United States Congress of Fail - Part 4

[GreyhoundFan]

Two good ones about Nunes' memo:

[onekidanddone]

4 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Two good ones about Nunes' memo:

I was okay until I got to the 3 foot, penis, member, you know what, johnson orange fuck stick, ..now I want to throw up.

[fraurosena]

The Wired has a good article on that super secret squirrel... eh, memo.

THE CYNICAL MISDIRECTION BEHIND #RELEASETHEMEMO

Quote

“EXCLUSIVE: Infowars has obtained and is now releasing the secret FISA memo,” conspiracy theorist Alex Jones blared on Twitter Tuesday. Jones thought he had a mysterious four-page document authored by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, who leads the House Intelligence Committee. The memo purportedly proves that intelligence officials abused surveillance powers authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in investigating Trump’s campaign ties to Russia.

Jones had not, in fact, obtained the Nunes memo. But that confusion, and the fuss over the memo more generally, demonstrate just how little the American public understands about how FISA actually works. That misunderstanding makes it easy for the law to be twisted for partisan purposes.

Republicans who have viewed the Nunes document will have you believe it’s incredibly explosive. Congressman Matt Gaetz said it’s “jaw-dropping,” and called for its public release. Representative Steve King said it was “worse than Watergate.” Over the past week, thousands of Americans—as well as likely bots linked to Russia—have flooded Twitter with the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. Wikileaks even pledged a $1 million reward to anyone who leaked the document to the organization. Everyone from Breitbart and Fox News to Mike Cernovich has talked about it ceaselessly.

Nunes has successfully manufactured a controversy designed to undermine the Justice Department’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, and he used FISA to do it. (This also isn't his first time.) The 1978 surveillance law is not only densely complicated, but operates via a secret court staffed by judges entirely appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, making it a prime target for conspiracy theories.

“FISA is mysterious to most Americans. It’s a complex statutory scheme,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The government routinely puts out a lot of misleading descriptions of it. It’s easy to capitalize on Americans’ misunderstandings about the law for partisan purposes if someone wants to do that.”

The confusion over FISA has allowed Nunes and fellow Republicans to tell the public that intelligence officials abuse the law, while at the same time moving to expand its powers. Nunes, as well as Gaetz and King, all voted in favorof expanding surveillance authorities authorized under Section 702 of FISA earlier this month. They cast their votes while at the same time telling the public that FISA is terribly abused by the FBI and the Justice Department. So what’s really going on? Let’s start with Nunes’ memo.

Unlike the Alex Jones mix-up, the actual four-page document says, according to The New York Times, that intelligence officials improperly obtained a warrant to surveil Trump campaign advisor Carter Page, who is believed to be connected to Russia. Here’s where the mechanics of FISA come in.

Under Title 1 of the law, nicknamed “traditional FISA,” law enforcement must go before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to receive a warrant to surveil an individual or group of people. To get that warrant, law enforcement must show probable cause that a person is an agent of a foreign power. That means the government had to demonstrate Page was acting as an operative for Russia.

“When we talk about traditional FISA and we say someone has to get a court order based on probable cause,” says Goitein, “that means there has to be some sort of criminal activity, such as espionage, in order to qualify.”

Nunes’ memo reportedly alleges that to obtain their warrant, law enforcement officials relied on research from a dossier written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Yes, that dossier, made public last year and subsequently revealed to be financed in part by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

You can start to see rough outlines of the conspiracy theory already: Unverified research, funded by Democrats, led to the surveillance of an advisor to a Republican presidential candidate. But we don’t know what other evidence law enforcement may have relied on to obtain a warrant to investigate Page. While the dossier may have been cited, officials could have also included a significant amount of evidence collected by the US intelligence community.

The House Intelligence Committee’s lead Democrat, Adam Schiff, has said he believed the memo was misleading. “It’s designed to push out a destructive narrative and further the attacks on the FBI. It’s basically a burn-the-house down strategy to protect the president,” he told Politico.

Nunes apparently wants it to look like the FISC judge issued the warrant on shaky grounds. But to assess whether that’s the case, you have to know again how FISA works.

All of the judges currently serving on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were appointed by a single person: Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court. The judges are tasked with overseeing requests for surveillance warrants. Most requests are granted, though the standard is usually higher to target a US person like Page, rather than a foreigner.

“They pretty infrequently turn down wiretap requests,” says Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute studying technology, privacy, and civil liberties.

The FISC isn’t necessarily free from abuses, and merits a healthy amount of skepticism, especially because so much of its process occurs behind closed doors. What we know usually comes from a small set of declassified opinions made public by the Director of National Intelligence’s office.

But Title 1 of FISA is not the part most susceptible to abuse. Lost in the conversation over Carter Page is an entirely separate portion of the law, called Section 702. This section doesn’t involve a judge at all: It authorizes a series of warrantless surveillance programs, several of which were first made public by Edward Snowden. Section 702 is the piece of FISA that most worries civil liberties activists at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Experts say it’s much more troublesome than traditional FISA, because it has far less oversight.

Nunes and fellow House Republicans have focused their fretting on traditional FISA, rather than Section 702. In fact, Nunes sponsored a version of a bill passed earlier this month that greatly expanded the surveillance powers authorized under Section 702. He and other Republicans turned down an amendment that would have imposed a warrant requirement on the FBI, requiring officials to go before a judge before it searched through communications pertaining to Americans.

“It’s a slightly different authority, but it’s very hard for me to enter the mental space of someone who really believes there’s this problem of political surveillance abuse and then is uninterested in imposing any additional safeguards on exactly the kind of thing they’re worried about,” says Sanchez.

If you just saw the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, but didn’t know that Nunes is one of Section 702’s staunch supporters, you might think civil liberties was his primary concern. That’s the point. Public confusion over various parts of FISA allow him to dupe the public into believing he cares about anything other than derailing investigations into Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential campaign.

It’s ultimately hard to say exactly what Nunes’ “top secret” document really contains, because it hasn’t yet been released to the public. Despite cries from Twitter for its disclosure, it’s possible that it won’t ever see the light of day, because it could reveal how the FBI and other agencies gather intelligence. With that said, President Trump is reportedly inclined to release the memo, according to CNN.

So far, it looks like only Congress has viewed the secret report. Not even the agencies it implicates have seen it: Both the FBI and the Justice Department say they haven’t looked at the memo. And to be clear, neither has Alex Jones. InfoWars, the dubious site Jones’ runs, didn’t publish Nunes’ memo, but actually a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion made public eight months ago. A simple Google search turns up the document on the Director of National Intelligence website. The opinion concerned Section 702, the part of FISA Nunes and his fellow Republicans just reauthorized and expanded.

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I was okay until I got to the 3 foot, penis, member, you know what, johnson orange fuck stick, ..now I want to throw up.

3 foot... Would that be a Barbie doll foot?

[fraurosena]

Does anyone else hear Freddie Mercury singing "And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust"  when they hear about another Repug retiring/not running again?

Scandal-Tarred GOP Rep. Meehan Will Retire, Opening Up Swing Seat

Quote

Rep. Pat Meehan (R-PA) will retire at the end of his term, he told GOP leaders Thursday, days after it became public that a senior staffer had accused him of sexual misconduct and he’d settled using taxpayer dollars.

Meehan’s decision comes after he sought to defend his relationship with a former aide, arguing it had never been sexual in nature while at the same time admitting that he’d acted inappropriately toward her.

The congressman until recently sat on the powerful House Ethics Committee that oversaw investigations of scandals, including sexual harassment claims, and his burgeoning scandal threatened to further damage the national image of a party that’s already struggling badly with female voters in recent polls and elections.

His decision to retire opens up a swing House seat in suburban Philadelphia. Democrats would likely be favored to win this seat in what’s shaping up to be a good year, and a recent state Supreme Court ruling that the GOP-drawn congressional map is an illegal partisan gerrymander may make the district even more Democratic, giving the party a prime pickup opportunity.

Republicans walked a fine line in acknowledging Meehan’s decision to leave, declining to criticize him directly while promising to hold his seat.

“While I’m disappointed by the circumstances leading to Congressman Meehan’s retirement, I thank him for his dedication to his district. We must always hold ourselves to the highest possible standard – especially while serving in Congress,” National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Steve Stivers (R-OH) said in a Thursday night statement. “I am confident that the voters of Pennsylvania’s 7th District will elect a strong conservative who will represent their values.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this shit up: "GOP candidate says feminists have ‘snake-filled heads,’ hopes daughters don’t become ‘she devils’"

Spoiler

A Republican candidate who hopes to unseat a female Democratic senator in Missouri is drawing criticism for a statement he posted about women’s rights in which he called feminists “she devils” and said that he expected his fiancee to have dinner ready for him every night at 6 p.m.

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have my daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives,” he wrote of his fiancee, Chanel Rion, saying he wanted his world to be more Norman Rockwell — the painter known for his depictions of classic American life — than the feminist Gloria Steinem.

... < facebook posting >

The candidate, Courtland Sykes, wrote that “radical feminism” has a “crazed definition of modern womanhood.”

“They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads,” he said. “Men and women are different and gender-bending word games by a goofy nest of drugstore academics aren’t going to change anything — except the fantasy life of those confused people in ivory towers.”

Sykes, who is one of several Republicans planning a run against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), posted the remarks on his Facebook page this week, though they were originally from an interview in September.

Of the daughters he envisioned himself having in the future, he wrote that he wanted them to build “home based enterprises.”

“I don’t want them [to] grow up into career obsessed banshees who [forgo] home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils,” he said.

Hillary Clinton’s loss, he wrote, showed that radical feminists had been defeated.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Sykes said that he fully supported women and that he didn’t believe his statement was demeaning to them.

“I clearly state that modern women can be anything they want,” he said. “No one is in a position to tell women what they can and can’t do.”

He said that he did not intend the statement about “feminist she devils” to be an indictment of women with careers, noting that he counted some women he used to work with as mentors.

“There are amazing women with amazing careers,” he said. “You take Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee Sanders. These women absolutely should be celebrated.”

And he said he supported his fiancee, a conservative illustrator, and her work. In fact, she doesn’t even make dinner for him every night, he said; the two live in separate parts of the state — Sykes in Independence, near Kansas City, and Rion, his fiancee, a few hours south.

“That was just a pushback, maybe a brash pushback,”  he said. “That was basically me saying we want to support traditional family values moving forward.”

Sykes’s comments drew rebukes and jokes on social media.

“This afternoon in IS THIS REAL?” the writer Rebecca Traister posted on Twitter.

“I worry that ‘nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings’ is going to be hard to fit on the front of a t-shirt,” journalist Jennifer Wright tweeted.

Some conservatives also moved to distance themselves from the comments.

“Just to be clear: No relation. At all. Thank God,” wrote the conservative commentator Charlie Sykes.

“Good luck with that, you unutterable moron,” wrote New York Post columnist John Podhoretz.

Others questioned Sykes’s seriousness as a candidate.

“This dude is so clearly less interested in becoming a senator than he is in trying to get a job at Fox or some other conservative outlet,” wrote Craig Calcaterra, a baseball writer at NBC.

Sykes worked for the military for 10 years, as an analyst for the Navy and later for the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to his LinkedIn account. Originally from Arkansas, he announced his candidacy before he’d been a permanent resident of Missouri for a year.

The comments that Sykes posted originated as a part of a written response that Sykes sent the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a feature story the paper wrote about him last year in response to questions about women’s rights. The newspaper wrote that Sykes sent them the document after declining to do a follow-up interview.

In that document Sykes “praises Breitbart News, derides ‘Big Media,’ belittles the Muslim faith and, in a jab at the nation’s education system, says Detroit ‘is crawling with uneducated people who can’t read a breakfast menu,’” the newspaper wrote.

He called for a ban on “Muslim immigration” saying that he opposed “Muslims — and their Koran.”

“Big media has become too many dumb blonds,” he wrote according to the paper, “too many leg dangles, too many ‘tee-hee’s,’ too many hate-Trump stories, too much ‘fake news,’ too many left-biased reporters, too much mud-slinging — the credibility is shot to hell and with it big media.”

John Messmer, a political-science professor at St. Louis Community College, told the newspaper that the document read like “Trump-inspired populism on steroids.”

“I’m 99.9 percent sure it’s not parody,” Messmer said.

... < awful ad >

Sykes’s campaign sent The Post another statement Thursday night lambasting the feminism of the “radical drug and communal hippy-visioned 1960’s.”

“The Femimarxian era is ending and I am here to help end it,” the statement said.

Though Sykes’s style bears some similarity to the president’s, he has not earned Trump’s endorsement.

The president has instead expressed support for Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, who also has the backing of some of the party’s establishment.

In November, Sykes released a long video in which he defended Roy Moore against the accusations that the Senate candidate from Alabama had pursued women and teenage girls while he was an assistant district attorney more than 30 years ago.

Sykes’s Facebook page is a repository of conservative ideas and memes, including one that compares McCaskill to the character Ursula from Disney’s “Little Mermaid.”

“I don’t think anybody wants me making dinner,” Sykes told The Post. “It would just be Pop-Tarts.”

... < another awful ad >

What a fucking tool.

[fraurosena]

On nefarious Nunes' drunken desperation-made memo.  

“A couple of whiskeys into the bag”: the Devin Nunes Trump-Russia memo is even nuttier than we thought

Quote

Rogue Congressman Devin Nunes has made a last ditch attempt at saving Donald Trump, and perhaps saving himself, in the Trump-Russia scandal. Nunes has written a four page memo which claims to document abuses by the FBI in the investigation. The trouble: every word of the memo is false. Now it turns out the memo is nuttier than we initially thought.

Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, revealed earlier in the week that he had read the Nunes memo. He confirmed that Nunes didn’t even read any of the source material he’s claiming to cite in his memo, and that none of Nunes’ claims in the memo have any correlation to the source material. Even Trump’s own Department of Justice is asking Nones not to release the memo, because it’s just that embarrassing.

Now another person who has read the memo is speaking out even more harshly about it. Congressman Jim Himes, who also sits on the House Intel Committee, appeared on Hardball on MSNBC on Thursday evening. His assessment of the memo: “You’d hope that whoever wrote that was a couple of whiskeys into the bag.” Nunes wrote it, of course, so Himes is saying that the memo is so embarrassing, it reads like Nunes was drunk when he wrote it. Those are harsh words for one Congressman to publicly hurl at another, which tells you that the memo is indeed so nutty, Himes fully expects the bulk of Americans to agree with him if it ever sees the light of day.

Congressman Himes also confirmed what Congressman Schiff had already asserted about the Devin Nunes memo. Himes said that it was “based on intelligence that none of these people have reviewed” and that Nunes and his Fox News pals who have been hyping the memo “are people who are making stuff up.”

 

[CTRLZero]

39 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In an interview with The Washington Post, Sykes said that he fully supported women and that he didn’t believe his statement was demeaning to them.

I know I'm not the only person asking if this person is for real.  It's interesting how he's speaking out so outrageously, but then he back-pedals furiously.  My snake-filled head is spinning.  As someone posited, he is probably angling for a job at Fox News or Breitbart. 

Another loudmouth whackadoodle. 

44 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

the document read like “Trump-inspired populism on steroids

They got that right!

[fraurosena]

Their silence is deafening.

GOP senators shamefully silent on Trump’s attempt to fire Mueller

Quote

The explosive story that Donald Trump attempted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller just a month after his appointment has erased every other consideration from the national news and even has legal experts and historians raising the specter of impeachment.

But Senate Republicans are staying very quiet.

Among the silent Republicans is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who just two months ago said he “didn’t hear much pressure” to pass any of the bipartisan bills protecting Mueller’s job because Trump would never make a move on him.

Also silent thus far is Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who was forced Thursday to walk back a conspiracy theory to discredit any investigations into Trump, based on a facetious text message, that a “secret society” in federal law enforcement was working to undermine Trump.

Even supposedly principled Republicans like Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who fiercely defended Mueller last year and called his career “unimpeachable,” have not publicly commented.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham warned last summer that “any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency.” At the time, he encouraged support for his proposed legislation to protect Mueller’s investigation, insisting, “We need a check and balance here.”

Graham has also been silent.

But that does not mean there are zero senators speaking up.

Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut outlined the serious implications of the news on CNN Thursday evening, warning the revelations portend a “constitutional crisis.”

This is a make or break moment for the integrity of every politician in Washington. Now that Trump’s commission of obstruction of justice is essentially confirmed, it is time for every lawmaker in Congress to make clear which side they are on.

And those who continue to hide will simply mark themselves out as cowards.

 

[AnywhereButHere]

It's like on one of the nights his fiancée was unavailable to cook for him, he sat down and ate the entire James Dobson canon (and maybe a dictionary) and is now vomiting the pages in random order. I'm sure he thought he was very clever in coming up with "Femimarxian". I thought it was from a parody site like The Onion or something, but no. He's real (unless the Washington Post and Kansas City Star have given up with real news and are trolling us all - I might not even blame them if they are...)

Quote

The other Republican Senate campaigns were perplexed by Sykes’ comments.

“Bless his heart,” said Kelli Ford, the spokeswoman for Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, the GOP frontrunner to take on McCaskill.

Jeffrey Carson, the spokesman for Austin Petersen, responded to Sykes’ post with a quote that is often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article196687404.html#storylink=cpy

Caligula threw support behind Hawley which hopefully will signal his candidacy's death knell. Sykes is hopefully too bug fuck nuts for Missourians. Don't know anything about Austin Petersen. So hopefully McCaskill can hold on.

Actually, that Napoleon quote fits quite nicely for the latest news out of camp Caligula as well. If he really does go through with testifying, he's going to destroy himself bigly!

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You couldn't make this shit up: "GOP candidate says feminists have ‘snake-filled heads,’ hopes daughters don’t become ‘she devils’"

  Reveal hidden contents

A Republican candidate who hopes to unseat a female Democratic senator in Missouri is drawing criticism for a statement he posted about women’s rights in which he called feminists “she devils” and said that he expected his fiancee to have dinner ready for him every night at 6 p.m.

“I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have my daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives,” he wrote of his fiancee, Chanel Rion, saying he wanted his world to be more Norman Rockwell — the painter known for his depictions of classic American life — than the feminist Gloria Steinem.

... < facebook posting >

The candidate, Courtland Sykes, wrote that “radical feminism” has a “crazed definition of modern womanhood.”

“They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads,” he said. “Men and women are different and gender-bending word games by a goofy nest of drugstore academics aren’t going to change anything — except the fantasy life of those confused people in ivory towers.”

Sykes, who is one of several Republicans planning a run against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), posted the remarks on his Facebook page this week, though they were originally from an interview in September.

Of the daughters he envisioned himself having in the future, he wrote that he wanted them to build “home based enterprises.”

“I don’t want them [to] grow up into career obsessed banshees who [forgo] home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils,” he said.

Hillary Clinton’s loss, he wrote, showed that radical feminists had been defeated.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Sykes said that he fully supported women and that he didn’t believe his statement was demeaning to them.

“I clearly state that modern women can be anything they want,” he said. “No one is in a position to tell women what they can and can’t do.”

He said that he did not intend the statement about “feminist she devils” to be an indictment of women with careers, noting that he counted some women he used to work with as mentors.

“There are amazing women with amazing careers,” he said. “You take Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee Sanders. These women absolutely should be celebrated.”

And he said he supported his fiancee, a conservative illustrator, and her work. In fact, she doesn’t even make dinner for him every night, he said; the two live in separate parts of the state — Sykes in Independence, near Kansas City, and Rion, his fiancee, a few hours south.

“That was just a pushback, maybe a brash pushback,”  he said. “That was basically me saying we want to support traditional family values moving forward.”

Sykes’s comments drew rebukes and jokes on social media.

“This afternoon in IS THIS REAL?” the writer Rebecca Traister posted on Twitter.

“I worry that ‘nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the top of a thousand tall buildings’ is going to be hard to fit on the front of a t-shirt,” journalist Jennifer Wright tweeted.

Some conservatives also moved to distance themselves from the comments.

“Just to be clear: No relation. At all. Thank God,” wrote the conservative commentator Charlie Sykes.

“Good luck with that, you unutterable moron,” wrote New York Post columnist John Podhoretz.

Others questioned Sykes’s seriousness as a candidate.

“This dude is so clearly less interested in becoming a senator than he is in trying to get a job at Fox or some other conservative outlet,” wrote Craig Calcaterra, a baseball writer at NBC.

Sykes worked for the military for 10 years, as an analyst for the Navy and later for the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to his LinkedIn account. Originally from Arkansas, he announced his candidacy before he’d been a permanent resident of Missouri for a year.

The comments that Sykes posted originated as a part of a written response that Sykes sent the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a feature story the paper wrote about him last year in response to questions about women’s rights. The newspaper wrote that Sykes sent them the document after declining to do a follow-up interview.

In that document Sykes “praises Breitbart News, derides ‘Big Media,’ belittles the Muslim faith and, in a jab at the nation’s education system, says Detroit ‘is crawling with uneducated people who can’t read a breakfast menu,’” the newspaper wrote.

He called for a ban on “Muslim immigration” saying that he opposed “Muslims — and their Koran.”

“Big media has become too many dumb blonds,” he wrote according to the paper, “too many leg dangles, too many ‘tee-hee’s,’ too many hate-Trump stories, too much ‘fake news,’ too many left-biased reporters, too much mud-slinging — the credibility is shot to hell and with it big media.”

John Messmer, a political-science professor at St. Louis Community College, told the newspaper that the document read like “Trump-inspired populism on steroids.”

“I’m 99.9 percent sure it’s not parody,” Messmer said.

... < awful ad >

Sykes’s campaign sent The Post another statement Thursday night lambasting the feminism of the “radical drug and communal hippy-visioned 1960’s.”

“The Femimarxian era is ending and I am here to help end it,” the statement said.

Though Sykes’s style bears some similarity to the president’s, he has not earned Trump’s endorsement.

The president has instead expressed support for Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, who also has the backing of some of the party’s establishment.

In November, Sykes released a long video in which he defended Roy Moore against the accusations that the Senate candidate from Alabama had pursued women and teenage girls while he was an assistant district attorney more than 30 years ago.

Sykes’s Facebook page is a repository of conservative ideas and memes, including one that compares McCaskill to the character Ursula from Disney’s “Little Mermaid.”

“I don’t think anybody wants me making dinner,” Sykes told The Post. “It would just be Pop-Tarts.”

... < another awful ad >

What a fucking tool.

OMG! Has anyone checked to make sure there aren't any open serial killer cases with female victims in Arkansas and Missouri?

[JMarie]

On 1/25/2018 at 8:41 AM, AmazonGrace said:

After all this theater it will probably turn out that the secret society was a code name for a date or something

GOP  nurturing their Inter-Nazi-onal relationships:

 

The leader of the neonazi party is Asian?  How is this possible?

[fraurosena]

Word.

 

[fraurosena]

BAM!

I love it when someone tells it like it is.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Focus is on an audience of one — Trump — to prevail with House GOP"

Spoiler

The “Hastert Rule” is on its way out. It’s been replaced by the “Trump Rule.”

Several times last year, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) articulated this subtle but important shift. The much maligned, often misunderstood practice of requiring majority support among House Republicans to advance most legislation has evolved with this Republican president.

It used to be the political assumption that if Ryan brought a bill to the floor that did not have the support of the Republican majority, that would be the end of his speakership. But now, there’s a corollary to the Hastert Rule, named after disgraced former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

It’s the Trump Rule.

Even on the divisive issue of immigration, Ryan is guided by whether President Trump supports legislation, and that will be enough for him to bring it to the House floor.

“We will not be advancing legislation that does not have the support of President Trump, because we’re going to work with the president on how to do this legislation,” Ryan told reporters in September, predicting that any bill that has Trump’s backing is likely to gain wide support among House Republicans.

Leadership aides point to those comments when pressed about Democratic predictions that any bipartisan Senate deal on immigration will not get consideration in the House because it will fail the Hastert Rule.

The focus now is an audience of one.

Any bill to provide permanent legal status to hundreds of thousands of “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children, must get the president’s signature. But also critically important is Trump’s position as the most vocal proponent of tougher immigration laws and tighter border security.

“If that bill comes out of the Senate and the president says, ‘I will sign it,’ I think it makes a lot of those issues go away,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who served in the House-whip operation last decade when the Hastert Rule took root.

They have a win, but Republicans may stumble into another chaotic round of negotiations

Rather than the old threats of deposing Ryan, or his predecessor John A. Boehner, the most conservative faction of House Republicans would be hard-pressed to complain if the speaker put legislation on the floor that had Trump’s blessing — and, with his backing, there is a good chance that Trump would bring on board a majority of House Republicans.

“I think you’ve got plenty of explanation at home as to why the guy who’s been the strongest on the border issues believes this is an acceptable solution,” Blunt predicted.

Some Democrats see a distinction with little difference. They think there are many bipartisan votes for legislation that would give dreamers permanent status without catering to Trump’s demands for border security, but Ryan will not allow the vote.

“In a certain way, that’s just a mechanical description of the Hastert Rule,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who spent the past week urging his social-media followers to study up on the old House principle. “Regardless of whether it’s the Trump Rule or the Hastert Rule, when you have major legislation that has 80 percent support among the public, and they’re not bringing it to the floor because they’re afraid it would succeed, that is a foundational problem for democracy.”

Hastert became speaker in January 1999 after the tumultuous rule of Newt Gingrich and just after the impeachment of Bill Clinton. As he tried to build unity within his fractured caucus, he promised that he would not advance legislation unless the majority of House Republicans supported it.

Democrats cried foul for years, and after Boehner (R-Ohio) became House speaker in 2011, conservative critics railed every time he allowed a bill to pass when a majority of Republicans voted no, eventually driving him out of office in 2015.

The day before Boehner passed the gavel to Ryan, Hastert pleaded guilty to breaking tax laws in paying hush money to a man who accused Hastert of molesting him when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s — a fact that made the “Hastert Rule” even more pejorative in some corners.

As he pulled together the votes to succeed Boehner, Ryan made a pledge to House conservatives that he would not bring immigration legislation to the floor unless it had majority support among Republicans.

Once Trump won the White House, however, that pledge slowly disappeared. It became all about the president and whatever he would support. The belief was that the president’s backing would be decisive in getting the requisite support in the House.

“If we have legislation coming through here that is worked with and supported by the president,” Ryan said in September, “I’m very confident that our members will support that.”

This year is shaping up to be a clash of Republican idealists and realists

All of this makes Trump’s support more critical for any solution to the Deferred Access for Childhood Arrivals program, under which 690,000 dreamers face the loss of their protections from deportation after Trump terminated the program last fall. Republican leaders had grown somewhat frustrated by Trump’s shifting positions on the issue, highlighted by a declaration by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that he would begin to move legislation “as soon as we figure out what he is for.”

Trump’s advisers signaled his positions on dreamers and border security in a carefully scripted conference call with congressional aides Thursday, formally embracing a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants and $25 billion for the construction of some border wall and increased border security.

There was enough in the initial proposal for conservatives to decry it as “amnesty” and liberals to complain that it contained new anti-immigrant proposals.

But it was a detailed start, and it established a marker for negotiations among a bipartisan group of senators trying to find a compromise.

Blunt remains optimistic that the Senate can thread the needle and that a majority from both caucuses will support a DACA-border bill, leaving the far left and far right disappointed.

“So if you really want to pass a bill, it needs to probably get about 65 [Senate] votes and those need to be pretty evenly divided between the two parties,” he said.

In that scenario, the pressure would shift to Ryan and the House — but only if the legislation still has the support of Trump, and only if the president has not changed his position on some key issues.

For instance, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a fierce critic of Trump on many issues, praised the president’s call to embrace a path of 10 to 12 years for citizenship for the dreamers.

“If he sticks with this position, I think it’s more reflective of where the Senate is,” he said.

Lyan is stupid, Agent Orange changes his mind more frequently than he orders another diet coke. Legislating to please him is short-sighted.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Focus is on an audience of one — Trump — to prevail with House GOP"

  Reveal hidden contents

The “Hastert Rule” is on its way out. It’s been replaced by the “Trump Rule.”

Several times last year, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) articulated this subtle but important shift. The much maligned, often misunderstood practice of requiring majority support among House Republicans to advance most legislation has evolved with this Republican president.

It used to be the political assumption that if Ryan brought a bill to the floor that did not have the support of the Republican majority, that would be the end of his speakership. But now, there’s a corollary to the Hastert Rule, named after disgraced former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

It’s the Trump Rule.

Even on the divisive issue of immigration, Ryan is guided by whether President Trump supports legislation, and that will be enough for him to bring it to the House floor.

“We will not be advancing legislation that does not have the support of President Trump, because we’re going to work with the president on how to do this legislation,” Ryan told reporters in September, predicting that any bill that has Trump’s backing is likely to gain wide support among House Republicans.

Leadership aides point to those comments when pressed about Democratic predictions that any bipartisan Senate deal on immigration will not get consideration in the House because it will fail the Hastert Rule.

The focus now is an audience of one.

Any bill to provide permanent legal status to hundreds of thousands of “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children, must get the president’s signature. But also critically important is Trump’s position as the most vocal proponent of tougher immigration laws and tighter border security.

“If that bill comes out of the Senate and the president says, ‘I will sign it,’ I think it makes a lot of those issues go away,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who served in the House-whip operation last decade when the Hastert Rule took root.

They have a win, but Republicans may stumble into another chaotic round of negotiations

Rather than the old threats of deposing Ryan, or his predecessor John A. Boehner, the most conservative faction of House Republicans would be hard-pressed to complain if the speaker put legislation on the floor that had Trump’s blessing — and, with his backing, there is a good chance that Trump would bring on board a majority of House Republicans.

“I think you’ve got plenty of explanation at home as to why the guy who’s been the strongest on the border issues believes this is an acceptable solution,” Blunt predicted.

Some Democrats see a distinction with little difference. They think there are many bipartisan votes for legislation that would give dreamers permanent status without catering to Trump’s demands for border security, but Ryan will not allow the vote.

“In a certain way, that’s just a mechanical description of the Hastert Rule,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who spent the past week urging his social-media followers to study up on the old House principle. “Regardless of whether it’s the Trump Rule or the Hastert Rule, when you have major legislation that has 80 percent support among the public, and they’re not bringing it to the floor because they’re afraid it would succeed, that is a foundational problem for democracy.”

Hastert became speaker in January 1999 after the tumultuous rule of Newt Gingrich and just after the impeachment of Bill Clinton. As he tried to build unity within his fractured caucus, he promised that he would not advance legislation unless the majority of House Republicans supported it.

Democrats cried foul for years, and after Boehner (R-Ohio) became House speaker in 2011, conservative critics railed every time he allowed a bill to pass when a majority of Republicans voted no, eventually driving him out of office in 2015.

The day before Boehner passed the gavel to Ryan, Hastert pleaded guilty to breaking tax laws in paying hush money to a man who accused Hastert of molesting him when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s — a fact that made the “Hastert Rule” even more pejorative in some corners.

As he pulled together the votes to succeed Boehner, Ryan made a pledge to House conservatives that he would not bring immigration legislation to the floor unless it had majority support among Republicans.

Once Trump won the White House, however, that pledge slowly disappeared. It became all about the president and whatever he would support. The belief was that the president’s backing would be decisive in getting the requisite support in the House.

“If we have legislation coming through here that is worked with and supported by the president,” Ryan said in September, “I’m very confident that our members will support that.”

This year is shaping up to be a clash of Republican idealists and realists

All of this makes Trump’s support more critical for any solution to the Deferred Access for Childhood Arrivals program, under which 690,000 dreamers face the loss of their protections from deportation after Trump terminated the program last fall. Republican leaders had grown somewhat frustrated by Trump’s shifting positions on the issue, highlighted by a declaration by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that he would begin to move legislation “as soon as we figure out what he is for.”

Trump’s advisers signaled his positions on dreamers and border security in a carefully scripted conference call with congressional aides Thursday, formally embracing a path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants and $25 billion for the construction of some border wall and increased border security.

There was enough in the initial proposal for conservatives to decry it as “amnesty” and liberals to complain that it contained new anti-immigrant proposals.

But it was a detailed start, and it established a marker for negotiations among a bipartisan group of senators trying to find a compromise.

Blunt remains optimistic that the Senate can thread the needle and that a majority from both caucuses will support a DACA-border bill, leaving the far left and far right disappointed.

“So if you really want to pass a bill, it needs to probably get about 65 [Senate] votes and those need to be pretty evenly divided between the two parties,” he said.

In that scenario, the pressure would shift to Ryan and the House — but only if the legislation still has the support of Trump, and only if the president has not changed his position on some key issues.

For instance, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a fierce critic of Trump on many issues, praised the president’s call to embrace a path of 10 to 12 years for citizenship for the dreamers.

“If he sticks with this position, I think it’s more reflective of where the Senate is,” he said.

Lyan is stupid, Agent Orange changes his mind more frequently than he orders another diet coke. Legislating to please him is short-sighted.

This scares me. Following the neighborhood half-wit around like puppies would seem like suicide in a normal world. The only way it makes sense to pander to this clueless dotard, instead of passing legislation that the majority of the country supports, is if you're sure you've got a solid path to re-election. In this day and age, for Repubs that can only mean nefarious methods.

[fraurosena]

12 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

This scares me. Following the neighborhood half-wit around like puppies would seem like suicide in a normal world. The only way it makes sense to pander to this clueless dotard, instead of passing legislation that the majority of the country supports, is if you're sure you've got a solid path to re-election. In this day and age, for Repubs that can only mean nefarious methods.

And you can see that happening as we speak. The gerrymandering, the voter suppression, and now governors refusing to write out elections that are legally due to be held because they know the Dems will win them. This is really scary stuff you guys! 

[fraurosena]

And the corruption begins... or should I say 'goes on'?

Koch network to spend $400 million during 2018 midterm election cycle

Quote

The network of groups affiliated with billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch will spend more than $400 million on conservative causes and candidates in the 2018 midterm election cycle.

Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips said Saturday that the investment would be the network’s largest election-cycle investment ever – 60 percent greater than the 2016 presidential cycle - as Republicans seek to protect majorities in the House and Senate against stiff political winds.

The network notably stayed out of the 2016 presidential contest between President Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, although it spent heavily on Republican candidates and conservative causes. 

Some of the $400 million for 2018 will be spent on electing GOP candidates. The network also plans to spend heavily promoting tax reform and other achievements of the GOP-controlled government, including Veterans Affairs reforms and Trump’s conservative judicial picks.

“We’re all in,” Phillips said, adding that the political landscape indicates that 2018 is “going to be a challenging year” for Republicans.

The party in power historically suffers losses in a midterm election.

Generic ballot polling for the House shows Democrats with a double-digit lead and Trump’s historically low approval rating for a first-term president could be a drag on the party.

The GOP’s effort to hold on to the House has been complicated by a raft of retirements and there are worries that an energized liberal base could send the GOP to substantial losses.

Still, fundraising has been a bright spot for the GOP, with Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and outside groups aimed at electing Republicans raising enormous sums in 2017 to protect their majorities.

Hundreds of top conservative donors affiliated with Koch network have gathered this weekend at the exclusive Indian Wells resort in the California desert to strategize ahead of the 2018 midterms elections.

“We’re looking for candidates, policy-makers who can credibly commit to helping people improve their lives,” said Brian Hooks, the co-chairman of the Winter Seminar.

The Koch network spent $20 million in support of the GOP’s tax reform bill and plans to spend another $20 million to advertise its benefits, Hooks said.

"We're hopeful," Phillips said. "When you look at recent coverage of the public’s view of tax reform, it's going up as they see pay raises." 

The Koch network has attracted its biggest crowd of members ever to the Winter Seminar, with 550 conservative activists from around the country, including 160 first-timers, who have descended on the California desert to strategize ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

“Charles Koch has challenged us and the other leaders in the network to step things up by an order of magnitude, that means 10 fold,” said Hooks, the co-chair of the Winter Seminar. “That’s what we’re going to do.”

Throwing such unprecedented amounts at the election indicates that they are really running scared of a democratic* tidal wave in November. 

*lower casing deliberate

[Howl]

Sen. Lindsey Graham is on ABC This Week (Martha Raddatz) sounding rational and coherent and (gulp) moderately bipartisan.  

[AmazonGrace]

14 hours ago, Howl said:

Sen. Lindsey Graham is on ABC This Week (Martha Raddatz) sounding rational and coherent and (gulp) moderately bipartisan.  

Pretty sad it is now noteworthy when a member of the Congress sounds semi sane.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

On 1/29/2018 at 4:50 AM, AmazonGrace said:

Pretty sad it is now noteworthy when a member of the Congress sounds semi sane.

Isn't that the damned truth?  Right now the whole #ReleaseTheMemo deal is a crazy end run, but because Trump has managed to inoculate a part of the populace and half of Congress against actual facts, it could work toward derailing the Russia investigation.  

That even a few Congress critters were sounding rational -- I wondered if the finger they constantly hold up in the wind had sensed a slight shift and they were adjusting accordingly.  Just weeks ago, Graham was so far up Trump's ..... he could see daylight.  Now, not quite so much.  

[GrumpyGran]

34 minutes ago, Howl said:

Isn't that the damned truth?  Right now the whole #ReleaseTheMemo deal is a crazy end run, but because Trump has managed to inoculate a part of the populace and half of Congress against actual facts, it could work toward derailing the Russia investigation.  

That even a few Congress critters were sounding rational -- I wondered if the finger they constantly hold up in the wind had sensed a slight shift and they were adjusting accordingly.  Just weeks ago, Graham was so far up Trump's ..... he could see daylight.  Now, not quite so much.  

I hope that there are still some Republicans in Congress who haven't abdicated their morals and ethics and realize that these attempts to demonize government servants could backfire, not to mention it's just plain disgusting.

Let's face it, if the FBI is as corrupt as they say, then they better burn it down or they're screwed. Those evil corrupt FBI agents can make some serious trouble for them.

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree with Representative Crowley.

 

BTW, the answer is that Gosar is a Repug. 'uff said.

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's a great satirical version of Nunes' memo. I can't paste it here, but it's worth a look for the entertainment value.