufficiently conservative.

Far-right radio host Mark Levin has attacked Kushner before, calling him “some 32-year-old, liberal Democrat kid out of New York.” Other neoconservatives and Zionist Israel supporters said they had high hopes for Kushner because he is an Orthodox Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, but thus far they say he has disappointed them.

A source told Politico that “those hopes mostly have been supplanted by ‘deep concern that Jared is not the person we thought he was — that this guy who is supposed to be good at everything is totally out of his depth.’”

Kushner himself remains breezily confident, telling associates not to fret over the Russia investigation because it “isn’t going anywhere” and assuring others that his father-in-law’s administration will get past its early stumbles.

“But if it doesn’t,” Politico said, “allies and aides say, one thing is clear: the president will surely find someone else to take the blame. And Kushner will likely be delivering the bad news.”

Kushner was the subject of Republican ire in the wake of the president’s failed healthcare bill after he and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump left Washington for a ski-trip to Aspen, CO. This week it came out that the presidential son-in-law is wanted for testimony in connection to an FBI investigation of a bank implicated in Russian money laundering.

Trump could learn a lot from his mistakes. He won’t.

By Eugene Robinson Opinion writer March 27 at 7:43 PM

 

Last week’s health-care fiasco could end up being a positive experience for President Trump if he learns a few obvious lessons. Spoiler alert: He won’t.

The first thing that should dawn on Trump is that the warring Republican factions in Congress have multiple agendas, none of which remotely resembles his own. This is why the bill that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was forced to withdraw on Friday — the abominable American Health Care Act — made such a cruel mockery of Trump’s expansive campaign promises.

A “populist” president who promised health insurance “for everybody” ended up supporting legislation that would have taken away coverage from 24 million people. Many, if not most, of the victims would have been working-class voters — the “forgotten Americans” Trump claimed to champion. Now that he has time, maybe he will actually read the bill (or have someone summarize it for him) and realize how truly awful it was.

You don’t have to be a policy wonk to recognize that replacing income-based subsidies with less generous across-the-board tax credits would mean a net transfer of resources from poorer people to wealthier people. That’s just fine with Ryan and the “mainstream” House Republicans who hung in there with legislation that Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater would have considered extreme.

For members of the Freedom Caucus, however, the bill didn’t go nearly far enough. They wanted to strip away the requirement that health insurance policies cover eventualities such as maternity, hospitalization, emergency care, mental illness — basically, all the reasons anyone would need insurance in the first place. These ultra-radicals believe health care is like any other product and the free market should be allowed to work its magic. To them, it’s irrelevant that the question is not who buys the latest flat-screen television and who doesn’t, but who lives and who dies.

As Trump lobbied House Republicans to support the AHCA, according to The Post, he kept asking aides, “Is this really a good bill?” They assured him it was, but on some level, he must have known the truth was an emphatic no. What happened to those fabled Trumpian instincts?

The president let himself be convinced by Ryan that health care would be an easy win. That should make him wary of going down another garden path with a speaker who can’t even marshal his own chamber, let alone produce important legislation with a chance of making it through the Senate. Yet Trump seems ready to make the same mistake with tax reform.

Note to the president: If Ryan is saying “trust me on this one,” don’t.

The same dynamic is shaping up. House Republicans will all agree on tax cuts, just as they all agreed that the Affordable Care Act should be repealed. The Freedom Caucus, which can only be emboldened by its recent triumph, will make extreme demands. Ryan will accommodate many of them. The end result will be legislation that is more about ideology than policy. The wealthy will benefit enormously, the middle class hardly at all, and the working class will suffer.

Such a bill could never win 60 votes in the Senate. Only more modest changes that don’t balloon the deficit qualify for the “reconciliation” process under which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can pass legislation by simple majority — and if just three Republicans balk, even such a limited bill would fail.

Trump should wonder why someone on his staff isn’t explaining all of this to him and trying to come up with an appropriate strategy. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and budget director Mick Mulvaney were supposed to know how to get things done in Washington. White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon reportedly tried to bully Freedom Caucus members, who instead seem to have stiffened their resolve. Advisers Jared Kushner and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, went skiing.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval, as measured by Gallup, stood Monday at 36 percent — a stunning new low. The financial markets seem a bit shaky as investors worry about the administration’s competence. If this were a business, the chief executive would be reading up on Chapter 11.

During the campaign, Trump was nothing if not headstrong. Yet in office he has let others lead — and is getting nowhere. He could still change course. He could get rid of the sycophantic aides who spend so much time blaming each other. He could focus on parts of his agenda, such as infrastructure, that have popular support, including among Democrats.

But that would mean acknowledging his mistakes thus far. Don’t hold your breath.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.

Dear Donald, you were just played for a sucker

Donald, This I Will Tell You

By Maureen Dowd MARCH 25, 2017

Donald, you said you could shake up Washington and make it work again. Instead, you’re the one who got worked over. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Dear Donald,

We’ve known each other a long time, so I think I can be blunt.

You know how you said at campaign rallies that you did not like being identified as a politician?

Don’t worry. No one will ever mistake you for a politician.

After this past week, they won’t even mistake you for a top-notch negotiator.

I was born here. The first image in my memory bank is the Capitol, all lit up at night. And my primary observation about Washington is this: Unless you’re careful, you end up turning into what you started out scorning.

And you, Donald, are getting a reputation as a sucker. And worse, a sucker who is a tool of the D.C. establishment.

Your whole campaign was mocking your rivals and the D.C. elite, jawing about how Americans had turned into losers, with our bad deals and open borders and the Obamacare “disaster.”

And you were going to fly in on your gilded plane and fix all that in a snap.

You mused that a good role model would be Ronald Reagan. As you saw it, Reagan was a big, good-looking guy with a famous pompadour; he had also been a Democrat and an entertainer. But Reagan had one key quality that you don’t have: He knew what he didn’t know.

You both resembled Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloons, floating above the nitty-gritty and focusing on a few big thoughts. But President Reagan was confident enough to accept that he needed experts below, deftly maneuvering the strings.

You’re just careering around on your own, crashing into buildings and losing altitude, growling at the cameras and spewing nasty conspiracy theories, instead of offering a sunny smile, bipartisanship, optimism and professionalism.

You promised to get the best people around you in the White House, the best of the best. In fact, “best” is one of your favorite words.

Instead, you dragged that motley skeleton crew into the White House and let them create a feuding, leaking, belligerent, conspiratorial, sycophantic atmosphere. Instead of a smooth, classy operator like James Baker, you have a Manichean anarchist in Steve Bannon.

You knew the Republicans were full of hot air. They haven’t had to pass anything in a long time, and they have no aptitude for governing. To paraphrase an old Barney Frank line, asking the Republicans to govern is like asking Frank to judge the Miss America contest — “If your heart’s not in it, you don’t do a very good job.”

You knew that Paul Ryan’s vaunted reputation as a policy wonk was fake news. Republicans have been running on repealing and replacing Obamacare for years and they never even bothered to come up with a valid alternative.

And neither did you, despite all your promises to replace Obamacare with “something terrific” because you wanted everyone to be covered.

Instead, you sold the D.O.A. bill the Irish undertaker gave you as though it were a luxury condo, ignoring the fact that it was a cruel flimflam, a huge tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill. 

You were so concerned with the “win” that you forgot your “forgotten” Americans, the older, poorer people in rural areas who would be hurt by the bill.

As The Times’s chief Washington correspondent Carl Hulse put it, the G.O.P. falls into clover with a lock on the White House and both houses of Congress, and what’s the first thing it does? Slip on a banana peel. Incompetence Inc.

“They tried to sweeten the deal at the end by offering a more expensive bill with fewer health benefits, but alas, it wasn’t enough!” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau slyly tweeted.

Despite the best efforts of Bannon to act as though the whole fiasco was a clever way to bury Ryan — a man he disdains as “the embodiment of the ‘globalist-corporatist’ Republican elite,” as Gabriel Sherman put it in New York magazine — it won’t work.

And you can jump on the phone with The Times’s Maggie Haberman and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa — ignoring that you’ve labeled them the “fake media” — and act like you’re in control.

You can say that people should have waited for “Phase 2” and “Phase 3” — whatever they would have been — and that Obamacare is going to explode and that the Democrats are going to get the blame. But it doesn’t work that way. You own it now.

You’re all about flashy marketing so you didn’t notice that the bill was junk, so lame that even Republicans skittered away.

You were humiliated right out of the chute by the establishment guys who hooked you into their agenda — a massive transfer of wealth to rich people — and drew you away from your own.

You sold yourself as the businessman who could shake things up and make Washington work again.

Instead, you got worked over by the Republican leadership and the business community, who set you up to do their bidding.

That’s why they’re putting up with all your craziness about Russia and wiretapping and unending lies and rattling our allies.

They’re counting on you being a delusional dupe who didn’t even know what was in the bill because you’re sitting around in a bathrobe getting your information from wackadoodles on Fox News and then, as The Post reported, peppering aides with the query, “Is this really a good bill?”

You got played.

It took W. years to smash everything. You’re way ahead of schedule.

And I can say you’re doing badly, because I’m a columnist, and you’re not. Say hello to everybody, O.K.?

Sincerely, Maureen

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@MaureenDowd) and join me on Facebook.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 26, 2017, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Donald, This I Will Tell You. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Let's just take a moment to appreciate just how impressively epic this fail is

By unblock

republicans control the white house and both houses of congress.

they essentially campaigned on repeal of obamacare for eight solid years and claimed their victory was a mandate to do just that.

obamacare includes some taxes (on high earners), so repeal by definition includes a tax cut.

and they're in a new president's first 100 days, historically the ideal time for passing new legislation.

... and they couldn't even get it though the house, where democrats have effectively zero power, not even the filibuster power we have in the senate.

this is truly an impressively epic demonstration of incompetence, not only on donnie's part, but also on ryan and mcconnel and the entire republican (non-)leadership.

FAIL

FAIL

FAIL!!!!

The American Health Care Act Of 2017 (Trumpcare)

Republicans Staggering Supreme Court Hypocrisy

Mitch McConnell has a very very short memory. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, the hosts of The Young Turks, show you how Republicans are giant hypocrites.

“If Neil Gorsuch can’t get 60 votes in today's Senate, perhaps no Republican Supreme Court nominee can, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday.

“I haven’t seen a single Democrat … indicate they were prepared to either for cloture or to vote for him,” McConnell told reporters. “If Judge Gorsuch can’t achieve 60 votes in the Senate, could any judge appointed by a Republican president be approved with 60 or more votes in the Senate?”

The Kentucky Republican’s comments underscore just how popular Gorsuch is among Republicans amid an otherwise shaky first two months under Donald Trump’s White House. But they also expose a potentially troubling problem for the GOP: No Democrats have announced support for Gorsuch, and he needs at least eight Democratic votes.”

Chuck Todd Blasts Paul Ryan On GOP Healthcare Plan

Chuck Todd easily blasts Paul Ryan on his lies about the new GOP healthcare plan.

Advice To Democrats: Comey Has Given You Your Battle Plan On Gorsuch

Posted by Rude One

It doesn't get any easier than this, dear Democrats. You want something to rally around? You want something that can give you a principled stand against the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court? Here you go.

Today, FBI Director James "But Her Emails" Comey stated, in as plain a language as one could ask from a rat-faced ratfucker, the FBI is investigating "the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts."

Roll that around in your head for a moment. The FBI. Is investigating. Trump campaign. Russia. Coordination. Think about the fact that when the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton, the Republican National Committee declared that it "should be disqualifying for anyone seeking the presidency, a job that is supposed to begin each morning with a top secret intelligence briefing."

Put aside any snark about Trump and his inability to sit through an intelligence briefing or having intelligence. Instead, ponder the idea that the Republican Party declared Clinton unqualified for the presidency because of an FBI investigation. Not the conclusion of it. Not the finding of any criminal activity. The investigation, which, to be as fair as possible to bastards, does seem suspicious as hell in any situation.

Also today, the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch got under way in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under normal circumstances, Gorsuch would just be a garden variety conservative cockknob, but these are not normal circumstances since Merrick Garland should have been confirmed last year.

But, as we know, the GOP is made up of syphilitic lepers who spread their diseases to democracy every chance they get with their scabby genitals. So they created a new rule: No Supreme Court confirmations in the last year before an election. It makes no sense at all. And Democrats should have gone to the motherfuckin' barricades on that, but, alas, they did not, because they are Democrats. So here we are with Gorsuch.

So here's a chance at redemption, dear, dumb, defeated Democrats in the Senate. A simple plan for a vile time. It goes like this: You cannot consider the Supreme Court nominations of Donald Trump until he is cleared by the FBI (and any other U.S. intelligence agency investigating him) of possible collusion with a foreign power to affect the presidential election. The Gorsuch hearings should be shut down until that time. In fact, you should say that you don't believe anyone nominated for a lifetime appointment by Trump should be considered by the Senate until the investigation is done, but you don't have the filibuster to use on other positions.

Go even further. State that anyone who does believe that Trump's SCOTUS nominees should be confirmed is, in essence, also colluding with the Russians, if the FBI discovers Trump has done so. Ask GOP senators if they're willing to take that risk.

See how easy this is? Take the playing field away from the Republicans. Force them to react. Force them to own Trump. Force them to eat his failure and choke on his corruption. Democrats have a stronger anti-confirmation case now than Republicans ever did with Obama.

At the end of the day, they're probably gonna nuke the SCOTUS filibuster rule if Democrats don't roll over and offer to let the GOP fuck them. So make it hurt. Make them just this side of traitors and make them fuckin' sweat awaiting the outcome of the investigation to see if they're nudged across the line.

All you gotta do is stop fucking colluding, too, Democrats.

Paul Ryan dreamed about screwing over poor people back in college

"So, the health care entitlements are the big, big, big drivers of our debt. There are three. Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare. Two out of three are going through Congress right now. So, Medicaid—sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate. We’ve been dreaming of this since you and I were drinking out of a keg."



http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/03/17/paul_ryan_s_college_dream_was_to_kick_poor_people_off_medicaid.html

Trump Is The Biggest Failure In History As His Disapproval Rating Skyrockets To 58%

Donald Trump has set a record that has never been reached before in the history of polling as his disapproval rating has reached 58% - two months into his time in office.

By Jason Easley 

Donald Trump has set a record that disapproval rating that has never been reached before in the history of polling as his disapproval rating has reached 58% two months into his time in office.

Here is the latest Gallup Daily Tracking Poll of Trump’s approval rating:


Trump’s approval rating has plunged to 37% as his disapproval rating has soared to 58%.

Never in US history has a president been this unpopular so early in his first term. Trump has lost 2 points in approval and gained three disapproval points since the CBO revealed that 24 million people would lose their health insurance under Trumpcare.

Trump has the worst job approval numbers since Gallup began tracking presidents in 1945. At this same point during his first term, President Obama’s job approval rating was in the low 60's. George W. Bush’s approval rating was in the low 50's. It took Ronald Reagan a year to have an approval rating as bad as Trump’s, and it was a year into Richard Nixon’s second term before he hit the low that Trump is at.

The practical political lesson for Democrats is that they should not shy away from linking Congressional Republicans to their unpopular president. What should be frightening for elected Republicans is that things will probably get much worse for Trump in the future. The first few months of his term are supposed to be the most popular point of his presidency.

How low can Donald Trump go? It is possible that he may set records for unpopularity that will stand for decades.

Trump promised to make America great, but instead, he has been a complete failure as president.

Rachel Maddow Terrifies Trump By Warning That The Tax Return Leaked To Her Won’t Be The Last

Rachel Maddow had a terrifying message for Donald Trump. The 2005 tax return that was leaked to her may be the first, but it won't be the last.

By Jason Easley



Maddow said, “The greater concern. The worry that this president may be financially beholden to an individual, to an institution, to a country, and now that he’s president we won’t know if he tries to use the resources and power of our country to pay off that entity to whom he is beholden. We can’t know any of that without getting his tax returns. That’s why presidents release their tax returns. That’s why there will continue to be unrelenting pressure to find Donald Trump’s tax returns, to expose Donald Trump’s tax returns, and that pressure will remain every single day that he is president and until he releases them that pressure will never let up, and that’s why somebody has decided to leak this portion of his 2005 tax return, which is how and why we got it tonight, and I am sure it is only the start, but it’s a start.”

The news isn’t what is on Trump’s 1040 from 12 years ago. The big story is that a tax return was published. Every news organization in the United States and others around the world have been trying to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns.

The fact that somebody was able to get one of Trump’s returns out to the public suggests that there are more of them out there, and it is only a matter of time before others reveal the secrets that this president has worked so hard to keep hidden.

Maddow got a 1040, but eventually, a whole tax return or returns will be made public. Trump isn’t worried about the details of what Rachel Maddow made public. What terrifies Trump is that his tax return secrecy has been shattered and the real damage is yet to come.

Trump Freaks Out After Rachel Maddow Shows His Tax Returns To The Country

By Sean Colarossi on Tue, Mar 14th, 2017 at 10:22 pm

Trump said Rachel Maddow's reporting on Tuesday night was "totally illegal." 

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, with the help of Daily Beast contributor David Cay Johnston, revealed a portion of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns on Tuesday night – and the White House is freaking out about it.

In a statement released a short time ago, the White House said this:

You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.

Before being elected President, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world with a responsibility to his company, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required. That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million dollars even after taking into account large scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150 million dollars, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes and this illegally published return proves just that. Despite this substantial income figure and tax paid, it is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns. The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the President will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.

First of all, with or without this exclusive reporting by Maddow, her ratings would have been just fine. As Jason Easley wrote yesterday, her audience is rapidly growing and even beat Fox News last week among key viewers.

What was particularly striking, though, is that the White House accused Maddow of breaking the law by revealing this portion of Trump’s tax documents. Or, as they called her reporting, “totally illegal.”

But as Maddow pointed out during Tuesday’s program, sharing the returns – which were lawfully obtained – is part of a journalist’s first amendment rights, though we probably shouldn’t expect Trump to know anything about those since he has spent nearly every day of his first two months in office either attacking the press or avoiding them.

Still, Maddow fought back:

“For the record, the first amendment gives us the right to publish this return. It is not illegally published, nor are we fake,” Maddow said.

It’s clear that the MSNBC star hit a nerve in the Trump White House by revealing something that no one in the media has yet been able to – his tax returns, even if it was just a portion.

Perhaps the president is just angry because he’s afraid this is only the beginning of what could be more leaks into his financial background, which could show more than Trump’s earnings – but where the money came from.

Rachel Maddow Shatters Trump’s World By Exposing His Tax Returns On Live TV

By Sean Colarossi on Tue, Mar 14th, 2017 at 9:45 pm

Maddow's exclusive reporting on Tuesday finally gave the American people a much-deserved glimpse behind the curtain when it comes to Trump's finances.

Rachel Maddow’s show on Tuesday night was one for the ages, as she shattered Donald Trump’s world by revealing a portion of his 2005 tax returns on live national television at a time when her audience is larger than it’s ever been.

Maddow revealed just some of Trump’s tax documents from 2005, which were acquired by David Cay Johnston.

Video:



The tax returns Maddow exposed on Tuesday showed that Trump made $150 million in 2005 and paid $36.5 million (or 24 percent) in taxes when those in his income bracket were required to pay 35 percent that year.

As Johnston also noted on MSNBC, Trump made $418,000 a day in 2005.

Unfortunately, while the documents showed how much Trump earned in income and paid in taxes, it still doesn’t show the source of that income – which is the most important part of this story, due to Trump’s questionable ties to Russia.

Throughout the campaign and during his first two months in the White House, Trump and his team have stubbornly refused to release any of his tax returns – unprecedented for a presidential candidate and, now, president.

Maddow’s exclusive reporting on Tuesday finally gave the American people a much-deserved glimpse behind the curtain when it comes to Trump’s finances. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of more to come.