Texans Receive Notices To Sell Or Have Their Land Taken

By Rika Christensen on March 15, 2017 1:44 am

Texas landowners along the U.S.-Mexico border have begun receiving notices from the federal government saying that they’re coming to either buy, or take, parcels of land for Trump’s pointless border wall. According to the Texas Observer, landowners are receiving “Declarations of Taking” notices that offer a price for the piece that the government wants. If the landowners refuse that, then they may see those parts of their property taken via eminent domain.

One landowner, Yvette Salinas, got her notice back in January. She’d been dreading it for a while because of George W. Bush’s focus on a border fence. Under Obama, she’d been able to relax a bit because he focused on patrolling and monitoring the border in ways that didn’t include taking land and building a wall.

Now, with Trump in office, this shit has just gotten real. Whether any of these preparations happened while Obama was still in office or not, it’s Trump who is pushing the wall forward as quickly as he can. It’s one of his focal points, and it will be his government that buys up or takes the land.

The introduction in Salinas’ letter reads like this:

“The United States of America is acquiring property along its border with Mexico in order to construct a fence and related improvements designed to secure the border, as required by the Secure Fence Act of 2006.”

They offered Salinas and her family $2,900 for 1.2 acres of land – the same amount for the same land that the government offered her under George W. Bush years earlier. The tiny community in which she lives—Los Ebanos—lies entirely within the floodplain of the Rio Grande. That land is protected by a treaty with Mexico that forbids the building of structures that could force floodwaters into other communities, and has been an obstacle towards border wall construction.

Under Trump, though, Los Ebanos seems to have become a focal point. The government has already completed surveys and planning for a wall there. Despite increasing problems with costs, the fact that crossings are down, and the fact that Republicans are voicing their discomfort with the idea, Trump keeps hammering the wall as the way to secure the border.

It’s impossibly stupid. People who live along the border prefer the technological surveillance and the presence of the U.S. Border Patrol to a wall because they believe that’s more effective and costs a hell of a lot less. And they don’t have to give up pieces of land that have been in their families for generations for that.

They also know people will still cross whether there’s a wall or not.

Salinas doesn’t want to sell that bit of land but she doesn’t know what to do. The community doesn’t want to allow the wall to be built through there, either, but neither can they afford to have the U.S. government sue them, and they risk having their land taken without compensation if they try to fight.

Rachel Maddow Stands Tall And Refuses To Back Down When Threatened By Donald Trump

By Sarah Jones on Tue, Mar 14th, 2017 at 10:46 pm

Rachel Maddow refused to bow to Donald Trump's baseless threats. After the Trump White House had threatened her, the MSNBC host reported on a leak of Trump's 2005 tax return. 

Maddow said, “The White House confirmed to us tonight that this return is real. They threatened us and said it is illegal for us to publish it. It is not illegal for us to publish it.”

It’s true that the unauthorized release of federal tax returns is a criminal offense, however Maddow argued on the air that releasing the tax returns was a matter of public interest, given that every single president has done so since Nixon except for this one, who just so happens to be under scrutiny for his foreign ties. Thus MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right.

Trump promised to release his tax returns if elected, and then once elected had his surrogates announce that no one cared. Polls disagree with the Trump administration’s claims on the matter of his tax returns. Americans think they do matter and they want to see them.

“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” and said it was “totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns,” a statement from the White House charged oddly, given that Rachel Maddow’s ratings are skyrocketing right now given her coverage of Trump’s Russia scandal.

Maddow discussed a 2 page 1040 tax filing said to be Trump’s and confirmed by the White House, produced by David Cay Johnston, who noted that it could have been Trump himself who leaked the documents to him because Trump has a habit of doing that.

The Trump White House picked the worst enemy in Rachel Maddow. They seem to have a real feel for making enemies of media outlets – like the New York Times and Washington Post – that will not back down to them.

Rachel Maddow is the last person Donald Trump should want to get into any kind of pissing match with, and if he’s looking for a “liberal” to kick around, an easy foil if you will, he picked the wrong one. Maddow is way, way, way too smart and knowledgeable to be intimidated by Donald Trump’s White House.

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.

Campaign Flashback

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INDIVISIBLE

A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR RESISTING THE TRUMP AGENDA

Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.

Donald Trump is the biggest popular-vote loser in history to ever call himself President. In spite of the fact that he has no mandate, he will attempt to use his congressional majority to reshape America in his own racist, authoritarian, and corrupt image. If progressives are going to stop this, we must stand indivisibly opposed to Trump and the Members of Congress (MoCs) who would do his bidding. Together, we have the power to resist — and we have the power to win.

We know this because we’ve seen it before. The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party. We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own MoCs to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism— and they won.

We believe that protecting our values, our neighbors, and ourselves will require mounting a similar resistance to the Trump agenda — but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance,
and fairness. Trump is not popular. He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.

To this end, the following chapters offer a step-by-step guide for individuals, groups, and organizations looking to replicate the Tea Party’s success in getting Congress to listen to a small, vocal, dedicated group of constituents. The guide is intended to be equally useful for stiffening Democratic spines and weakening pro-Trump Republican resolve.

We believe that the next four years depend on Americans across the country standing indivisible against the Trump agenda. We believe that buying into false promises or accepting partial concessions will only further empower Trump to victimize us and our neighbors. We hope that this guide will provide those who share that belief with useful tools to make Congress listen.

https://www.indivisibleguide.com/web 

Talk to your doctor to see if this medicine may help with symptoms of T.I.A.D.

Trump likely fired US Attorney Bharara to sabotage ‘troublesome’ investigations

By David Ferguson

Saturday evening, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin appeared by phone to discuss the firing of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara with anchor Ana Cabrera.

Mediaite.com said that Toobin believes Bharara was axed because he was pursuing lines of investigation that would prove “troublesome” to the Trump administration.

“The question arises,” Toobin said, “Is there something either that the Trump administration doesn’t want Preet Bharara to pursue, or are there things he knows that he might disclose later that could be troublesome for the Trump administration?”

Bharara was fired by Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions after he refused to comply with a Justice Department order for 46 U.S. Attorneys appointed by the Obama administration to vacate their posts immediately.

The call for the resignations came less than 24 hours after Fox News host and indefatigable Trump booster Sean Hannity called for a “purge” of federal officials appointed by the Obama administration.

Bharara has a reputation as a Wall Street enforcer and was looking into criminal allegations against Fox News. In 2012, Bharara’s office successfully extradited and prosecuted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was known as “the merchant of death.”

He is believed to have been investigating connections between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government. In his statement after the firing, Bharara said, “I did not resign. Moments ago I was fired. Being the US Attorney in SDNY will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life.”

Prominent US Attorney Preet Bharara says he was 'fired' after not resigning

https://gma.yahoo.com/justice-department-seeks-resignations-46-obama-era-us-173303853--abc-news-topstories.html

'I Might As Well Have Not Voted': Details Of GOP Health Plan Leave Trump Voter Appalled

By Brad Reed

Donald Trump this week signaled his support for the House Republicans’ new health care bill — but it looks like that legislation is going over like a lead balloon with his base.

Not only are the Trump diehards at Breitbart News bashing the plan as “Obamacare 2.0,” but even some casual voters are worried about the president’s plan.

ABC News this week talked with North Carolina resident Martha Brawley, a 55 year old woman who cast a ballot for the first time in her life for Donald Trump. Brawley says that she voted for the president on the hopes that he could bring down the cost of health care — but she’s been appalled so far by what she’s seen from the Republican Congress.

“I voted for Trump hoping that he would change the insurance so I could get good health care,” she told ABC News. “I might as well have not voted.”

Brawley was particularly upset when she learned that, under Trumpcare, she would receive a paltry $3,500 tax credit to buy insurance. At the moment, she gets a federal subsidy of around $8,688 to buy insurance from Obamacare.

“All these people who talk in politics have insurance,” she told ABC News. “People like me don’t.”

One Brief Example Of The Insane Hypocrisy Of The GOP On The Health Care Bill

Posted by Rude One

It's really one of the weirdest things in the American Health Care Act, the bullshit bill that bullshit Republicans rolled out so their bullshit president could declare that he was St. Donald fighting the Affordable Care Act dragon. From pages 10-16, the bill's authors lay out the conditions by which MegaMillions and Powerball and other winners would have to pay for their own damn health insurance. That new part takes up a tenth of the length of the entire 66 page bill that escaped Mario Kart character Sean Spicer jigged around and pointed at for its brevity, contrasting it with the monstrously huge stack of pages that make up Obamacare (yeah, the black guy's was bigger and you could do more with it).

And the lottery section is just bizarrely precise in talking about the conditions when a lottery winner wouldn't be able to get Medicaid: "a State shall, in determining such eligibility, include such winnings or income (as applicable) as income received— (I) in the month in which such winnings or income (as applicable) is received if the amount of such winnings or income is less than $80,000; (II) over a period of 2 months if the amount of such winnings or income (as applicable) is greater than or equal to $80,000 but less than $90,000; (III) over a period of 3 months if the amount of such winnings or income (as applicable) is greater than or equal to $90,000 but..." You get the idea.

Obsessively detailed, no?

This is easy to mock in a "God, how fucking dumb are they?" kind of way. Except, instead, looking at why this language is in the bill reveals something just a little more sinister about the hypocrisy under which the GOP is operating to commit this health care fuckery.

One of the reasons that Republicans are desperately trying to cram the bill through like a limp cock on an unlubed asshole is because the Congressional Budget Office hasn't finished its scoring of the bill to see what its effects might be. When the CBO is done, it will likely reveal that the AHCA is, as previously mentioned, a bullshit bill that will cost a ton of money and kick millions of people off health insurance. Republicans in the House, at least, are trying to maintain the illusion that they're not just complete twat mites who want to straight up murder people to give the wealthy a tax cut, but, yeah, that's pretty much what's going on.

A cynical reader might be thinking, "Well, sure, everyone loves the CBO when it gives them the numbers they want. What's the big deal?" But that's not quite cynical enough.

See, the lottery exclusion up there was actually first brought up in 2016 because, apparently, there are enough winners to make a big damn difference: "Using the typical per capita cost for Medicaid adults, this provision would reduce direct spending by $475 million over the 2016-2026 period." You know who came up with that nearly half-billion dollars in savings because of a seemingly odd provision? The Congressional Budget Office.

That's the depth of hypocrisy occurring here. The Republicans need the CBO's figures to write their goddamn bill, but they are running scared from the CBO when it comes to the final bill's effects on Americans. That's the incredible dickishness involved here.

Trump Fires All 46 Remaining US Attorneys Out Of Fear That Obama's Out To Get Him

By Jason Easley 

Less than a week after President Trump made his allegation that President Obama wiretapped him, he has fired all 46 remaining US attorneys that were appointed by Obama. 

The New York Times reported:

Sarah Isgur Flores, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said in an email that all remaining holdover United States attorneys had been asked to resign, leaving their deputy United States attorneys, who are career officials, in place in an acting capacity.

“As was the case in prior transitions, many of the United States Attorneys nominated by the previous administration already have left the Department of Justice,” she said in the email. “The Attorney General has now asked the remaining 46 presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys to tender their resignations to ensure a uniform transition.”

Before Trump made his wiretap allegations against the former president, he blamed Obama for the leaks that have plagued his administration.

The mass firings come less than a day after Sean Hannity viewer Trump watched the Fox News host call for a purge of everyone who worked against him in government. Fox News and conservative websites are fueling Trump’s paranoid mentality.

It is not unusual for presidents to replace the US attorneys with their own appointees, but most presidents outside Clinton in 1993, do this gradually. They also don’t gut the attorneys at the Justice Department days after accusing the former administration of wiretapping them.

The Friday massacre style dismissal reeks of Trump administration paranoia. The Trump administration believes that holdovers from the previous administration are the problem.

The mass firing isn’t unprecedented, but it a sign of the mounting instability within with the White House.

Moscow's work didn't end on Nov. 8, 2016

Rachel Maddow Says Helping Trump Become POTUS Was Only The Beginning Of Russia’s Operation
 

Maddow says there is growing evidence that Moscow's work didn't end on Nov. 8, 2016 – that was only the opening act. 

By Sean Colarossi 

The MSNBC star said events that have unfolded during Trump’s time in office show that “Russia may now be reaping its reward, maybe getting what it wants out of the United States government as payback for running the successful op that helped install the new head of the American government.”



During the opening of her show, Maddow said that it’s one thing for the Trump campaign and its officials to meet and seemingly work with the Russians during the campaign – but it’s becoming apparent that the election may have just been the opening act of Moscow’s operation.

The new developments that Wikileaks – the same folks that worked with the Russians to expose hacked DNC emails last year – released a trove of classified CIA material is further proof, Maddow says, that the Russians are likely still trying to meddle in U.S. affairs at the direction of Vladimir Putin. Instead of influencing an election, the goal now seems to be disrupting and undermining U.S. intelligence agencies.

Like usual, there is a connection between the latest WikiLeaks release and the President of the United States.

As Maddow pointed out, Trump supporter Nigel Farage, who recently had dinner with Trump, met with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange just two days after the classified CIA information was reportedly released by the organization. When asked why he was visiting Assange, Farage said he “couldn’t remember.”

While the focus is rightfully on Russia’s involvement in last year’s election and what connection the Russians had with the Trump campaign, it’s also important to consider that Moscow now may be influencing our government. In other words, the election may have just been the beginning.

Maddow brings that point home:

The Russian government attacked our election. The Russian government was in contact with multiple Trump campaign sources while they were doing it. Russian nemeses in the American government – U.S. State Department, CIA – are not faring well since Donald Trump came to power. Is the operation that Russia started during the campaign, is it over? Or are they still running it? Are we still in this now?

It’s unsettling to consider the possibility that Russia, after helping put Donald Trump in the White House, is still influencing U.S. affairs. But there is mounting evidence that Moscow’s work didn’t end on Nov. 8, 2016 – that was only the beginning.

Rednecked, Racist Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Won't Rule Out Using Mafia Law To Go After Legal Marijuana

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/attorney-general-sessions-rule-out-using-mafia-law-go-after-legal-marijuana

Bernie Sanders rips ‘phony billionaire’ Donald Trump: ‘We have a president who is a pathological liar’

By Travis Gettys      

Bernie Sanders (Good Morning America)

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) accused President Donald Trump of lying in an effort to undermine democracy and gather authoritarian powers for himself.

“What he wants, I think, is to end up as leader of a nation which has moved in a significant degree toward authoritarianism where the president of the United States has extraordinary powers, far more so than our Constitution has provided for or the values of the American people support,” Sanders told The Guardian.

Sanders pointed to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the chairman of the House Science Committee, who urged Americans to get “unvarnished” news directly from the president instead of trusting the media.

“That is unprecedented in American history,” Sanders said. “George Bush was a very conservative president, I opposed him every single day. But George Bush did not operate outside of mainstream American political values.”

Sanders faulted the Democratic Party for ignoring the economic displacement of the working class to focus on Wall Street and liberal elites, which he said allowed a “phony billionaire” to win election to the White House.

“There needs to be a fundamental acknowledgement that the model of the Democratic party has been a horrific failure — no ifs, buts and maybes,” Sanders said. “Democrats have lost over 900 legislative seats in states all over this country. There are states where there is virtually no Democratic party at all. When an election takes place the Democrats can’t even put up a candidate for the US Senate.

That’s how pathetic it is.”

Those failures have left the Republican Party as the last defense against Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, Sanders said.

“These are very scary times for the people of the United States and, because the Unites States is the most powerful country on Earth, for the whole word,” he said. “The bad news, the very bad news is that we have a president who is a pathological liar.”

Paul Ryan: "Did You Know Insurance Works Like Insurance?"

Posted by Rude One

Blithering ass pimple Paul Ryan, a man who looks like he's perpetually contemplating how he can get away with getting fucked by a horse dick, said one of the stupidest things anyone in politics has said recently, and that's even counting every word out of Donald Trump's dumb, leathery, old man mouth.

Using the filmstrip of the damned that is PowerPoint, Ryan attempted to explain what is so bad about the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate, and, in doing so, demonstrated that you can make anything seem sinister with a colorful pie chart.

"The fatal conceit of Obamacare is that we’re just gonna make everybody buy our health insurance at the federal government level. Young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older, sicker people. So the young, healthy person’s going to be made to buy healthcare, and they’re gonna pay for the person, you know, who gets breast cancer in her 40's, or gets heart disease in his 50's," Ryan said.

You following that so far? Now let's have some motherfuckin' pie: "So take a look at this chart. The red slice here are what I would call people with pre-existing conditions, people who have real healthcare problems. The blue is the rest of the people in the individual market, that’s the market where people don’t get health insurance with their jobs, or they buy it themselves. [For the record, the blue is about 80% of the pie] The whole idea of Obamacare is the people in the blue side pay for the people on the red side. The people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a death spiral."

In other words, the insurance works, well, just like fuckin' insurance works. Exactly like insurance works. Every kind of insurance. Your car insurance? Homeowner's? Yep. But, hell, let's put insurance aside for a moment.

By Ryan's reasoning, there is no reason for there even to be a society, let alone a government. Some of you don't have children and you pay property taxes, which, in most states, goes to fund schools, which you don't use because, hey, you don't have any fuckin' children.

Jesus fuckballs, this is even more of a scam than health insurance because there's a good chance you're gonna go to a doctor some day. If you never have kids, you never take advantage of the school system. Why the fuck should you have to pay for it?

You know why we pay for schools for other people's kids? Because that's what the fuck you do or your entire society turns to shit (unless we start sending kids back to work all those coal mine jobs that Trump has promised). And that's why you pay for other people's health care. Because if you don't, you will end up paying, through emergency room visits, lost productivity, and more.

My insurance that I've paid during this relatively healthy time of my life is a hedge against the time when I get cancer from the soon-to-be poisoned water or have a heart attack from watching cock knobs like Ryan attempt to explain why the basic model for the existence of insurance is wrong. I'm not gonna forego insurance because I'm paying for someone's chemo now. What a fuckin' tool I'd be.

And, look, we shouldn't even be talking about fuckin' health insurance. We should be talking about a national health care system that eliminates the profiteering corporations. But we're Americans, and, goddammit, we want people to suffer because we think it's better that people have a fantasy idea of "freedom." Motherfucker, we have jobs and shit to do. And Ryan wants you to take the time to figure out how to get the best price on that stent surgery that you need. That's not freedom. That's fucking with people's lives and making them believe they are free when they are just slaves in your chains of market forces.

Towards the end of his TED-talk from hell, Ryan gave away the game, the real reason why the House GOP is attempting this nonsense: "We, as Republicans, have been waiting seven years to do this. We, as Republicans, who fought the creation of this law and accurately predicted that it would not work, ran for office in 2010, in 2012, in 2014 and in 2016 on a promise that we would -- if given the ability, we would repeal and replace this law. How many people running for Congress and the Senate did you hear say that? How many times did you hear President Donald Trump, when he was candidate Donald Trump, say that? This is the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing Obamacare. The time is here. The time is now. This is the moment. And this is the closest this will ever happen."

We're all just victims of a tautology that has ensnared the GOP. They swore up and down that they would repeal the Affordable Care Act, and now that they can repeal the ACA, they have to repeal the ACA because they said they would repeal the ACA and now they can repeal...

Except they can't unless they get a critical number of Americans to think, "Wait, I shouldn't pay for shit I'm not using right this second," which, sadly, is probably a convincing argument to the selfish pricks who voted for these assholes like Ryan.

(By the way, the ACA isn't in a "death spiral." Premiums have gone up for just 3% of all Americans with health insurance. That's what we're arguing about here. It's all a fucking game.)

Rachel Maddow Drops Major Reality Check: Trump-Russia Collusion Looks Increasingly Likely

By Sean Colarossi

The MSNBC host told America to "get back to the main point," which is that it's slowly looking like the Trump campaign was working with Russia to topple Hillary Clinton.

On MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on Tuesday, the liberal superstar dropped another Russian reality check on viewers, telling America to “get back to the main point,” which is that it’s slowly looking like the Trump campaign was working with Russia to topple Hillary Clinton last year.

In her opening segment, Maddow focused on a so-far unsubstantiated dossier released in January that details damning links between Trump and high-ranking Russian officials. While Trump and his apologists try to muddy the waters, point fingers, and deny any wrongdoing, more and more of that controversial dossier has become verified as truth.

As Maddow said, pieces from that document continue to fall into place, which is slowly raising the likelihood that Russia and Trump’s campaign worked together.

Rachel Maddow notes that while the dossier of intelligence about Donald Trump ties to Russia remains unconfirmed, pieces of it have checked out upon investigation by the press, though the primary government investigators are former Trump campaign officials.



Maddow said:

Forget all the salacious personal stuff. Forget all the stuff that made the White House so mad when this was published. The bottom line of this dossier, the bottom line allegation, the point of it is that the Trump campaign didn’t just benefit from Russia interfering in our presidential campaign. The point of this is that they colluded, they helped, they were in on it. The money quote from this dossier is, “The operation had been conducted with the full knowledge of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” That’s basically what this whole dossier alleges – that the Trump folks were in on it.  There were multiple people close to Trump, involved in the Trump campaign, who were in contact with the Russian government about the Russian government’s attacks on Hillary Clinton, while those attacks were happening, while Russia was waging these attacks. Overall, yes, we still have to describe this as a sheaf of uncorroborated allegations, but little pieces supporting that bottom line thesis really do keep falling in line.

Maddow then listed the series of Russian revelations – and secret meetings between Trump associates and the Russian officials – that have come out over the past several weeks, despite initial claims from the president that nobody on his team met with the Russians during the campaign.

It turns out that more than a half-dozen Trump associates are linked to Russia, including Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen.

As Maddow noted in her coverage, it was reported by Politico on Tuesday that one of those associates, Carter Page, was given permission by the Trump campaign last year to make a visit to Russia in the heat of the 2016 election cycle.

The president himself even met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before giving a campaign speech last year.

All of these bits of information are turning what was previous an unverified dossier into a credible document implicating Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in what would be the biggest political scandal in U.S. history.

Even though there is so much going on in our politics right now, much of it disturbing and distracting, we must not lose focus on this scandal.

'A Low, Low Moment For Washington' | Morning Blow | MSNBC

Over the weekend in a Saturday tweet storm, Trump accused President Obama of tapping his phones during the 'sacred election process' and saying it was 'Nixon/Watergate.'

The Return Of Baby Man