United States Congress of Fail - Part 4

[formergothardite]

Was Paul Ryan sure that woman wasn't being sarcastic? 

[candygirl200413]

Don't forget the follow up:

Better be grateful for those crumbs!**

**sarcasm 

[GrumpyGran]

41 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Was Paul Ryan sure that woman wasn't being sarcastic? 

I'm pretty sure she was being sarcastic and it went right over his head. And what does that second tweet mean? He's happy that the middle class thinks they're getting crumbs? I've been laboring under the delusion that he is mean-spirited and ambitious but is he just incredibly dumb? He acts like he's in the same boat as most Americans. If we're getting crumbs he's getting a 8-tier wedding cake!

[formergothardite]

Sarcasm is going right over his head. He truly is mean and dumb. 

[47of74]

Oh, I see news of Paul Ryan's latest social media dud already landed here on Free Jinger. 

I would love to have said to Paul Ryan hey asshole an extra buck fifty an hour would not cover the cost of my surgery, which if I hadn't had last year I probably wouldn't have been able have the surgery thanks to the fucking around they all did with ACA.

My operation cost about $30,000 before insurance.  I had to pay about $8,000 out of pocket in insurance premiums and deductible to have that surgery.  Fuck you, Paul Ryan, the cost of a Costco membership would have made little difference in the cost of that.

[fraurosena]

There is a Dutch saying that comes to mind when reading this: They're simply filling one hole with another.

The U.S. government is set to borrow nearly $1 trillion this year, an 84 percent jump from last year

Quote

It was another crazy news week, so it's understandable if you missed a small but important announcement from the Treasury Department: The federal government is on track to borrow nearly $1 trillion this fiscal year — Trump's first full year in charge of the budget.

That's almost double what the government borrowed in fiscal year 2017.

Here are the exact figures: The U.S. Treasury expects to borrow $955 billion this fiscal year, according to a documents released Wednesday. It's the highest amount of borrowing in six years, and a big jump from the $519 billion the federal government borrowed last year.

Treasury mainly attributed the increase to the “fiscal outlook.” The Congressional Budget Office was more blunt. In a report this week, the CBO said tax receipts are going to be lower because of the new tax law.

The uptick in borrowing is yet another complication in the heated debates in Congress over whether to spend more money on infrastructure, the military, disaster relief and other domestic programs. The deficit is already up significantly, even before Congress allots more money to any of these areas.

“We're addicted to debt,” says Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He blames both parties for the situation.

What's particularly jarring is this is the first time borrowing has jumped this much (as a share of GDP) in a non-recession time since Ronald Reagan was president, says Ernie Tedeschi, a former senior adviser to the U.S. Treasury who is now head of fiscal analysis at Evercore ISI. Under Reagan, borrowing spiked because of a buildup in the military, something Trump is advocating again.

[graph]

Trump didn't mention the debt — or the ongoing budget deficits — in his State of the Union address. The absence of any mention of the national debt was frustrating for Goldwein and others who warn that America has a major economic problem looming.

“It is terrible. Those deficits and the debt that keeps rising is a serious problem, not only in the long run, but right now,” Harvard economist Martin Feldstein, a former Reagan adviser, told Bloomberg.

The White House got a taste of just how problematic this debt situation could get this week. Investors are concerned about all the additional borrowing and the likelihood of higher inflation, which is why the interest rates on U.S. government bonds hit the highest level since 2014. That, in turn, partly drove the worst weekly sell-off in the stock market in two years.

The belief in Washington and on Wall Street has long been that the U.S. government could just keep issuing debt because people around the world are eager to buy up this safe-haven asset. But there may be a limit to how much the market wants, especially if inflation starts rising and investors prefer to ditch bonds for higher-returning stocks.

“Some of my Wall Street clients are starting to talk recession in 2019 because of these issues. Fiscal policy is just out of control,” says Peter Davis, a former tax economist in Congress who now runs Davis Capital Investment Ideas.

The Federal Reserve was also buying a lot of U.S. Treasury debt since the crisis, helping to beef up demand. But the Fed recently decided to stop doing that now that the economy has improved. It's another wrinkle as Treasury has to look for new buyers.

Tedeschi, the former Treasury adviser to the Obama administration, calls it “concerning, but not a crisis.” Still, he says it's a “big risk” to plan on borrowing so much in the coming years.

Trump's Treasury forecasts borrowing over $1 trillion in 2019 and over $1.1 trillion in 2020. Before taking office, Trump described himself as the “king of debt,” although he campaigned on reducing the national debt.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget predicts the U.S. deficit will hit $1 trillion by 2019 and stay there for a while. The latest borrowing figure — $955 billion — released this week was determined from a survey of bond market participants, who tend to be even faster to react to the changing policy landscape and change their forecasts.

Both parties claim they want to be “fiscally responsible,” but Goldwein says they both pass legislation that adds to the debt. Politicians argue this is the last time they'll pass a bill that makes the deficit worse, but so far, they just keep going.

The latest example of largesse is the GOP tax bill. It's expected to add $1 trillion or more to the debt, according to nonpartisan analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation (and yes, that's after accounting for some increased economic growth).

But even before that, Goldwein points to the 2015 extension of many tax cuts and the 2014 delays in Medicare reimbursement cuts.

“Every time you feed your addiction, you grow your addiction,” says Goldwein.

There doesn't seem to be any appetite for budgetary restraint in Washington, but the market may force Congress' hand.

Wah? We cut taxes for the rich, and now we have less tax revenue and a bigly debt? Who'd've thunk? 

Idiots.

[onekidanddone]

3 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Hello my name is Paul Ryan and I am a sycophantic shit weasel 

[47of74]

37 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Hello my name is Paul Ryan and I am a sycophantic shit weasel 

Hey now.  That's insulting.  To sycophantic shit weasels.

[GreyhoundFan]

"This is the week that the GOP truly became the party of Trump"

Spoiler

This was the week when the Republican Party finally went all in with President Trump. What once seemed unlikely is now reality. The Republican establishment — there are a few dissenting voices, of course — has succumbed to the power of the presidency, and this president in particular.

This coming together has taken place gradually. The path has been rocky at times. But the embrace of the president by elected Republicans could not have been warmer or fuller than shown in the past week.

There was the enthusiasm Republicans in the House chamber displayed when Trump delivered his State of the Union address Tuesday. There was the all-in-the-family chitchat when a conversational and relaxed Trump spoke at the Republican retreat in West Virginia on Thursday.

Then on Friday came the memo prepared for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee alleging misconduct by the FBI with regard to the Russia investigation. It was released with the full blessing of the president (over objections by FBI officials) and of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who claimed, despite the thrust of the memo, that it was not “an indictment of our institutions, of our justice system.”

Dating back to the 2016 campaign, Trump presided over a divided, even hostile, Republican establishment. Ryan’s awkward relationship with Trump during the presidential campaign came to symbolize the plight of a party captured in a hostile takeover by a candidate operating outside the boundaries.

For those in the leadership, there seemed to be no good place to land. During the campaign, Ryan tried various approaches depending on the events and Trump’s behavior, eventually declaring after the “Access Hollywood” tape that he would not worry about campaigning for Trump for the duration of the campaign. Nothing quite worked for him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) adopted a more sphinxlike attitude when Trump’s behavior caused embarrassment or worse, saying as little as possible and trying to stay out of the bright lights. That too came at a price.

Republicans celebrated when Trump was elected, hoping that he would allow them to set the agenda, though many had obvious reservations about the new president. Then came the inaugural address. With the collective political establishment of both parties behind him on the West Front of the Capitol, Trump lit into those in power for having enriched themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans. He sounded nothing like the leader of the Republican Party at that moment.

In succeeding months, the president never hesitated to express his displeasure or disappointment with GOP leaders on Capitol Hill. Yes, there were moments when they all put on brave faces and tried to show the world that they were all friends. But the party’s failure to find consensus on an alternative to the Affordable Care Act brought one rebuke after another from the president, especially aimed at McConnell and his Senate. Showing his displeasure, Trump reached briefly to Democratic leaders.

The turnaround in the relationship came from two directions.

The first was pressure from the outside. Party leaders began to recognize that rank-and-file Republicans wanted the GOP to be the party of Trump rather than for leaders to keep their distance from the president.

This sentiment appeared to go beyond Trump’s hardcore base. Big majorities of Republicans said they approved of the job Trump was doing, and his personal ratings were far better than those of Ryan, McConnell or any other prominent Republican leader.

Republican leaders could see that opposition to Trump came at a price with their constituencies. GOP candidates saw the same thing. Candidates who did not fully embrace the president risked backlash from Republican voters, though a full embrace brought risks to attracting support from other voters.

The other major turning point came from the inside, with the passage of the tax cut bill in late December. Finally, the president had a big legislative achievement, thanks to congressional Republicans. The victory party Trump staged at the White House became an extravagant love fest. The president heaped praise on all the members of Congress who had engineered the bill’s passage. In turn, they lavishly praised the beaming president.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) delivered the ultimate in compliments: “We are going to make this the greatest presidency we have seen, not only in generations, but maybe ever.” Even Trump, who revels in being the center of attention, seemed startled by Hatch’s exultation. “Boy, that was good!” he said. “Paul Ryan just said, ‘How good was that?’ ”

Until this week, the steady march toward mutual embrace between the president and the party establishment mostly had to do with GOP lawmakers being happy to have a president championing a conventionally conservative agenda, from tax cuts to regulatory rollbacks to the nomination of conservative judges. This is the heart of the bargain Republicans made with Trump. But it is not a benign bargain.

The Nunes memo moves the relationship to a different place. Its release puts much of the Republican leadership fully behind the president in his efforts to discredit the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and possibly remove more officials at the top of the FBI.

The president has tried for months to discredit Mueller’s work. If he was looking for allies to cast the Mueller investigation as partisan and therefore illegitimate, he could not have found a more willing partner than Nunes.

The key charge in the memo is that Justice Department officials seeking approval for surveillance of a former Trump campaign aide had failed to tell the relevant court that the infamous dossier preparer had been funded by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, though officials did note it came from a politically biased source.

Trump tweeted Saturday morning that the memo “totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe.” Again he called the investigation a witch hunt, adding, “This is an American disgrace!”

The fact that the memo’s release came with the imprimatur of the House speaker and many other leading Republicans only adds weight to what has become a Trump-led effort to muddy the eventual conclusions of the investigation. With public opinion among Republicans likely to follow, Mueller’s goal to deliver a report that will be seen as legitimate has become materially more difficult.

There were protests from some in the party on Friday. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) issued a statement saying that attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department serve no interests other than those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Mueller investigation, he said, must be allowed to proceed without interference.

“Our nation’s elected officials, including the president, must stop looking at this investigation through the warped lens of politics and manufacturing partisan sideshows,” McCain said. “If we continue to undermine our own rule of law, we are doing Putin’s job for him.”

Still, GOP dissenters remain among a distinct minority, largely the handful of Republican elected officials who long ago broke from the president, along with the “Never Trump” cadre loyal to the old GOP but estranged from the party of Trump. For the Republican Party, this has been an extraordinary transformation in a remarkably short time.

Most of them have gone to the Dumpy Dark Side.

[onekidanddone]

7 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

I'm pretty sure she was being sarcastic and it went right over his head. And what does that second tweet mean? He's happy that the middle class thinks they're getting crumbs? I've been laboring under the delusion that he is mean-spirited and ambitious but is he just incredibly dumb? He acts like he's in the same boat as most Americans. If we're getting crumbs he's getting a 8-tier wedding cake!

Way off topic, but @GrumpyGran, is your profile pic of Horseshoe Curve?

[fraurosena]

 

[GrumpyGran]

9 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Way off topic, but @GrumpyGran, is your profile pic of Horseshoe Curve?

I think so, isn't that in PA? The pix came from my DIL, they took my grandson, who loves trains like Grandma, there.

[onekidanddone]

4 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

I think so, isn't that in PA? The pix came from my DIL, they took my grandson, who loves trains like Grandma, there.

Yup. I'm a 54 year old woman who quite obsessed by trains.

 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Yup. I'm a 54 year old woman who quite obsessed by trains.

 

The snow there right now is so beautiful! You are the bomb! I've got to get there one day.

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh, this ass is all we need (note sarcasm): "Holocaust denier running for Congress has no opponents in Republican primary"

Spoiler

Like most candidates running for Congress, Arthur Jones has a campaign website.

It outlines the Republican candidate’s education background, his stance on issues and how to donate to his campaign to represent the Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District.

It also lays out Jones’s unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic views.

In a section called “Holocaust?” Jones describes the atrocities as a “racket” and “the biggest, blackest, lie in history.” Under another tab titled “Flags of Conflict,” he lists the Confederate flag first and describes it as “a symbol of White pride and White resistance” and “the flag of a White counter revolution.”

And in his most recent blog post — dated Aug. 24, 2017 — Jones railed against “Radical Leftists” and blamed them for starting racial violence in Charlottesville about two weeks before. Heather Heyer, 32, who had been there to protest a white supremacists rally, died after a car ran into a crowd of demonstrators. A self-professed neo-Nazi has been charged with first-degree murder in the incident. Jones painted the death as an accident.

Despite his views, Jones is all but certain to become the GOP nominee for one of Illinois’s most prominent congressional districts, one that includes parts of Chicago and several suburbs to the west and southwest. Jones is running unopposed in the Republican primary — and the deadline to file to run against him was in early December.

His chances of winning the seat are extremely slim. The district is rated “safely Democratic,” according to Ballotpedia, and two Democrats are facing off against each other: Daniel Lipinski, the incumbent, and Marie Newman. An independent candidate, Mat Tomkowiak, withdrew from the race earlier.

Still, even getting that far in the race was a new milestone for Jones. Over three decades, he has unsuccessfully thrown his hat into the ring for the 3rd District seat seven times, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Jones’s candidacy comes at a time when far-right groups have had new clout in the national discussion: Some hate groups have ramped up recruitment on college campuses and, for a time, alt-right leaders imagined they had an ally in the White House in the form of Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to President Trump.

And when Chicago Sun-Times reporter Frank Main drove to Lyons, Ill., the suburb where Jones lives, the candidate was no less vocal about his extreme views.

“Well first of all, I’m running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany, all right?” Jones said. “To me, the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket.”

Jones did not immediately respond to interview requests Sunday afternoon. It’s unclear how he arrived at the opinion that the Holocaust, a systematic genocide in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime, was a sham.

In 2016, the state election board tossed Jones from the ballot for the 3rd District for “flagrant disregard of the election code,” the Chicago Tribune reported, although a lawyer for the board did not specify why Jones’s signatures were not valid.

The newspaper that year also highlighted Jones’s former membership in the American National Socialist Workers Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a relatively recent offshoot of the National Socialist Movement, “one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.”

Representatives from the Illinois Republican Party and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supports conservative candidates, did not respond to questions sent by email Sunday. But Tim Schneider, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, told the Sun-Times that the party denounced Jones.

“The Illinois Republican Party and our country have no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones,” Schneider told the newspaper. “We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District.”

It's scary when crazies like this can be a candidate for national office representing a major political party.

[onekidanddone]

43 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, this ass is all we need (note sarcasm): "Holocaust denier running for Congress has no opponents in Republican primary"

  Reveal hidden contents

Like most candidates running for Congress, Arthur Jones has a campaign website.

It outlines the Republican candidate’s education background, his stance on issues and how to donate to his campaign to represent the Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District.

It also lays out Jones’s unapologetically racist and anti-Semitic views.

In a section called “Holocaust?” Jones describes the atrocities as a “racket” and “the biggest, blackest, lie in history.” Under another tab titled “Flags of Conflict,” he lists the Confederate flag first and describes it as “a symbol of White pride and White resistance” and “the flag of a White counter revolution.”

And in his most recent blog post — dated Aug. 24, 2017 — Jones railed against “Radical Leftists” and blamed them for starting racial violence in Charlottesville about two weeks before. Heather Heyer, 32, who had been there to protest a white supremacists rally, died after a car ran into a crowd of demonstrators. A self-professed neo-Nazi has been charged with first-degree murder in the incident. Jones painted the death as an accident.

Despite his views, Jones is all but certain to become the GOP nominee for one of Illinois’s most prominent congressional districts, one that includes parts of Chicago and several suburbs to the west and southwest. Jones is running unopposed in the Republican primary — and the deadline to file to run against him was in early December.

His chances of winning the seat are extremely slim. The district is rated “safely Democratic,” according to Ballotpedia, and two Democrats are facing off against each other: Daniel Lipinski, the incumbent, and Marie Newman. An independent candidate, Mat Tomkowiak, withdrew from the race earlier.

Still, even getting that far in the race was a new milestone for Jones. Over three decades, he has unsuccessfully thrown his hat into the ring for the 3rd District seat seven times, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Jones’s candidacy comes at a time when far-right groups have had new clout in the national discussion: Some hate groups have ramped up recruitment on college campuses and, for a time, alt-right leaders imagined they had an ally in the White House in the form of Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to President Trump.

And when Chicago Sun-Times reporter Frank Main drove to Lyons, Ill., the suburb where Jones lives, the candidate was no less vocal about his extreme views.

“Well first of all, I’m running for Congress not the chancellor of Germany, all right?” Jones said. “To me, the Holocaust is what I said it is: It’s an international extortion racket.”

Jones did not immediately respond to interview requests Sunday afternoon. It’s unclear how he arrived at the opinion that the Holocaust, a systematic genocide in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime, was a sham.

In 2016, the state election board tossed Jones from the ballot for the 3rd District for “flagrant disregard of the election code,” the Chicago Tribune reported, although a lawyer for the board did not specify why Jones’s signatures were not valid.

The newspaper that year also highlighted Jones’s former membership in the American National Socialist Workers Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a relatively recent offshoot of the National Socialist Movement, “one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States.”

Representatives from the Illinois Republican Party and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which supports conservative candidates, did not respond to questions sent by email Sunday. But Tim Schneider, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, told the Sun-Times that the party denounced Jones.

“The Illinois Republican Party and our country have no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones,” Schneider told the newspaper. “We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District.”

It's scary when crazies like this can be a candidate for national office representing a major political party.

And Trump will endorse him.  What I want to know is why isn't any  Rethug running against  him?

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

And Trump will endorse him.  What I want to know is why isn't any  Rethug running against  him?

Why isn't a Dem?

[47of74]

Why isn't a Dem?

 

Actually there is a couple Democrats running in their primary for they seat. It’s rated as safely Democratic but I hope the Democrats hammer that Nazi holocaust denying son of a bitch fuck face pig from now until Election Day.

 

And, yes, I hate Illinois Nazis.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[47of74]

Then this happened today;

Quote

The Supreme Court declined Monday a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block a lower court ruling that ordered Pennsylvania to redraw congressional lines.

Justice Samuel Alito issued the order.

The ruling will have massive ramifications for the 2018 midterm elections, where Republicans' control of the US House is on the line and Democrats are targeting a handful of GOP-held seats in Pennsylvania.

Republicans had hoped the Supreme Court would keep the current maps -- where Republicans hold 12 of 18 seats in Pennsylvania and are expected to keep a 13th in a March special election -- in place through this year's elections.

My question is how long until Donnie Butt Plugs starts calling Alito names...

[onekidanddone]

12 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Then this happened today;

My question is how long until Donnie Butt Plugs starts calling Alito names...

TMI alert might be NSFW:

Spoiler

Oh don't say Butt Plugs.... the teenage daughter of somebody I know ordered one through the mail. Said teen's parents were not thrilled. 

 

[fraurosena]

Thank Rufus!

Bachmann won't run for Franken's Senate seat because she did not hear a 'call from God'

Quote

Michele Bachmann has decided that she will not run for former Sen. Al Franken’s (D) Minnesota seat, saying that she did not get a “sense from the lord” that she should launch a bid.

“It became very clear to me that I wasn’t hearing any call from God to do this,” Bachmann told radio host Jan Markell, as reported Monday by Minnesota Public Radio.

Bachmann, a former GOP representative and presidential candidate, said in a January interview that she was considering running for Franken’s seat, and that she would be “asking God” if she should run.

Days later, a billboard in St. Paul depicted “God” telling Bachmann that she shouldn’t.

Franken stepped down from the Senate early this year after several accusations of sexual misconduct against him prompted multiple Democratic colleagues to call for his resignation.

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Tina Smith (D) was sworn in as Franken’s replacement, and she has said she will run in November in a special election to finish the last two years of his term.

Bachmann served eight years in Congress and ran for president in 2012, dropping out after the Iowa caucus. She serves as a member of President Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

That billboard! 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

Thank Rufus!

Bachmann won't run for Franken's Senate seat because she did not hear a 'call from God'

That billboard! 

Thank God we'll be spared watching her and her husband dance again.

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I will agree with Gowdy on one point -- he has been a lousy politician, though I think he means in a different way than I mean.