Trump seeks sharp cuts to housing aid, except for program that brings him millions

Trump’s budget calls for sharply reducing funding for programs that shelter the poor and combat homelessness — with a notable exception: It leaves intact a type of federal housing subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords.

One of those landlords is Trump himself, who earns millions of dollars each year as a part-owner of Starrett City, the nation’s largest subsidized housing complex. Trump’s 4 percent stake in the Brooklyn complex earned him at least $5 million between January of last year and April 15, according to his recent financial disclosure.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-seeks-sharp-cuts-to-housing-aid-except-for-program-that-brings-him-millions/2017/06/20/bf1fb2b8-5531-11e7-ba90-f5875b7d1876_story.html

Don't be stupid. It wasn't the voting machines that won Handel the election.

By GaYellowDawg

It's because it was a heavily Republican district, and Republican voters, just like the politicians they elect, always put party before country. You couldn't get most southern Republicans to vote for any Democrat over any Republican with a car battery and wet alligator clips. They just don't fucking do it. You could run Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, or a big old cow shit in the South and it would win elections in a lot of districts. I'm not kidding. If you dressed someone up in a cow shit costume and ran a campaign as "Vote Cow Shit in 2018. I Love Guns, Jesus, and Murka, and Fuck Democrats", then Cow Shit would win elections all over the south in landslides. LANDSLIDES.

Look at my handle. Pun on yellow dog Democrat. You know the origin of that, don't you? When the Democratic Party was conservative and racist, you couldn't get a Republican elected in the South, ever. When the parties traded places with respect to ideology, southern voters flipped and now it's just the reverse. And it's much, much, much worse with Fox News and right wing hate radio rationalizing all their dumbass votes and the awful fucking bigotry.

It's the fucking South, y'all. When you have a region full of people waving flags over a failed rebellion that got the region shitstomped over 150 years ago, how the hell can you expect rational behavior? I was born in Georgia. Raised in Tennessee. I know my people, and they are fucked up. Clannish and fucked up. They're wonderful people if they recognize you as their own, and are the worst shitheads on earth if they don't. You don't need Russian intervention or hacked voting machines in the South for even a mean, obnoxious, self-righteous, bigoted, judgmental, out of touch asshole like Karen Handel to win. All you have to do is put an (R) beside her name and stand back. It's a goddamn miracle that Ossoff was within 20% in that district.

So damn, just stop it with the voting machines bullshit. You want to know the main reason we lost? Because of 40% voter turnout. If Democrats and/or progressives - everyone here obviously excepted - would get off their stupid asses and just go vote, we'd win a lot more elections and even maybe pull an upset here and there. The higher the turnout, the better Democrats do. I don't know what the solution to that is. Sometimes I think we need to put a shock collar around every progressive in the country and zap the fuck out of them until they go goddamn VOTE. Fuck, I'm disgusted with tonight.

GOP May Cancel August Recess To Inflict More Damage On The Working Class

Republicans in Washington, D.C. might be cancelling their month-long August vacation because they just haven’t accomplished enough of their agenda.  Keep in mind, that agenda involves doing away with safety regulations, cutting taxes for millionaires, and taking healthcare away from millions of American citizens. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.



http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/338220-gop-considers-cancelling-august-recess-to-salvage-agenda

The Honest Cabinet

Trump's Bizarre Kiss Ass Cabinet Meeting

Donald Trump opened a cabinet meeting by inviting the media in to hear the important business of the country.

What did the country hear?

First, Trump took time to praise himself, saying that “nobody would have believed” how many jobs were created in the last seven months … which was less than the jobs created in the previous seven months.

And that the papers were full of “big stories” about new mines opening.

There was also a self-celebration of Trump’s great achievements as a signer of legislation. Which are the greatest. The most ever.

It may be hard to think of a single piece of substantive legislation that bears Trump’s scrawl, but that’s because you’re not thinking hard enough. Besides, every tweet now counts as legislation.

What’s passing that Lilly Ledbetter Act next to calling Comey a coward from the toasty comfort of your bed?

 Once Trump got tired of hearing himself explain how great he was, it was time to share the duty with others. That big smacking sound was each Trump appointee taking his or her turn at telling Trump what a wonderful man he is, how right he is about everything, and how much everyone loves him.



Full story: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/6/12/1671049/-Donald-Trump-turns-a-cabinet-meeting-into-a-butt-kissing-ritual

Nina Turner Speaks To The People's Summit 2017

"How To Spot A Stoner," featuring Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III

Steve Scalise Supported The Lack Of Laws And Regulations That Allowed His Shooting To Happen

Posted by Rude One

A good-sized chunk of Representative Steve Scalise's congressional career has been devoted to making guns easier to get. Scalise, a Louisiana Republican who is the Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, was one of five victims shot by James T. Hodgkinson in Alexandria, Virginia. The wannabe mass murderer was carrying a semiautomatic rifle and a pistol. Hodgkinson was gunned down and killed by Capitol police, but he had apparently come to the baseball field to specifically take out Republicans. A motivation beyond a deranged vision of how to achieve progressive goals hasn't been announced.

Scalise is proudly, even obnoxiously devoted to the Second Amendment. He has an A+ rating from the NRA and a 100% pro-gun voting record, and he has, on many occasions, spoken against any laws that might even minimally effect the free acquisition of all kinds of guns, including the kind of rifle used today on him.

On April 25, 2013, Scalise made a floor speech where he used the Sandy Hook massacre of children to support the rights of gun owners. "I think they counted over 40 different laws that were broken by the Sandy Hook murderer," Scalise said. "Then somebody is going to tell you that one more law, which makes it harder for law-abiding citizens to get a gun, would have stopped him from doing that." The congressman doesn't mention that a law banning assault weapons would have actually slowed down Adam Lanza. And we're not even allowed to discuss banning handguns anymore, which would have done a great deal to stop the bloodshed.

Scalise co-sponsored a resolution that praised the Supreme Court for its Heller decision that eliminated limits on gun ownership in Washington, D.C. Prior to the decision, he had co-sponsored a bill that would have done the same thing, including repealing the ban on semiautomatic guns. And he co-wrote a 2015 letter to the head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives condemning a reclassification of a kind of bullet. In the letter, he talks about the "the failed 'Assault Weapons Ban.'"

A more substantial action was that he voted to overturn President Obama's rule that prevented people who had been determined to be mentally ill from purchasing guns. I'd also bet that Scalise supports laws that allow people arrested for domestic violence to retain their guns. Hodgkinson had been charged several times for that kind of assault.

Look, this isn't a "blame the victim" type of thing. There is nothing that Steve Scalise did today that brought on the shooting. And I hope he and all the other victims recover fully.  But if a pig is gonna build a house out of straw, he shouldn't be too shocked when a wolf comes along to blow it down. It'd be something like a miracle if this caused Scalise to reconsider his blind devotion to the NRA and its perverse version of the Second Amendment.

More likely, though, it will just make him and his firearms-mad colleagues double-down and demand even more guns and fewer restrictions. And they will blame Kathy Griffin, Shakespeare in the Park, Black Lives Matter, angry liberals, and anyone and anything for this rather than take a single second to look in the hospital mirror to ask what they could do differently.

Like maybe stop talking romantically about using guns to solve problems.

10 Ways Mitch McConnell's Secret, Evil Senate Operation To Destroy The Affordable Health Care Act Will Make Life Hell For Many Americans

Mitch McConnell's politics have always been abysmal. But now he's playing with people's lives.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet

June 13, 2017, 4:54 PM GMT

Photo Credit: cspan.org

As details emerge from Senate Republicans’ backroom deliberations to write a single bill repealing Obamacare, defunding Medicaid and deregulating health insurance, it's clear that virtually no American household—apart from the very rich—would be immune from fiscally painful and medically harsh consequences if the GOP gets a bill to the president’s desk.

For the past month, an 11 man committee appointed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, has been meeting in secret to fine-tune the House-passed Obamacare repeal legislation. They are not starting anew, but are polishing a bill that will leave 15-20 million people without health care, prompt higher insurance and medical costs for all but the youngest adults, freeze and shrink state-run Medicaid (which now covers 45 percent of the children in rural America), and defund Planned Parenthood. This is according to analyses by the Congressional Budget Office, Kaiser Family Foundation and others.

Even the pro-corporate Washington Post editorial board has called out the GOP for its chaos-creating prescriptions, writing that they are “motivated to solve a problem that does not exist—saving a health-care system supposedly on the path to inevitable collapse by repealing and replacing Obamacare.” None of that seems to matter to McConnell, who wants to pass the as-yet-unreleased bill before the Senate’s July 4 recess. While defections from the GOP’s far right or few moderates could thwart any Senate bill’s passage, the White House has made it clear it wants McConnell to pass something the president can sign.

What’s unfolding in Washington right now is appalling. Beyond the cowardly political tactics, the GOP is literally playing with the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Everyone ages, and many will get sick and develop chronic illness and disease. The consequences can be devastating if the GOP shreds medical safety nets for the poor and allows the insurance industry to charge more yet deliver less health security in myriad ways.

What follows are 10 takeaways from the Senate’s Obamacare repeal process.

1. McConnell’s skullduggery is back. As Andy Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2015 to 2017, wrote in a Washington Post column Saturday, only 8 percent of the public supported passage of the House’s Obamacare repeal bill (which also slashed Medicaid and included major tax cuts for the rich). He could have told senators to fix Obamacare’s problems, such as allowing small states to form insurance pools.

“Instead, McConnell put a plan in place to pass something close to the House bill using three simple tools: sabotage, speed and secrecy,” Slavitt wrote. “He formed a committee to meet secretly, hold no hearings, create a fast-track process and pressure Senate skeptics with backroom deals.” Trump just wants it done, Politico.com reported. “He’s definitely leaving it to Mitch to lead. But he very much wants it to happen,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN, told Politico.

2. Congressional chaos is having its desired effect—2018 premiums to rise. The GOP is not just sending mixed signals about what they may do to one-sixth of the U.S. economy. They are intentionally provoking insurers to raise their prices for 2018 as a pretext to pass their legislation.

This was cited in a Washington Post editorial, “The GOP’s Obamacare Sabotage Continues,” in which the editorial board was unusually clear-eyed. “‘Insurers have made clear the lack of certainty is causing 2018 proposed premiums to rise significantly,’ House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) said Thursday, arguing that Congress should step in.” That’s creating a problem to fit a solution.

3. Meanwhile Trump’s team is also embracing more chaos. The Trump team is doing everything it can not to enforce Obamacare, such as “lax enforcement of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, inadequate efforts to enroll more people in coverage and other gratuitous subversions of the finely tuned system Obamacare sought to create,” the same Post editorial said. As significant, the White House is refusing to commit to paying 2018 Obamacare subsidies for millions, according to Vox.com, which reported that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price wouldn’t even tell a U.S. Senate committee what the administration’s plans were.

4. Against this backdrop, the Senate is 'making progress.' That’s the word from a handful of center-right Republicans who have been shown glimpses of what’s going on behind closed doors—as if reversing one or two planks of the House bill is supposed to be a sign of moderation. That is absurd. Moreover, what the Senate is said to be doing is terrible.

For example, restoring Obamacare’s pre-existing condition rule—which requires insurers to sell people policies—but without cost controls or coverage requirements. Last month’s Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House-passed bill said a wide swath of the public “would be unable to purchase comprehensive coverage with premiums close to those under current law and might not be able to purchase coverage at all.” Moreover, many policies are likely to cover less once minimum coverage standards are deregulated.

5. The young will pay less, but everyone else won’t. The only people who stand to benefit, the New York Times reported, are those least likely to get sick. “The budget office [CBO] did note that the House bill would potentially lead to lower prices, especially for younger and healthier people,” it said. “But the budget office also warned that markets in states that allowed insurers to charge higher premiums for people with pre-existing conditions—whether high blood pressure, a one-time visit to a specialist or cancer.” This is what deregulation of the insurance industry will bring. The industry will go back to creating more barriers between patients and doctors.

6. Many policies will only be used for hospitalization. Other analyses include scenarios where people will see deductibles rise to levels where they will pay for most care until a serious emergency requiring hospital care arises. As the Times wrote, that can amount to a major fiscal burden.

“Millions of people could also wind up with little choice but to buy cheap plans that provided minimal coverage in states that opted out of requiring insurers to cover maternity care, mental health and addiction treatment or rehabilitation services, among other services required under the Affordable Care Act. Consumers who could not afford high premiums would wind up with enormous out-of-pocket medical expenses.”

7. Medicaid is going to be frozen, justified by big lies. Another detail that’s leaked out of the Senate drafting sessions is that it’s not a question whether Medicaid will see $800 billion in reduced spending and 14 million fewer recipients during the next decade, as the House bill laid out. Rather it is a question of how fast the Medicaid rollback will be. The Hill reports there’s been debate whether it will be three years or seven years. Vox.com also reports that the Senate wants to institute an approach that could lead to sharper funding cuts than the House: more frequent revisions to Medicaid reimbursement rates.

The White House and GOP talking points on this are a series of lies. HHS Secretary Price told a Senate committee, “We are trying to decrease the number of uninsured,” after the CBO estimated that 23 million people would lose insurance. Trump has said he will not touch Medicare—even though Medicaid pays for nursing home care in that program. And Republicans keep saying this is not spending cuts, but slower spending increases. “What the defenders of this claim—ranging from Karl Rove to Sally Pipes—have insisted is that this is a cut to the growth rate, not cuts to the existing program,” wrote health policy blogger Emma Sandoe. “The reality is that states will have to reduce the number of services they provide or reduce the types of people that can enroll as inflation and increased costs in medical services rise.”

8. This is a war on government and on the poor. What the GOP is trying to do is not just go after Obamacare, but dismantle safety nets dating back to the 1960s. As Sandoe noted, “The GOP has campaigned for decades on the idea that the social welfare state is bloated and that the oversized growth of the welfare state needs to be trimmed. The GOP should embrace the idea of calling per-capita caps and block grants cuts. From a policy perspective, the goal of the per-capita caps and block grants is to reduce the size and scope of the program.”

9. Republicans are pursuing this despite vast opposition. Recent polls show safety nets are incredibly popular while the GOP’s American Health Care Act is not. On Medicaid alone, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll by Democrats and Republicans opposed cutting its expansion and changing its financing structure. “Many other polls show that the majority of voters have favorable views of Medicaid, coming close to the level of support for Medicare,” Sandoe wrote. “Telling is that a Quinnipiac poll found that Republicans oppose cuts to Medicaid. This is one possible reason that the latest [GOP] messaging appears to be focused on reframing the cuts as minimal. Meanwhile, the AHCA has polled from 17–21 percent by Quinnipiac and only 8 percent think that the Senate should pass these reforms without changes.”

10. If this passes, a colossal downward spiral will ensue. The impact of the AHCA, if passed, is not just going to be fiscal—in terms of increased out-of-pocket costs for those with insurance policies. As the Times reported, people age 50 and older, and “millions of middle- and working-class Americans” will once again be trapped in their jobs because they will be unable to pay for coverage. “The Affordable Care Act has enabled many of those workers to get transitional coverage that provides a bridge to the next phase of their lives—a stopgap to get health insurance if they leave a job, are laid off, start a business or retire early.”

For those too poor to buy insurance, Medicaid will contract and likely be forced to focus on emergency and crisis care, rather than prevention. Rationing care will likely ensue, unless states step in with raising revenues to offset federal cutbacks. Safety nets are likely to roll backwards, landing somewhere between where they are now and where they were before Obamacare’s reforms took effect.

McConnell’s Fast Track
As Axios.com reported, McConnell is hoping to finalize the Senate’s legislation this week, because the Congressional Budget Office will need two weeks to “score” it—the Washington term for assessing its financial and programmatic impacts—if it is to come up for a Senate floor vote before the July 4 break. While it's possible that McConnell could present a bill without that analysis, it is likely that more details will emerge in coming days.

At that point, Republicans will surely feel the full wrath of voters who aren’t going to have anything positive to say if their health care is trashed, or if the GOP tries to blame Obama and the Democrats for market chaos they have worsened, not diminished.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America's democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).

Trump Supporters Are The Walking Dead

It increasingly looks like Russian hackers may have affected actual vote totals.

The Hard Truth Keeps Trickling Out, Little by Little

The Confederate General Babbles Before Congress

Posted by Excommunicated Cardinal

At 2:30pm Eastern time today, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III will testify under oath before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding his contacts with government officials of the Russian Federation prior to the January 20th inauguration, as well as his role in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. Many burning questions remain for Sessions.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has brought on money laundering experts, a veritable "murders' row" of prosecutors, while the right-wing world has turned on him in a transparent and vicious attempt to undermine the credibility of the investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia and other filthy laundry the investigation turns up.

To complicate matters further for the embattled chief executive, there are reports that he is considering attempting to fire Robert Mueller. Jesse Eisinger and Justin Elliott of ProPublica have also reported that Trump's personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz has claimed to have been a catalyst in the firing of former US Attorney Preet Bhara.

In other news, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the administration in regards to Trump's self-proclaimed travel ban, unanimously upholding an injunction preventing the implementation of the policy.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is trying desperately to pass another cruel ACA-repeal bill with no public text or CBO score.

The Incontrovertible Evidence

When Trump Said He'd Testify, He Didn't Mean To Congress

Trump will not testify before Congress under oath, a development that legal experts say was expected but that illustrates the pitfalls of the president’s tendency to shoot from the hip in public remarks.

Trump said at a Friday press conference that would “100%” agree to give sworn testimony in response to former FBI director James Comey’s allegations last week.

On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the president was “specifically asked whether or not he would talk to Director Mueller,” the special counsel investigating alleged Russian election meddling, under oath.

In fact, Trump was asked generally about giving sworn testimony rebutting Comey’s allegations that the president asked him to pledge loyalty and to ease up on the FBI’s investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Asked a follow-up about Mueller specifically, the president said he would speak with him as well.

Congressional Democrats were giddy at the prospect of grilling Trump under oath, but experts say that testimony was probably never going to happen. “I think that was expected,” said national security attorney Bradley Moss. “Having the President testify before Congress raises significant separation of powers concerns. The last to do it was Gerald Ford and all others since have adamantly refused.”

But Moss and his law partner Mark Zaid say the president didn’t seem aware of that fact during his remarks on Friday. “This Presidency is marked like none other by a White House tendency to reinterpret the specific words of the President. Every time that happens its credibility suffers,” Zaid said in an email.

—Lachlan Markay

The Oldest Known Surviving PC Operating System

By Jenny List

You’ll all be familiar with the PC, the ubiquitous x86-powered workhorse of desktop and portable computing. All modern PC's are descendants of the original from IBM, the model 5150 which made its debut in August 1981. This 8088-CPU-driven machine was expensive and arguably not as accomplished as its competitors, yet became an instant commercial success.

The genesis of its principal operating system is famous in providing the foundation of Microsoft’s huge success. They had bought Seattle Computer Products’ 86-DOS, which they then fashioned into the first release version of IBM’s PC-DOS. And for those interested in these early PC operating systems there is a new insight to be found, in the form of a pre-release version of PC-DOS 1.0 that has found its way into the hands of OS/2 Museum.

Sadly they don’t show us the diskette itself, but we are told it is the single-sided 160K 5.25″ variety that would have been the standard on these early PCs. We say “the standard” rather than “standard” because a floppy drive was an optional extra on a 5150, the most basic model would have used cassette tape as a storage medium.

The disk is bootable, and indeed we can all have a play with its contents due to the magic of emulation. The dates on the files reveal a date of June 1981, so this is definitely a pre-release version and several months older than the previous oldest known PC-DOS version. They detail an array of differences between this disk and the DOS we might recognize, perhaps the most surprising of which is that even at this late stage it lacks support for .EXE executables.

You will probably never choose to run this DOS version on your PC, but it is an extremely interesting and important missing link between surviving 86-DOS and PC-DOS versions. It also has the interesting feature of being the oldest so-far-found operating system created specifically for the PC.

If you are interested in early PC hardware, take a look at this project using an AVR processor to emulate a PC’s 8088.

George Will: Republicans Are Wrong To Embrace A Political Sociopath

Best Twitter Thread On Trump's Guilt After Comey Hearing

The Wire creator David Simon lays out his theory for why Trump looks guilty as hell after the Comey hearing.

 

By Mike Redmond

 

I don't have much to add to the Comey hearing. It's become clear that depending on your political affiliation, you either saw a former FBI director call Trump a liar and lay the groundwork for an obstruction of justice case (while not so subtly hinting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions can't be trusted) or you saw some shit about Hillary Clinton's emails, and that's all that matters to you.

The objective truth is that Democrats stayed focused on the serious issue of Russian interference with American elections - which could bite either party in the ass at any given moment - while Republicans spent their time focusing on Hillary Clinton and the occasional semantical argument about whether Trump directly told Comey to stop the Russian investigation.

That's the plain and simple reality of the situation, but good fucking luck explaining to that a not insignificant portion of the population who doesn't even think the Russian situation is real. (On the Right or Left.)

So here's veteran Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, more famously known for being the creative force behind HBO's The Wire, along with writing Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Long story short, Simon knows his shit, and his insights on the Comey hearing are worth reading.

From Twitter:

Thread: A year with some good detectives taught me that often WHAT ISN'T SAID is the actual tell. And note what isn't discussed between....
...Trump and Comey. At no point does Trump make any concerted effort to discern whether or not Russia did in fact attempt to interfere...
...in the election. Indeed, he notes that the claim has created a cloud over his governance -- so he can scarcely say that it isn't...
...of real concern to him; his concern is premised in this meeting. Yet, he doesn't inquire as to what Comey and the FBI is yet discerning..
...about Russia's role. He doesn't even do so as a means of disparaging the claim. (i.e. "I'm sure you're finding out that there's nothing..
...to the claims of Russian interference, right?" It. Doesn't. Come. Up. In this regard, I am reminded of every innocent and guilty man...
...I ever witnessed in an interrogation room. The innocent ask a multitude of questions about what the detectives know, or why the cops...
...might think X or Y or whether Z happened to the victim. The guilty forget to inquire. They know. An old law school saw tells young...
...trial lawyers to remind their clients to stay curious in front of a jury. There's a famous tale of a murder case in which the body of...
...the defendant's wife had not been recovered yet he was charged with the killing. Defense attorney tells the jury in final argument...
..there's been no crime and the supposed victim will walk through the courtroom doors in 10 seconds. 30 seconds later the door remains...
...shut. "Ok, she isn't coming today. But the point is all of you on jury looked, and that my friends is reasonable doubt. You must acquit."
Jury comes back in twenty minutes: Guilty. Attorney goes to the foreman: "I thought I had you." Foreman: "You had me and ten others. But...
"...juror number 8 didn't look at the door, he looked at your client. And he didn't eye the door, he was examining his nails.
Even when he was completely alone with Comey, Trump didn't look at the door. He eyed his nails. It's an absolute tell.
Why? Because Trump already knows that there is some fixed amount of Russian interference on his behalf, and possibly, collusion as well.

And now to pretend that won't be greeted with responses about Hillary Clinton's emails or how I'm a neoliberal shill. What the hell is happening out there?

BREAKING: ‘USA Today’ Drops Jeff Sessions Testimony Bombshell

By Carissa House-Dunphy

After the testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey on Thursday, which raised as many questions as it answered, pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle are left to analyze and debate what it all meant. The information given to the American public did not, however, end with Comey’s testimony.

On Tuesday, new testimony will be presented to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science by Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions has recently come under fire for his failure to disclose secret meetings with Russian government operatives in his requests for security clearance as attorney general. Questioning, however, will apparently not focus on those meetings, nor will it focus on matters related to commerce or science.

According to USA Today:

‘The hearing is supposed to focus on the 2017 budget request for the Department of Justice. But Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the overall Appropriations Committee and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said Thursday he will press Sessions about his role in President Trump’s May decision to fire Comey as FBI director.’

While Trump’s spokespeople insisted that the president fired James Comey on the recommendations of Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, Trump later denied that to Lester Holt during a televised interview in which he insisted that he alone made the decision to fire Comey.

The rapid turnaround in the narrative came after questions were raised as to why Sessions was involved in decisions about Comey at all, considering that Comey was in the process of investigating the president’s campaign team for collusion with Russia and Sessions had recused himself from all decision involving that investigation after his undisclosed meetings with Russian government officials became public.

The country once again waits with bated breath for more details of this ongoing saga.

The GOP Failed And Now We’re Stuck With Trump

By Jeff Greenfield 

As the carnage of World War I widened, Barbara Tuchman recounts in “The Guns of August,” a German leader asked a colleague, “How did it all happen?”

“Ah,” replied the other, “if only one knew.”

A century later, there is no mystery to the carnage that Donald Trump has wrought.

Everything we have seen in these first 140 days—the splintering of the Western alliance, the grifter’s ethics he and his family embody, the breathtaking ignorance of history, geopolitics and government, the jaw-dropping egomania, the sheer incompetence and contempt for democratic norms—was on full display from the moment his campaign began. And that’s not just what Democrats think—it’s what many prominent Republicans have said all along.

Once Trump was elected, his foes began to indulge in a series of fantasies about how to prevent his ascendancy or how to remove him from power. The electors should refuse to vote for him (which would have thrown the election into the House, which would have chosen Trump); the Cabinet and the vice-president should use the 25th Amendment to declare him unable to exercise his duties (a scenario, as I have written here earlier, that works just fine on TV melodramas like “24” and “Scandal”); Congress should impeach him (which would require 20 GOP House members and 19 Republican senators to join every Democratic lawmaker).

So this may be a good time to remember that in a key sense, Trump happened because a well-established, real-life mechanism that was in the best position to prevent a Trump presidency failed. That institution was the Republican Party.

It is not entirely true that Trump engineered a “hostile takeover” of the GOP, provided that the party is defined more broadly than elected officials and party insiders. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote last year in the Atlantic: “the elements of the party that sent pro-Trump cues or Trump is at least acceptable’ signals to primary voters—Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Breitbart.com, The Drudge Report, The New York Post, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Rick Scott, Jan Brewer, Joe Arpaio—are simply more powerful, relative to National Review, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and other ‘Trump is unacceptable’ forces, than previously thought.”

What is true, however, is that the governing wing of the party was fully aware that Trump was not to be trusted with the levers of power. In January of last year, National Review devoted an entire issue to a symposium where 22 prominent Republicans and conservatives detailed their militant opposition to the candidate Texas Governor Rick Perry—who is now Trump’s energy secretary—called “a cancer” on the American political system. Until his nomination was all but assured, Trump had the backing of a lone Republican senator, Jeff Sessions (who is now his embattled attorney general).

More broadly, the whole idea of a disparate party coming together at a convention was, for decades, rooted in the “vetting” process; those experienced in the mechanics of politics and governments would decide which of the candidates were best equipped to win an election and carry out the party’s agenda in Washington. It’s beyond obvious that in the decades since primaries replaced power brokers as the delegate-selecting process, this role has attenuated. But it survives today as an “In-Case-Of-Emergency-Break-Glass” tool. And the question is: Why didn’t the Republican Party employ it?

Explanations have ranged from the fragmented nature of the opposition—no early consensus choice as with George W. Bush in 2000—to the underestimation of Trump’s appeal (the establishment candidates like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie spent their time and money attacking each other, while Ted Cruz was constantly praising Trump, hoping to ride in his wake when he collapsed).

But one often overlooked reason—and one for parties to remember if they hope to avoid future Trumps—is that the rules of the GOP greatly benefitted Trump. The party allows winner-take-all primaries by congressional district or statewide— which in many states hugely magnified Trump’s delegate totals. Trump won 32 percent of the South Carolina vote, but all 50 delegates. He won 46 percent of the Florida vote but all 99 delegates. He won 39 percent of the Illinois vote, but 80 percent of the 69 delegates. By contrast, Democrats—who abolished winner-take-all primaries more than 40 years ago, insist on a proportional system, much like parents cut the cake at a children’s birthday party. The result is that an intensely motivated minority cannot seize the lion’s share of delegates.

Another rule may well have stayed the hand of Republicans who saw in Trump an unacceptable nominee. The Democratic Party gives more than 700 people seats as “super delegates.” Every senator, every House member, every governor and a regiment of party officials are, by rule, unbound.

They make up 15 percent of the total votes at the convention. Republicans only have some 150 “automatic” delegates—7 percent of the total—and they must vote the way their state’s primary voters did. Thus, the whole idea of an emergency brake is almost nonexistent in the GOP.

Whether such tools should exist is a matter of debate. Many Democrats on their party’s left disdain the idea of such backroom politics (although toward the end of the 2016 primary season, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ backers were urging super delegates to vote for him on the grounds that the was the more electable candidate in November). If a candidate comes to the convention with more votes than anyone else, but with more voters having chosen a different candidate, what’s the “right” thing for an unbound delegate to do? The famous assertion by Edmund Burke, that “your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion” is very much out of fashion among the populist movements on left and right.

But either by cluelessness or willful design, the Republican Party had put itself in a position where one of the most significant functions of a party—the “vetting” of its prospective nominee—was rendered impotent.

And we are living with that institutional failure every day.

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Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Random Observations On Comey's Testimony

Posted by Rude One

1.  Hey, there, Americans who voted for Donald Trump for president. I just wanna offer a hearty "thanks" for putting Trump in office. I mean, I thought things would be crazy, but, seriously, I never expected Trump to exceed expectations so quickly. Are you having fun yet? Are you tired of winning? Man, I sure am. I can't handle all this winning.

That's what it is, right? Trump's wins? Having the former director of the FBI testify under oath that Trump is a debased, immoral lying liar who lies so much that you gotta be ready for more lies? That's winning, no?

Having an attorney general who perjured himself repeatedly? Winning so hard that it hurts! And bonus winning: Trump never asked Comey about Russian interference in American elections. That means Trump knew the answer already. Or he didn't give a shit because it benefited him.

Goddamn, I don't see how you Trump voters can stand all this fucking winning.

You can brag about all these wins, Trump voters. All nearly 63 million of you, every single one a racist, moron, hypocrite, and/or liar. You own this. How's that feel? Is any of this getting through the Breitbart haze and Fox "news" mist? When tens of millions of people lose their health insurance and thousands of people die, that's on you, you dumbass motherfuckers. When another banking crisis wipes out your meager retirement funds or makes you lose your home, that's also on you.

You did this to the nation. You decided that you'd rather tear the country down because of some delusion that the rich man was gonna make you rich, too. You decided to ignore every single person, even Republicans, who told you that you were flushing the United States down the shitter, and you sure showed us. Yeah, you did.

You need to choke on your votes. You need to feel ashamed. When this is over, even if we have to wait until 2019, you need to beg for forgiveness from those of us who knew better.

But you won't. At this point, you could walk into a room where your mother has been raped and murdered, see Trump standing there with a bloody knife and a dripping dick, and you’d still say, “Why do libtards hate America?”

2. Let me put on my English professor hat for a moment here. Trump told Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Starting with Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, to some on the right, this meant that Trump was merely stating something that he was wishing might come true, like Comey was a well he had tossed a penny into, with no real expectation that it would.

And that might be right if Trump had told Comey, “I hope unicorns are real.” But he didn’t. Instead, Trump asked everyone who was in the room to leave him alone with Comey. And then he expressed this “hope.” If you’re alone with your boss and your boss says, “I hope you can finish those documents by morning,” there is an implicit “or else.”

To see this in any way other than as a command is to descend into “depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is” levels of linguistic fuckery. Fuck you, defenders of Trump. Everyone fucking knows what he was saying. Let’s stop pretending that all of a sudden it’s an innocent, earnest desire said theoretically, as if you have no control over it. “I hope Grandma doesn’t have cancer” is a fuck of a lot different than “I hope you don’t make me punch you.”

3. What Republicans are doing now is asking, “Who do you believe? The President? Or your own lying ears?” Words don’t have meaning. To write up a private meeting and then give those notes to the media is called “leaking,” even though no classified information was involved. “Vindication” apparently means “I don't fucking care what anyone says.”

4. A few things are clear. The President of the United States is a liar. It’s something that everyone around him has said about him. It’s something that he has said himself. And if the president can’t be trusted, then why should anyone listen to anything he says or promises? (See #1. Those fuckers will believe him even when they're standing in their own radioactive shit in the middle of a scorched wasteland.)

5. The vast majority of Americans who want Trump stopped, who don’t believe in his agenda, who think something is incredibly fucked here, are on their own. Democrats have virtually no power right now. And the Republicans have no interest in holding him to account. Nothing will happen unless Democrats take back at least the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Until then, we can look forward to nonstop scandal and the cruel dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, two things that will rapidly send the United States spiraling into chaos.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: What happens now is on Republicans. Trump's attempt to influence the FBI investigation is way worse, on so many levels, than a president lying under oath about whether or not he got a blow job in the Oval Office. But that was enough for Republicans to drag us through the Clinton impeachment, enough for them to say that the rule of law must take precedent.

These hypocritical sows of the GOP, many of whom were there back in the late 1990's, just roll around in their own mud and waste, telling the rest of us to join them because they're not gonna stop.