White House Admits Trump Lied About Bringing Back Coal Jobs

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

By Jason Easley

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gianforte was cited for misdemeanor assault, according to the Gallatin County Sheriff's Office.

In a recording of the incident, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs said he was "body-slammed" by Gianforte and wanted to call police.

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



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

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

Posted by Rude One

There is a genre of news story lately that has gotten old really damn fast. It's the "Hey, here's a fucking dumbass who voted for Trump and is now gonna be fucked by him" variety. Essentially, a diligent reporter goes to some shitty place, finds one or more of the aforementioned dumbasses, and gets them to say something along the lines of "Well, Trump's budget and health care plan will leave me dying of cancer in a ditch while my Congress member pisses on me, but I still support my president."

For instance, on CNN, we meet Barbara Puckett of Beattyville, Kentucky, which is the deepest shithole for white people in the nation. Puckett's got sclerosis and is on Social Security disability and food stamps, both of which are on the cutting board in Donald Trump's savage budget. But she's not abandoning her man: ""I am still happy with President Trump," she said.

AP reporters headed out across the country to talk to a spectrum of people, from white idiots in New York to white morons in Georgia to white dolts in Iowa. They all agree that they couldn't give a happy monkey fuck about the stories about Trump and Russia. It's all lies or bullshit, they say. Or you just ignore it, as one Staten Island hairdresser said, "I didn’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to feel that he’s not doing what he said, so I just choose to not listen." A college student there offered his support by saying, "If you’re wishing for him to fail, you’re basically wishing for the pilot of the plane to crash." To which one could point out that if the pilot doesn't know how to fly the plane, all the wishing in the world ain't gonna help you.

(To be vaguely fair, one of the Staten Islanders did get off a decent joke. When asked if anything could turn him against Trump, a man replied, "If he gases his own people, yeah, I would be against him," which, c'mon, is kind of funny. Well, until Trump starts gassing Brooklyn.)

Back in April, Nicholas Kristof wrote about a whole bunch of Americans who will suffer if even a fraction of Trump's budget were to be passed (which, let's face it, is the goal in putting out such a nut-punchingly vicious document). They include a 70-year-old woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is dependent on a job from the Senior Community Service Employment Program, which Trump has proposed slashing. She voted for the president because "he was talking about getting rid of those illegals," of course. If the program is cut, she said, "I’ll sit home and die."

But like almost everyone in these stories, she says she would vote for Trump in 2020. That's just sick. These are sick fucks who don't care if the god they worship wants to kill them.

The best mark in a con is the kind who doesn't believe they've been conned, even when the con is revealed. Either they are so embarrassed that it's easier just to double down on the delusion or they're that fucking stupid. And, in the end, it doesn't matter because they'll line up to be fleeced again.

Another genre of news story is of the wishful thinking variety. They say things like "Trump's Budget Cuts Target His Voters" or "Wait Until Trump's Supporters See the Size of the Dildo He's Fucking Them With" or "Man, Grandpa's Gonna Be Mad When He Catches Trump Stabbing His Grandkids." And they all posit a fantasy that Trump will cross some line, be it with health care or other cuts, or even in his canoodling with Russia, that will make his followers turn against him.

It's the same sort of hoping without any evidence that got us Trump in the first place. I've said it before: Fuck the dumbasses. The hell with the sick fucks. Don't court them. Don't count on them. Build up the outreach to the people who didn't vote. And then get elected and pass programs that help the dumbasses and everyone else.

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

By Jason Easley on Tue, May 23rd, 2017 at 4:43 pm

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

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

The Carrier deal was a PR scam.

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

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

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

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

Great news for African American voters in North Carolina!

Supreme Court strikes down North Carolina congressional district maps

Then And Now

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

Trump Completes First Leg Of World Hypocrisy Tour

Trump accused of rank hypocrisy in Saudi Arabia

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

On Islam, Trump is consistently inconsistent

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

Destiny 2 is leading to gold deflation in World of Warcraft

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

By Kyle Orland - 5/22/2017, 11:28 AM

Careful, friend... while you were sleeping, the real-world value of that gold pile just went down a bit.

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

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

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

The result looks to be about a 7 percent decline in the real-world buying power of a piece of WoW gold in less than a week. Put another way, the functional price of a $60 copy of Destiny 2 in WoW gold jumped from just under 450,000 gold pieces to just over 480,000 in a matter of days. An incredibly focused, min-maxing gold farmer could still earn that gold in a month or two of dedicated WoW play, though.

Further Reading

World of Warcraft gold can now be used to buy other Blizzard items

 

While WoW Token prices show minor fluctuations throughout each day, the last time the market saw this much turbulence was back in February, when Blizzard first allowed Tokens to be sold for Battle.net credit. Before that, Tokens could only be used to purchase World of Warcraft subscription time and were considered much less valuable at the in-game auction markets.

 Since the change, the in-game value of a Token has slowly grown about 22 percent over the course of about three months, from about 90,000 gold pieces on February 15 up to about 110,000 last week.

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

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

 

Kyle Orland Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.

 

Email kyle.orland@arstechnica.com // Twitter @KyleOrl

Defeated Pro-Trump Democratic Mayor Is Down In The Dumps

By Alex Seitz-Wald 

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

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

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

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

Trump stood in front of a wall of recycled trash to slam free-trade policies and promised to bring back good-paying coal mining and steel-making jobs.

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.

‘People Here Think Trump Is A Laughingstock’

On Trump's ill-timed world tour.

By Susan B. Glasser

May 19, 2017

“Chaos.”
“Circus.”
“Laughingstock.”

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

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

Trump’s tumultuous last two weeks—from firing his FBI director to allegedly sharing highly classified information with Russian officials even as a formidable special counsel was being named to investigate his campaign team’s possible collusion with the Kremlin—has them still confused about his foreign policy. But now they are more appalled than afraid of the man with whom they have no choice but to partner.
 

Many I spoke with said they had made a fundamental mistake of viewing Trump primarily as an ideologue with whom they disagreed rather than what he increasingly appears to be: an ill-prepared newcomer to the world stage, with uninformed views and a largely untested team that will now be sorely tried by a 9-day, 5-stop world tour that would be wildly ambitious even for a seasoned global leader.

“People are less worried than they were six weeks ago, less afraid,” a senior German government official with extensive experience in the United States told me. “Now they see the clownish nature.” Or, as another German said on the sidelines of a meeting here devoted to taking stock of 70 years of U.S.-German relations, “People here think Trump is a laughingstock.”
 

“The dominant reaction to Trump right now is mockery,” Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, told the meeting at the German Foreign Office here while moderating a panel on Trump’s foreign policy that dealt heavily on the difficulty of divining an actual policy amid the spectacle. Heilbrunn, whose publication hosted Trump’s inaugural foreign policy speech in Washington during last year’s campaign, used the ‘L’ word too. “The Trump administration is becoming an international laughingstock.” Michael Werz, a German expert from the liberal U.S. think tank Center for American Progress, agreed, adding he was struck by “how rapidly the American brand is depreciating over the last 20 weeks.”

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

Even Trump flying off on a poorly timed international tour isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory: Many embattled U.S. leaders have hit the road for a dose of statesman-like pageantry, red-carpet receptions and global superpower-style pomp to compensate for pressing investigations and congressional uproar back home. Bill Clinton toured Russia and Northern Ireland after testifying to the grand jury in the Monica Lewinsky affair and was in Israel when he learned the House of Representatives had the votes to impeach him. Ronald Reagan summited with Mikhail Gorbachev as the congressional Iran-Contra hearings threatened to derail his second-term agenda.

But Trump’s tribulations have confounded the world, and especially America’s closest allies here in Europe, in a whole different way. Never has a U.S. president flailed so early in his tenure at a time when he is still such an unknown quantity in the world. In Trump’s case, he will arrive in a skeptical Europe with an inexperienced or nonexistent staff appointed to deal with global problems and a record of wildly contradictory statements even on matters of core principle. Does he think NATO is still “obsolete” or not? Is he prepared to offer the Russians anything more than the symbolism of his recent, chummy Oval Office visit with its foreign minister? Want to blow up carefully negotiated agreements with Europe on climate change and trade?

No one knows.

***

 

When European diplomats meet these days, they often swap stories about Trump—and how to manage their volatile new ally. “The president of the United States has a 12-second attention span,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told a former senior official in April after meeting Trump in the Oval Office. Not only that, this person told me, the president seemed unprepared and ill-informed, turning the conversation to North Korea and apparently unaware that NATO is not a part of the ongoing North Korea saga.

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

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

NATO has downgraded the May 25 session to a meeting from a summit and will hold only a dinner to minimize the chances of a Trump eruption. Leaders have been told to hold normally windy remarks to just two to four minutes to keep Trump’s attention. They are even preparing to consider a “deliverable” to Trump of having NATO officially join the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria, as Trump has said his priority is getting NATO to do more in combating terrorism. 

 

“It’s a phony deliverable to give to Trump, a Twitter deliverable,” said a former senior U.S. official, pointing out that the individual NATO member states are already members of that coalition.

A Trump photo-op with a chunk of the World Trade Center has been choreographed in hopes of convincing the president who called NATO “obsolete” to reaffirm the basic principles of an organization committed to the mutual security of its members. The World Trade Center wreckage is part of a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks at NATO’s new headquarters that Trump is set to officially open (though the building is not in fact finished), and NATO observers hope he will use the occasion to finally endorse the principle in Article V of the NATO Treaty that requires countries to treat an attack on one NATO country as an attack on all – an article that has only been invoked once in the organization’s history: after 9/11. “The purpose of the 9/11 memorial opening is to try to get Trump to mention the Article V commitment, since how can he get around it? It’s the only time Article V was ever used,” the former official said.

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

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

No promises might well be the theme of Trump’s trip. Consider Trump’s original campaign-trail threat to blow up NATO if member states don’t live up to their commitment to put 2 percent of the budget into defense; even that, it appears, might now might be back on the table. Trump has publicly claimed victory on that score, crowing that he had already forced allies to comply, but in fact, few countries have actually raised their spending – and an anonymous senior White House official told a reporter this week that “he is not going to stay in NATO if NATO does not make a lot more progress.”

No doubt jittery officials have reason to be nervous. In an interview as Trump departed, Stoltenberg told Bloomberg TV that “Trump has clearly stated to me in several conversations … that he’s strongly committed to NATO.” As for Thursday’s meeting in Brussels? “I hope and expect that he will reiterate his strong commitment to NATO.”

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

The question of Donald Trump’s real views on NATO might not be as entertaining as the political spectacle unfolding in Washington, but the answer is just as uncertain.

***

 

On Tuesday night, Germany Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel opened the conference on U.S.-German relations, sponsored by the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brucke think tank here, with a lengthy, serious speech on the Marshall Plan’s legacy, a paean to American leadership in Europe and a rebuttal to Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We associate the United States with the idea of freedom and democracy,” he said, before warning of the erosion of the global order that America made. “A recalibration of the world is in full swing.”

An hour later, former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile was taking questions over dinner from a largely German group of current and former government officials and international business leaders.

What did they want to know? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Director Comey is said to have known in advance that Mr. Trump would dismiss him. He took careful steps, these sources say, to leave not only a paper trail as we have seen in the story of the ‘Comey Memo’ but also a digital one. Director Comey’s own primary work computer, and other computers in and around his former office, were fitted with sophisticated intelligence community software allowing the Justice Department to see precisely how and when they were attacked.

The official Foreign Ministry of Russia’s Twitter account posted a tweet showing Foreign Minister Lavarov laughing with Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State who has won the Order of Friendship of Vladimir Putin, over Director Comey’s firing, on the day Donald Trump hosted the Russians in the White House and verbally gave them top-secret allied intelligence, later published by the Russian news agency Tass.

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

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

More on this story as we receive it.

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

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

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

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

Posted by Rude One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Rick Wilson May 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[I support Trump, but firing Comey was wrong]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Tornado Tosses Baton Rouge Firefighter, Truck

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turkish president’s bodyguards beat up US protestors after he met with Trump

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/watch-the-turkish-president%e2%80%99s-bodyguards-beat-up-us-protestors-after-he-met-with-trump/ar-BBBe0yv

Trump Asked Comey To End Flynn Inquiry

Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him To End Flynn Investigation

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