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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
After the Comey firing and the Russia intel leak, the I’m-taking-one-for-the-team ship has sailed.
By Rick WilsonMay 18 at 6:00 AM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
I'm over 70 yrs old. Being a citizen of these United States has been my good fortune and privilege.
We've had our finer moments, and our embarrassments. I've spend my
lifetime advocating for "the little guy" and for a government that
exists for our collective good. I've had elected representatives that
performed well and with honor, and reps who used the office for the sole
purpose of enriching themselves and their rich friends. I thought I'd
seen it all.
I was wrong. Lady Liberty is still holding her hand high but I
don't see how. 30+ years ago we opened the doors to "conservative talk
radio" and now we've progressed to open hatred in the streets.
We are a
nation that elected a buffoon whose idea of political discourse is in
sentences short enough to fit on a bumper sticker. Even if we drum them
all out of public view, it will take generations of hard work to simply
regain the little bit of ground we gained in my lifetime before
everything started falling apart again.
We worked SO hard to turn our local police departments into a group
of people who protect and serve rather than turn the fire hoses and
attack dogs on citizens exercising their constitutional rights of free
assembly. We made so little headway and now we are to a point where the
police all over this country feel free to beat up women, shoot unarmed
children with no consequence whatsoever.
Donald Trump embodies everything that was ever wrong in America -
well with humanity in general. He is all 7 of the deadly sins. The
sheer pettiness, greed, sloth, gluttony, wastefulness, frivolousness,
disrespect. Just the fact our society gave such a person the limelight
at all is an embarrassment. But to exalt him to the highest office in
the land is beyond all understanding.
His presidency underscores the fact we, as a group, have had our
priorities all wrong for decades. President Obama did his damnedest to
try and pull us back to some sort of sanity, but we would have none of
it. Pigs at the trough under Whistle ass got put on a diet, and now put a
man in office that is literally the rich flipping us all the bird.
I really don't know where I'm going with all this....except to say that I'm heartbroken for America and what she's become.
That statue of a white man dangling from a crane is of Jefferson Davis,
who was the president of the defeated nation of racist traitors known as
the Confederate States of America. For all the world, it looks like a
well-deserved lynching.
His monument
in New Orleans used to be on the median (or "neutral ground," in New
Orleans parlance) where Canal Street meets the still-stupidly-named
Jefferson Davis Parkway. New Orleans is in the midst of taking down four
monuments to the Confederacy because, apparently, it only takes 150
years and a few massacres to realize that celebrating the legacy of the
enemies of the United States is fucking ridiculous, especially when
those enemies were fighting to keep slaves and the majority of the
city's citizens are African Americans. Seem kind of fucking obvious,
doesn't it? Would you want to walk by a statue of someone who wanted to
keep the literal rape of your ancestors legal?
The slave rapist supporters turned out,
too, flying their loser flag of rapists and slave owners and poor dumb asses who just went along with the rapists and slave owners. Or, you
know, Trump voters. Because blah, blah, blah heritage, history, and who
the fuck cares. Whatever their reasons are for keeping the monuments
up, they're wrong.
As for what will be done with the statues and plaques and pedestals, for
now, they will go into storage. After Davis, they'll be taking down
General Beauregard and Robert E. Lee, both scum fucking pigs, no matter
what "noble" justification Lee claimed to have. They might end up at a
museum to contextualize them better than they are now.
But I've got an idea. Get a giant furnace on site. Melt down the statues
right in front of the protesters. Then pour the liquid into cock-shaped
molds. When they cool and harden, hand them out to the white
supremacists, neo-Confederates, and one-toothed yahoos there and tell
'em to shove it up their assholes and go fuck themselves with it.
Donald Trump made good on a promise to investigate
alleged vote fraud with an executive order on Tuesday, White House
officials told NBC News.
The order will establish a commission to review alleged voter fraud
and voter suppression throughout the American election system. Vice
President Mike Pence will head the group, called the "Presidential
Commission on Election Integrity." Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach
will serve as vice chair.
The panel will be tasked with studying "vulnerabilities" in the
voting system, as well as potential impacts on "improper voting,
fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting."
As maybe a lot of you know, Kris Kobach is the infamous Trump
adviser behind "Interstate Crosscheck", which helped take many minority
voters of the rolls to ensure a Trump victory.
This "commission" is just a trick to worsen the integrity of the
voting system and making sure that Republicans are elected in spite of
their recent fall from grace...
I will write my senators and rep about this, but this doesn't bode well at all...who can stop this??! I have no idea...
