Donald Trump and his Coterie of the Craven (part 16)

[onekidanddone]

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, I understood what you meant about jury duty. I'm in a large county, and the parking at the courthouse is a joke. And so much of jury duty is "hurry up and wait".

 

"Why CNN refused to air Trump’s new ad targeting ‘fake news"

Glassner is a glassbowl. "...positive message..." SERIOUSLY? Agent Orange wouldn't know a positive message if it bit him in his ample ass.

I'm not completely up on the First Amendment, but I don't think any news origination, TV station, news paper or any body else has to air his shit. It is all about money, and if they don't feel like selling shit stain the advertising they don't have to. He can create is own network and do it there. 

I can feel my blood pressure rising.  I am really getting to love FJ, but I think I may need to stick with the non-political forums for a while

Am I playing ostrich?  Damn right I am.  There is a line between being informed, vigilant and getting obsessed and dysfunctional. I admit I am not always able to regulate my own emotions.

I've said this before, but I need a little break from the politics.  See ya'll in Quiver Full of Duggars, Food,TV, Weight Loss and what not. 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 minute ago, onekidanddone said:

I'm not completely up on the First Amendment, but I don't think any news origination, TV station, news paper or any body else has to air his shit. It is all about money, and if they don't feel like selling shit stain the advertising they don't have to. He can create is own network and do it there. 

I can feel my blood pressure rising.  I am really getting to love FJ, but I think I may need to stick with the non-political forums for a while

Am I playing ostrich?  Damn right I am.  There is a line between being informed, vigilant and getting obsessed and dysfunctional. I admit I am not always able to regulate my own emotions.

I've said this before, but I need a little break from the politics.  See ya'll in Quiver Full of Duggars, Food,TV, Weight Loss and what not. 

You are right, they don't have to air his advertisements. I was just surprised because they seemed to give him all the publicity he wanted from day one.

I understand about needing a break! I hope you come back soon! See you in the other threads!

[Ali]

@onekidanddone Take a break if you need it. Your mental health is important. I had to do that recently for my own mental health. I could not deal with Orange Voldemort in addition to real life crap that I was facing. I successfully avoided news about him by staying out of the politics forum and staying off social media until I was riding in the car with Mr. A. He decided to turn on the radio. They were talking about the newest absurdity and I begged him to change the station. 

[Childless]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

I think the infantile power grab is the only thing that is tenuously holding the Republican Party together at the moment.

Once reality sets in and they realize that this power is too fleeting to hold on to and is slipping like grains of sand between their grubby little fingers, you can bet that the divisions within the party will finally and inexorably break the GOP apart.

The Republican party seems to span a much larger ideological spectrum than the Democratic party which seems more cohesive and capable of agreeing on a legislative agenda.  It wouldn't surprise me if the Republican party eventually fractures into two or three different parties.  It's really the only way they'll be able to govern effectively. 

Actually, the break up of the Republican party or both parties would be fantastic for our democracy.  The two party system we have now will end up destroying this country if allowed to continue for much longer.

[47of74]

48 minutes ago, Childless said:

The Republican party seems to span a much larger ideological spectrum than the Democratic party which seems more cohesive and capable of agreeing on a legislative agenda.  It wouldn't surprise me if the Republican party eventually fractures into two or three different parties.  It's really the only way they'll be able to govern effectively. 

Actually, the break up of the Republican party or both parties would be fantastic for our democracy.  The two party system we have now will end up destroying this country if allowed to continue for much longer.

Yeah George Washington is probably banging his head against the wall repeatedly up in heaven.  I mean he saw what would happen back in the fucking 1700s, for Christ's sake!

avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp

Quote

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent, albeit lengthy, article: "How Trump Could Get Fired". There were many points discussed that I hadn't seen elsewhere.  A couple of excerpts:

Quote

Trump’s insulation from unwelcome information appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. “He tends to not like a lot of negative feedback,” Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump’s associates are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. “I don’t think he realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he’s such a large guy and he’s so powerful,” Ruddy went on. “I already sense that a lot of people don’t want to give him bad news about things. I’ve already been approached by several people that’ll say, ‘He’s got to hear this. Could you tell him?’ ”

Awww, he doesn't like negative feedback. Grow the hell up, everybody gets negative feedback.

 

Quote

The Framers of the Constitution planned ahead for the death of Presidents—hence, Vice-Presidents—but they failed to address an unnerving prospect: a President who is alive and very sick. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and been left comatose, there would have been no legal way to allow others to assume his powers. To fend off that possibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution in February, 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is judged to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel of medical experts. If the President objects—a theoretical crisis that scholars call “contested removal”—Congress has three weeks to debate and decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to remove the President. There is no appeal.

However, the definition of what would constitute an inability to discharge the duties of office was left deliberately vague. Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and others who drafted the clause wanted to insure that the final decision was not left to doctors. The fate of a President, Bayh wrote later, is “really a political question” that should rest on the “professional judgment of the political circumstances existing at the time.” The Twenty-fifth Amendment could therefore be employed in the case of a President who is not incapacitated but is considered mentally impaired.

I thought this was an interesting take on how to remove a sitting president.

 

Quote

Only one Administration is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became Reagan’s chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in disarray. “He seemed to be despondent but not depressed,” Baker said later, of the President.

Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White House officials about the Administration’s dysfunction, and Cannon learned that Reagan was not reading even short documents. “They said he wouldn’t come over to work—all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence,” Cannon recalled, in “Landslide,” a 1988 account of Reagan’s second term, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Baker summoned a small group of aides to his home. One of them, Thomas Griscom, told me recently that Cannon, who died in 2011, “floats this idea that maybe we’d invoke the Constitution.” Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he proposed a diagnostic process of sorts: they would observe the President’s behavior at lunch.

In the event, Reagan was funny and alert, and Baker considered the debate closed. “We finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, ‘You know, boys, I think we’ve all seen this President is fully capable of doing the job,’ ” Griscom said. They never raised the issue again. In 1993, four years after leaving office, Reagan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. His White House physicians said that they saw no symptoms during his Presidency. In 2015, researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, in which they examined transcripts of news conferences in the course of Reagan’s Presidency and discovered changes in his speech that are linked to the onset of dementia. Reagan had taken to repeating words and using “thing” in the place of specific nouns, but they could not prove that, while he was in office, his judgment and decision-making were affected.

I was in high school and college for the Reagan years and didn't pay much attention to politics. I didn't realize that Baker had seriously looked at Reagan's fitness.

 

Quote

Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” President, one “who reigns over the end of his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?

I doubt he understands anything...

[47of74]

This is an excellent, albeit lengthy, article: "How Trump Could Get Fired". There were many points discussed that I hadn't seen elsewhere.  A couple of excerpts:

Trump’s insulation from unwelcome information appears to be growing as his challenges mount. His longtime friend Christopher Ruddy, the C.E.O. of Newsmax Media, talked with him recently at Mar-a-Lago and at the White House. “He tends to not like a lot of negative feedback,” Ruddy told me. Ruddy has noticed that some of Trump’s associates are unwilling to give him news that will upset him. “I don’t think he realizes how fully intimidating he is to many people, because he’s such a large guy and he’s so powerful,” Ruddy went on. “I already sense that a lot of people don’t want to give him bad news about things. I’ve already been approached by several people that’ll say, ‘He’s got to hear this. Could you tell him?’ ”

Awww, he doesn't like negative feedback. Grow the hell up, everybody gets negative feedback.

 

The Framers of the Constitution planned ahead for the death of Presidents—hence, Vice-Presidents—but they failed to address an unnerving prospect: a President who is alive and very sick. Had Kennedy survived being shot, and been left comatose, there would have been no legal way to allow others to assume his powers. To fend off that possibility, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution in February, 1967. Under Section 4, a President can be removed if he is judged to be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” The assessment can be made either by the Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet secretaries or by a congressionally appointed body, such as a panel of medical experts. If the President objects—a theoretical crisis that scholars call “contested removal”—Congress has three weeks to debate and decide the issue. A two-thirds majority in each chamber is required to remove the President. There is no appeal.

However, the definition of what would constitute an inability to discharge the duties of office was left deliberately vague. Senator Birch Bayh, of Indiana, and others who drafted the clause wanted to insure that the final decision was not left to doctors. The fate of a President, Bayh wrote later, is “really a political question” that should rest on the “professional judgment of the political circumstances existing at the time.” The Twenty-fifth Amendment could therefore be employed in the case of a President who is not incapacitated but is considered mentally impaired.

I thought this was an interesting take on how to remove a sitting president.

 

Only one Administration is known to have considered using the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove a President. In 1987, at the age of seventy-six, Ronald Reagan was showing the strain of the Iran-Contra scandal. Aides observed that he was increasingly inattentive and inept. Howard H. Baker, Jr., a former senator who became Reagan’s chief of staff in February, 1987, found the White House in disarray. “He seemed to be despondent but not depressed,” Baker said later, of the President.

Baker assigned an aide named Jim Cannon to interview White House officials about the Administration’s dysfunction, and Cannon learned that Reagan was not reading even short documents. “They said he wouldn’t come over to work—all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence,” Cannon recalled, in “Landslide,” a 1988 account of Reagan’s second term, by Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus. One night, Baker summoned a small group of aides to his home. One of them, Thomas Griscom, told me recently that Cannon, who died in 2011, “floats this idea that maybe we’d invoke the Constitution.” Baker was skeptical, but, the next day, he proposed a diagnostic process of sorts: they would observe the President’s behavior at lunch.

In the event, Reagan was funny and alert, and Baker considered the debate closed. “We finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, ‘You know, boys, I think we’ve all seen this President is fully capable of doing the job,’ ” Griscom said. They never raised the issue again. In 1993, four years after leaving office, Reagan received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. His White House physicians said that they saw no symptoms during his Presidency. In 2015, researchers at Arizona State University published a study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, in which they examined transcripts of news conferences in the course of Reagan’s Presidency and discovered changes in his speech that are linked to the onset of dementia. Reagan had taken to repeating words and using “thing” in the place of specific nouns, but they could not prove that, while he was in office, his judgment and decision-making were affected.

I was in high school and college for the Reagan years and didn't pay much attention to politics. I didn't realize that Baker had seriously looked at Reagan's fitness.

 

Oscillating between the America of Kenosha and the America of Mar-a-Lago, Trump is neither fully a revolutionary nor an establishmentarian. He is ideologically indebted to both Patrick Buchanan and Goldman Sachs. He is what the political scientist Stephen Skowronek calls a “disjunctive” President, one “who reigns over the end of his party’s own orthodoxy.” Trump knows that Reaganite ideology is no longer politically viable, but he has yet to create a new conservatism beyond white-nationalist nostalgia. For the moment, all he can think to do is rekindle the embers of the campaign, to bathe, once more, in the stage light. It lifts him up. But what of the public? Does he understand that all citizens will have a hand in his fate?

 

I doubt he understands anything...

 

I heard that story too about Raygun.

 

Now I wonder if not for that pesky 22nd Amendment the GOP was so insistent on if they would have tried getting him to run for a third term, and kept him as a powerless figurehead once dementia had taken hold.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is learning — and sometimes mislearning — the lessons of the presidency"

Quote

As Howard J. Kittell gave President Trump a tour of former president Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation in Nashville a couple of months ago, the two discussed the seventh president’s military career, his controversial marriage, his image as a “tough, go-get-’em kind of guy” and his determination to keep the young country unified.

The Civil War never came up.

So on Monday, as Kittell checked his phone while stopped at a red light on the way to work, he was surprised to read that Trump had wondered aloud in a radio interview why there was a Civil War — and that he tied it to Jackson.

“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump said. “. . . And he was really angry that — he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ ”

Kittell, the president of Hermitage, was stunned. “I am glad that I was stopped at the moment,” he said.

For one thing, Jackson was long dead by the time the Civil War happened. For another, he is not generally viewed as having had a direct role in the conflict.

Many presidents fancy themselves amateur historians who are fascinated by the office and how others have approached the job, often deeply researching and studying leaders they want to emulate — or to avoid emulating.

Trump, who reads sparsely, is not one of the history buff types. But now that he is living in the museum-like White House, the president is learning — and sometimes mislearning — about the men in the oil paintings that fill his new home. His comments about those who have come before seem to reveal how little history he knew before taking office, and often confound historians attempting to discern the lessons he is taking away from his predecessors’ time in office.

...

Trump has said he looked to presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy for inspiration for his inaugural address, yet his remarks on that day were far from Kennedy’s call for selfless devotion or Reagan’s sunny optimism; instead he decried “American carnage.” Trump has also repeatedly claimed to have had the largest electoral victory since former Reagan — even though Barack Obama had larger victories in both 2008 and 2012, as did Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Trump has increasingly cited past presidents as he ruminates about his new job, but he often gets facts wrong or comes up with interpretations sharply at odds with the historical consensus. Either way, he appears to revel in the sense of being a part of U.S. history.

One week into his presidency, Trump gave Sean Hannity of Fox News a tour of the Oval Office, listing the presidents featured — Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, “the great Abraham Lincoln” and Jackson — but spending more time marveling at his phone and the papers piled on his desk. At one point, Hannity asked why Trump was reusing Reagan’s Oval Office rug.

“First of all, I liked it,” Trump said. “I liked the look, I like the lightness, and I like having it be Reagan. I like Reagan. I disagreed with him on some things, primarily trade — he was not as strong on trade as I felt he should have been, but that’s okay. But he represented us very well.”

“In your lifetime, who was the president that maybe you admire the most?” Hannity asked.

“Well, I like Reagan,” Trump said. “I didn’t like him on trade but other than trade, I liked him very much. And he was okay on trade, but not great.”

...

But the comment alarmed Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of the Chickasaw Nation, who said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday that he takes great offense to “anything nice said about Andrew Jackson.”

“That’s the one that concerns me the most,” Cole said. “My great-grandfather was forcibly removed out of —”

Host Joe Scarborough cut Cole off, saying he was more concerned about Trump’s comments about North Korea, about the news of the day. A spokeswoman for Cole has yet to respond to a request for the congressman to finish his sentence about his family’s painful history.

RE: the bolded text -- that's the understatement of the year.

[47of74]

Jesus Christ what a fornicating man baby...

msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/white-house-argues-dems-shouldnt-hurt-trumps-feelings?cid=sm_npd_ms_fb_ma

Quote

Congress recently agreed to a spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown, but the end result represented the latest in a series of defeats for Donald Trump. The White House made all kinds of demands for the legislation, each of which were largely ignored. By the time the agreement was announced, it was Democrats who were smiling.

And that’s not sitting well with the president, who on Monday praised the measure. Politico reported that Trump “was furious Tuesday morning with news coverage about the spending deal,” because the reports he saw made him look like “the loser” in the deal.

It also sent Trump himself to Twitter, where he warned Democrats that he believes the nation may “need” a government shutdown for reasons he didn’t fully explain. But the Huffington Post also highlighted an important detail about Mulvaney’s attempted spin.

Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that the reason Trump floated the possibility of a shutdown was all because of Democrats’ happiness at the spending deal. Over and over, he went after Democrats for hurting the president’s feelings.

Go Fornicate yourself Donnie.  You and other Republicans never gave a flying fornicate about President Obama's feelings. 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, 47of74 said:

Jesus Christ what a fornicating man baby...

msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/white-house-argues-dems-shouldnt-hurt-trumps-feelings?cid=sm_npd_ms_fb_ma

Go Fornicate yourself Donnie.  You and other Republicans never gave a flying fornicate about President Obama's feelings. 

But the ebil libruls are "snowflakes". Irony is definitely lost on some folks, isn't it?

 

 

This is a surprise -- apparently Barron will be going to school in DC next year. I would have wagered that he and Melania would be staying in NYC.

Quote

...

Asked about that in an interview with Bloomberg News, Trump said his family’s move to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a done deal. “They’re already set…. In fact, we just got him into a good school,” Trump said, though he declined to say which one.

And pressed about whether White House living would be good for his son, Trump indicated that Barron would be protected.

“It’s a cocoon,” Trump said.

There are plenty of great schools in this area that are used to high profile families.

[VelociRapture]

Just a FYI if it hasn't been mentioned - the House may vote on Trumpcare as soon as tomorrow. Start calling your Reps guys - I called DeLauro (even though she isn't at risk of voting for it) simply to show my support for her.

For anyone needing a script or help finding their Rep, March of Dimes has a page setup to help. Simply enter your contact information and they'll tell you your Rep's name and give you a script to use. It's focused on the importance of prenatal care (obvious reasons), but it's a good starting point.

http://actioncenter.marchofdimes.org/marchofdimes/app/make-a-call?0&engagementId=343674&ep=AAAAC2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxlu8JK0b77p05bBFRrEwbj0EjEv6v-SN_XWvUDblBPvoSFyDu--9i8hnJ8HFLgNKS__yVtbyqqmYu--O7K5vqYWuKiTuK5fQPRYgKP5RFOHQ&lp=0

(Also, apologies I don't participate more. Having a baby has me busy and I've been using other forums to try and escape the reality of the world a bit.)

[Destiny]

Per CNN, they have the votes to repeal. </3

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, VelociRapture said:

Just a FYI if it hasn't been mentioned - the House may vote on Trumpcare as soon as tomorrow. Start calling your Reps guys - I called DeLauro (even though she isn't at risk of voting for it) simply to show my support for her.

For anyone needing a script or help finding their Rep, March of Dimes has a page setup to help. Simply enter your contact information and they'll tell you your Rep's name and give you a script to use. It's focused on the importance of prenatal care (obvious reasons), but it's a good starting point.

http://actioncenter.marchofdimes.org/marchofdimes/app/make-a-call?0&engagementId=343674&ep=AAAAC2Flc0NpcGhlcjAxlu8JK0b77p05bBFRrEwbj0EjEv6v-SN_XWvUDblBPvoSFyDu--9i8hnJ8HFLgNKS__yVtbyqqmYu--O7K5vqYWuKiTuK5fQPRYgKP5RFOHQ&lp=0

(Also, apologies I don't participate more. Having a baby has me busy and I've been using other forums to try and escape the reality of the world a bit.)

I sent a fax to my extra-super-duper pro-life Representative telling him that he can't call himself pro-life and vote for the AHCA. I talked about how this bill will take away prenatal care from pregnant women, and pregnant women who don't receive proper care during their pregnancies run the risk of having their babies die or be born sickly. If he really believes in "the sanctity of life" as he claims to, he can't in good conscience support a bill that could lead to the death of a baby.

 The AHCA bill will obviously hurt a lot of people other than expectant mothers, but my Rep. is a conservative pro-life Christian, so I went for what has the best chance of working on him. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo featured an article about tomorrow's vote: "What happens if the House GOP health bill actually passes? Then it gets really ugly."

Quote

Republicans are engaged in a frantic effort to assemble enough votes in the House for the latest version of the American Health Care Act, their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. After so many pratfalls and so much public disgust with what they’re attempting, can they actually pull this off?

It’s possible. So it’s worth running through the various scenarios to see how things might proceed from here, if they do.

...

 

Scenario 1:

Quote

This version of the AHCA dies in the House. While many Republican House members haven’t said where they stand, the number of explicit GOP “No” votes has been hovering around 20 in the past couple of days, with many others leaning against it or undecided; if they lose 23, the bill fails. I think this is the most likely scenario, but that’s just a gut feeling. The politics of this debate are just dreadful for Republican members, who are already terrified that 2018 will be a “wave” election that sweeps them out of office, and they’re acutely aware of the anger that has built up against their bill and how broadly unpopular it is. That may provide enough of an incentive for those last few to bail on it, especially if it looks as though it can’t succeed. There’s no great political outcome on offer, but it’s better to vote against something that failed than to vote for it. At least then you can claim you had something better in mind.

 

Scenario 2:

Quote

They pass a bill in the House, which then dies in the Senate. Although Republicans are trying to push this latest bill through the House before the Congressional Budget Office gives it a score, this is in many ways the same bill that the CBO said would result in 24 million Americans losing their health coverage. If it loses a mere three Republican votes in the Senate (where they have a 52-48 advantage), it’s over. In some ways, this is the best political scenario for Democrats: The ACA remains intact, but they get to savage GOP members of the House for voting for something so dreadful.

 

Scenario 3:

Quote

The bill passes in the House, gets radically changed by the Senate, and then fails when it comes back to the House. Members of the House leadership have been trying to persuade moderate Republicans to vote for this bill on the basis that once the Senate gets a hold of it, their version will be less horrifying, and then the two houses could pass something more like what the Senate produces. Which is possible — but the problem is that if the Senate moderates the bill, it could lose the support of the Freedom Caucus members who are now supporting the current version precisely because of the widespread suffering it would cause. “They better not change it one iota,” said Freedom Caucus member David Brat, visions of millions of people being kicked off Medicaid no doubt dancing in his eyes. “If they change it, you’re not going to have 218 [votes].” It’s impossible to know how many votes such a bill would lose in the House until we know what it contains, but the general presumption has been that nothing conservative enough to pass the House could pass the Senate, and nothing liberal enough to pass the Senate could pass the House.

I despise David Brat. The only name more apropos for him is Douchecanoe.

Scenario 4:

Quote

The bill passes in the House, the Senate passes a version, then the two houses work out a compromise in the conference committee that majorities of both houses can support. This is the ultimate path to victory, but it depends on a lot. Among other things, Republicans in the Senate would have to craft a bill that meets the requirements of “reconciliation,” which mandates that only provisions with a direct effect on the budget are allowed. Otherwise, the bill would be subject to a filibuster, and be doomed. That means certain provisions that are policy changes without direct budgetary effects — such as allowing insurers in one state to sell plans in the other 49 states, something most Republicans want — couldn’t be included. They could pass some reconciliation-ready provisions without undoing the whole ACA, such as undoing its expansion of Medicaid or slashing the subsidies people now get to help afford insurance. But it’s clear that they’d rather rip the bandage off all at once.

 

Quote

...

Republicans certainly want to pass something, if only to show that they kept their promise and they can get things done. But if that something looks as though it could mean the end of their careers, don’t be surprised if enough of them shake their heads and step back from the precipice at some point or other during this process. They will have many opportunities to pull the plug.

 

I know my Rep is very pro-ACA, so I didn't even call his office today -- I've called twice in the last week. I hope the powers-that-be are not able to strong-arm enough moderate Repubs to vote for this atrocity.

[candygirl200413]

Douchecanoe is one of my favorite words and does accurately describe Brat.

I'm calling my pro-ACA Rep tomorrow morning, cause I heard the vote is at one.

[Mercer]

I contacted my legislators even though it won't make any difference; neither of my senators would ever vote to repeal Obamacare, and my representative is hopeless on basically any issue so he won't care what I say. At least I tried.

I'm really panicked about this. I'm supposed to have some diagnostic tests on Friday but I'm considering calling my doctor and claiming I made a miraculous recovery and it's no longer necessary. It won't count as a pre-existing condition if there's no diagnosis, right? I need future insurance more than I currently need treatment.

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, Mercer said:

I contacted my legislators even though it won't make any difference; neither of my senators would ever vote to repeal Obamacare, and my representative is hopeless on basically any issue so he won't care what I say. At least I tried.

I'm really panicked about this. I'm supposed to have some diagnostic tests on Friday but I'm considering calling my doctor and claiming I made a miraculous recovery and it's no longer necessary. It won't count as a pre-existing condition if there's no diagnosis, right? I need future insurance more than I currently need treatment.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you saw the doctor, even without a diagnosis, the insurance company could consider it pre-existing. Remember that the rules always favor the insurance company. In fact, they can do this odious practice where, if a "reasonable person" would have sought treatment for your issue, it could be considered pre-existing.

 

George Will and I don't often agree, but he is definitely no fan of Agent Orange. This is a thoughtful piece: "Trump has a dangerous disability"

Quote

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.

In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.

Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: “A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.” Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.

What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history. As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.

The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: “I would bomb the s--- out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”

...

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

 

[formergothardite]

10 hours ago, Destiny said:

Per CNN, they have the votes to repeal. </3

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk. What happened? What dirt did they dig up on these folks to get them to switch? 

I'll call my damn representative who won't answer emails and literally gives no fucks about anything but himself. It won't do any good, but maybe it will help me feel better. 

[apple1]

"untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence"

A perfect description of Trump. And terrifying.

[Audrey2]

My gut says two things regarding Trump and information. 

1. He is widely known not to be a student of history, so any time someone tells him a historical fact, it's new to him. He figures he's the smartest person in America, so if he doesn't know, no one else knows either.

2. He bases what the general population knows on what the people on the street in the Jay walking segments of the old Jay Leno show know. Many of us who caught them found them especially cringe worthy. 

[apple1]

23 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

My gut says two things regarding Trump and information. 

1. He is widely known not to be a student of history, so any time someone tells him a historical fact, it's new to him. He figures he's the smartest person in America, so if he doesn't know, no one else knows either.

2. He bases what the general population knows on what the people on the street in the Jay walking segments of the old Jay Leno show know. Many of us who caught them found them especially cringe worthy. 

I KNEW it was a probably when, way back during the campaign, he actually said that he didn't like to read.

Point 2 of this post: Anytime he starts a statement with "many people" you can know the next part is complete fiction.

[Flossie]

Jimmy Kimmel sends someone out periodically to do 'man on the street' interviews for his Lie Witness News bit.  The interviewer always asks the most outrageous questions.  Like the time the inteviewer asked people if they'd seen the speech that Martin Luther King gave this morning.  Out of 14 people who were asked, seven of them said they saw the speech.  One guy even mentioned that it looked like MLK had gained some weight recently and suggested he get a treadmill.

Then there was the time the interviewer asked if the person if they preferred Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act.  A surprisingly large number of people didn't realize they were the same thing, and offered their opinions on which one they liked better.

People have been asked if they watched the Super Bowl, a week before the Super Bowl was played.  I'm just making up the question here, but it went something like this:  "So when the Jets pulled that last minute win over the Browns by pulling that Statue of Liberty play, a lot of people think that it was a dirty move and they shouldn't have been given the winning point.  What do you think?"  Some people obviously don't follow football and tried to bluff their way through the interview instead of just admitting that they didn't know.

People have been asked if they watched the Oscars before the Oscars had actually occured.  When someone would say, "Yeah, I watched." the interviewer would pounce.  "Did you watch Halle Barry's speech when she won Best Actress for Pride and Prejudice?"  "Yeah, she deserved it."  "Oh, so you watched the movie?"  "Yeah."  "What did you take away from the movie?  What did you learn?"  "Uh, well, a strong black woman has to take pride in herself, and uh, fight back against the prejudice that, you know, happens." 

The point is that some people can't admit that they don't know something, so they will just ramble on hoping that they're actually getting it right or that no one will realize that they don't know what they're talking about.  That's Donald Trump.  He's the real life version of Lie Witness News, and he's got the freaking nuclear codes!

[JMarie]

11 hours ago, Mercer said:

I contacted my legislators even though it won't make any difference; neither of my senators would ever vote to repeal Obamacare, and my representative is hopeless on basically any issue so he won't care what I say. At least I tried.

I'm really panicked about this. I'm supposed to have some diagnostic tests on Friday but I'm considering calling my doctor and claiming I made a miraculous recovery and it's no longer necessary. It won't count as a pre-existing condition if there's no diagnosis, right? I need future insurance more than I currently need treatment.

It's horrible that this could be a future decision many Americans face.

[GreyhoundFan]

4 hours ago, apple1 said:

"untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence"

A perfect description of Trump. And terrifying.

I often disagree with George Will, but he does write beautifully. That description of the tangerine toddler jumped off the screen at me.

 

"Trump signs order aimed at allowing churches to engage in more political activity"

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President Trump on Thursday said he would direct the Internal Revenue Service to relax enforcement of rules barring tax-exempt churches from participating in politics as part of a much-anticipated executive order on religious liberties.

The order — which Trump formally unveiled in a Rose Garden ceremony with Christian leaders — also offers unspecified “regulatory relief” for religious objectors to an Obama administration mandate, already scaled back by the courts, that required contraception services as part of health plans, the officials said.

“For too long the federal government has used the state as a weapon against people of faith,” Trump said, later telling the religious leaders gathered for the event that “you’re now in a position to say what you want to say … No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors.”

But the sweep of the order — unveiled on a National Day of Prayer — was significantly narrower than a February draft, which had alarmed civil libertarians, gay rights and other liberal advocacy groups and prompted threats of lawsuits.

...

The order released Thursday instead included a blanket statement that “it is the policy of the administration to protect and vigorously promote religious liberty.”

While Trump’s action was applauded by many in the Rose Garden, some religious groups criticized him for what they characterized as a vague directive that didn’t live up to his campaign rhetoric.

...

Until Trump elevated it during his campaign, the Johnson Amendment was rarely a top priority for advocates of religious liberty. In fact, some faith groups have said they strongly support the amendment that Trump is weakening. Requiring churches to stay out of politics, they say, is key to separating church and state.

The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a leading faith-based group focused on religious freedom, has said it supports the Johnson Amendment, because keeping politics and religion separate is best for religion.

Rabbi Jack Moline, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, criticized the executive order in a statement.

“For decades, the Johnson Amendment has prevented houses of worship from being turned into partisan political tools. A majority of clergy — and Americans — support the status quo and oppose political endorsements from the pulpit.”

...

The picture at the top of this article is nauseating. The shit-eating grin on Agent Orange made me stabby. I love how it's evangelicals who feel persecuted, but have no problem clamping down on any other religion.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Their dream president’: Trump just gave white evangelicals a big boost"

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During the election, Donald Trump made a promise that few people anticipated: He would do away with the Johnson Amendment, which in 1954 effectively barred pastors from endorsing or opposing candidates from the pulpit.

In recent years, religious liberty issues have gotten caught up in debates over contraception and LGBT rights. But Trump’s promise was a throwback to the 1950s, an era when many pastors felt they were freer to say what they believed. He repeated the promise to religious leaders during his campaign, and on Thursday — the National Day of Prayer — they saw him begin to deliver.

The president first announced his plans for an executive order on religious liberty to about 45 pastors in the White House on Wednesday night, according to Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas.

The pastors, many of whom were on Trump’s evangelical advisory council during his campaign, were joined in the Blue Room by several members of the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence; Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; chief strategist Steve Bannon; and chief of staff Reince Priebus. Jeffress said administration officials were still working on the details, but Trump promised to effectively halt the Johnson Amendment. (It would take an act of Congress to change the law.) On Thursday, the president held a gathering of interfaith leaders at the Rose Garden.

Jeffress told the group that the amendment was a hindrance, saying that left-leaning groups have used it to “harass” pastors like him for speaking out on political issues. “It’s time to take the muzzle off pastors and allow them to speak openly,” Jeffress said.

The announcement was an “unexpected delight and pleasant surprise” to people in the room, said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. During the dinner, those gathered also learned that Congress would vote Thursday on repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would include pulling funding from Planned Parenthood. “These folks walked off the White House about 10 feet off the ground,” Reed said.

...

During the election, Trump made a special effort to reach out to white evangelicals in particular, meeting with several of them in Trump Tower and creating the evangelical advisory council that gave him feedback throughout the campaign. He received support from other religious groups, but white evangelicals voted for him overwhelmingly (exit polls showed 80 percent) compared to other groups.

...

Ahead of Trump’s 100th day in office last week, some religious conservatives, like the Rev. CJ Conner, a pastor of a Kansas church, were worried the president could “forget us” and protections for Christian institutions.

“We have sacrificed for you, Mr. President,” Conner wrote in an open letter published at Charisma, a magazine for Pentecostals, in which he urged Trump to uphold “Christian freedoms.”

“Thousands of us have sacrificed our standing in our denominations,” Conner wrote. “Some have been fired from our congregations for supporting you. We have suffered in many ways, but our families have suffered the most.”

...

The biggest win for religious conservatives has been Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which they consider key to winning future cases involving religious liberty or abortion. Trump has also rolled back federal guidelines specifying that transgender students have the right to use public school restrooms that match their gender identity.

“Interestingly, as much as President Bush is revered by evangelicals, in a certain way, they have even more trust of Donald Trump,” Jeffress said.

...

Abortion rights opponents have been pleased by Trump’s appointments, including making Charmaine Yoest — the former head of Americans United for Life — the assistant secretary of communications for Health and Human Services. Penny Nance, president of the conservative group Concerned Women for America, said she was nervous when Trump took office because he had no record in Washington. But she said that if it reaches his desk, she expects Trump to sign a bill that would ban abortion past five months of pregnancy.

When Nance saw several presidential or vice presidential staffers appear at the March for Life alongside Pence in January, she was encouraged Trump would deliver on his promise to oppose abortion. “It was this moment for me that was, ‘This is legit.’ ” She said she has been invited to the White House seven times.

Other leaders are pleased with the continued access they’ve had to the White House.

“I think evangelicals have found their dream president,” said Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University — where Trump will give a commencement address on May 13. “I’ve never seen a White House have such a close relationship with faith leaders than this one.”

...

You know it's bad when Ralph Reed and JF Jr are applauding something.