Trump's America, March 2017: Using His Inside VOICE

social security for all + medicare for all + free state college tuition, all paid for with upper class taxes, will inject some much needed equality into this bullshit system

It is grimly hilarious to me the extent to which our PM rolled out the red carpet to Trump only for the White House to accuse British intelligence of bugging the President.

Congress can hold hearings to investigate whatever the fuck it wants IIRC - but yeah obviously the GOP have an interest in letting Trump's toxic nonsense go unchecked on that front. Amazing they're bothering to debunk his wiretapping BS.

I guess, but monitoring elections is not a standard congressional oversight perogative (unlike national security), although yeah you are right the GOP has definite political motivations for letting that particular lie slide

It wouldn't be 'monitoring elections' though - just fact-finding on a provocative claim made by the president, and one that if it were anything approaching true would be one of the biggest news stories of the century so far. call it The Hearings To Investigate The Alarming Concerns Raised By President Trump About The Soundness And Legality Of The 2016 Presidential Election, or whatever. if they can have five thousand fact-finding hearings and commissions on benghazi you'd think they could carve out a week for "millions of people are voting illegally, rendering our democratic process a total sham." obviously the only thing a competent committee would reveal is that nothing of the kind happened and the president made it up out of nothing, so they're not bothering.

right - what I'm saying is that the reason, for example, the Russia stuff immediately got traction is because there are standing committees w very territorial committee members on them whose focus is this exact kind of thing

voter fraud would require some kind of special select committee or something

and McConnell would have to greenlight it and work with Schumer to staff it which duh yeah that is not happening, waste of resources, not in their interests etc.

okay true. but it's not THAT hard to bang together a special committee - congresspeople do it all the time, usually to enhance their own standing by telling the folks back home that they chaired a special investigation of the pine weasel overpopulation crisis or whatever. i get that we're not really disagreeing on this, just want to point out that not doing so marks a particular kind of subtle heel-dragging, easy to miss 'cause it's the absence of doing something. but yeah you're right about why we heard statements on the "wiretaps" and not the "voter fraud."

special investigation of the pine weasel overpopulation crisis or whatever

Save Ghostwood Estates

can't stop watching this. american hero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQoh70ErZiU

^^^I am pretty sure that's the senator who was caught with another young flamboyant* right-wing senator on a boys' trip to Argentina and Brazil using taxpayers' money. The other senator had to pay back a lot of the funds, not sure what happened to this Smith guy (besides being a complete idiot).

*NOTE: I have no issue with people's sexual preferences, except so many of these poor guys are in the Republican party who legislate against LGBT rights, it's tragic.

Yeah it's him, but his hair is much fuller now than it was a couple years ago:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/254183-smith-schock-ties-garner-scrutiny

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/tillerson-says-all-options-are-on-the-table-when-it-comes-to-north-korea/2017/03/17/e6b3e64e-0a83-11e7-bd19-fd3afa0f7e2a_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Apage%2Fbreaking-news-bar&tid=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.40f1fbdeb547

It's inflammatory, but how different is this from US policy the last couple of decades?

we'll see. so far, not much, despite the Nobel Prize

It's more just depressingly hilarious that Tillerson's taking this line of "we're tired of being patient" when as far as the rest of us can glean, he hasn't done fucking anything in his six weeks on the job.

Didn't he gut the State dept or did that come from elsewhere?

"Make America Great Again" might as well have been "We're Tired of Being Patient."

tillerson's impatience no doubt in part stems from the sanctions the kenyan placed on russia after the former KGB agent invaded the ukraine. there's about a trillion dollars of oil just sitting there below the climate changed tundra, ready to be monetized, if only somehow someone with authority could restore russia's rightful seat at the global economic table

Ha, it's all so ridiculous at this point, I had to read your post twice before I realized who the Kenyan was.

This whole thing:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/17/us-makes-formal-apology-britain-white-house-accuses-gchq-wiretapping/

(No briefing today. Perhaps Spicer IS on a binge.)

Meanwhile, just for Alfred: Peggy Noonan, she is earnest!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reach-across-the-aisle-mr-president-1489705420?mod=e2two

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/03/16/trumps-budget-makes-perfect-sense-and-will-fix-america-and-i-will-tell-you-why

National Endowment for the Arts: The NEA will be destroyed and replaced with an armored helicopter with a shark painted on it.

which the fuck congressmen were in that meeting with Trump just now and did they really just agree to switch from No to Yes on AHCA? or were they just humoring the big old fussy baby?

Awesome, now even we're bombing Aleppo.

I thought we didn't know where that was

To be fair, maybe we don't, it was reported that we supposedly just bombed a mosque *near* Aleppo.

Doctor Casino looks like you've got some competition:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5zsilz/trump_when_told_the_biggest_losers_under/df0p14d/

Also I am not u/surviva316 (down thread) despite having said the exact same thing here, basically.

J love and j Chicago can you all drop a link or two

see. trump tells it like it is. he's not some lying politician, saying anything just to get elected

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mounting-claims-of-civilian-deaths-after-us-targetsal-qaeda-in-syria/2017/03/17/350d5838-0ae9-11e7-8884-96e6a6713f4b_story.html

BEIRUT — The United States said Thursday that an airstrike on an al-Qaeda meeting site in Syria killed “several terrorists,” but reports emerged Friday that dozens of civilians may have died in the same attack.

A brief statement from the U.S. Central Command said it struck a “meeting location” in the northwestern province of Idlib, which it described as “a significant safe haven for al-Qaeda in recent years.”

Separately, a U.S. official said the strike was based on verified intelligence and targeted al-Qaeda groups gathered to discuss future operations. The attack involved two Reaper drones, which fired about eight Hellfire missiles and dropped at least one 500-pound GPS-guided bomb, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

But local activists and a monitoring group claimed that the airstrike hit a mosque in the western Aleppo countryside next to Idlib province, killing at least 46 people and leaving dozens more under the rubble.

There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy on the location of the strike.

“The mosque in al-Jinah was destroyed,” said Mohamed al-Shaghal, a local journalist who arrived at the scene shortly after the attack. “Bodies filled the space.”

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring network, described the attack as a “massacre” and said the dead were mostly civilians. In photographs from the area, rescue workers were shown pulling mangled bodies from a bank of rubble. Aerial imagery appeared to confirm that much of the northern section of Jinah’s mosque was destroyed, although it was unclear whether the strike was a direct one.

According to the opposition-linked Step News Agency, the building was full at the time of the attack.

Idlib and Aleppo provinces are home to hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced by fighting, as forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad box the remnants of a six-year-long armed rebellion into a shrinking sliver of territory along the country’s border with Turkey.

The United States has struck dozens of locations in the region, where an al-Qaeda-linked alliance of rebel groups is now the ascendent force. The group’s second-in-command, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, was killed in an airstrike on his car in late February, and the Central Command said that a separate bombing raid on an al-Qaeda training camp in January killed more than 100 militants.

Russian and Syrian aircraft are also known to operate in the area, turning the battlefield into a microcosm of the geopolitical tensions that have come to define Syria’s war.

Senior U.S. military officials have called for increased talks between Washington and Moscow to “deconflict” operations and make sure there are no collisions between aircraft.

Separately Friday, Syria and Israel traded competing claims over an apparent Israeli attack near the western city of Palmyra in the early morning hours.

While the Syrian military said its air defenses had shot down an Israeli jet over what it called "occupied ground," an Israeli military spokesman said the pilots’ safety was “at no point” compromised.

in b4 morbs to say obama killed civilians too &c &c

Well, yeah. Does it make a moral difference if one president says he gives a fuck if civilians are killed and the other doesn't?

Meanwhile, just for Alfred: Peggy Noonan, she is earnest!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reach-across-the-aisle-mr-president-1489705420?mod=e2two

― Ned Raggett, Friday, March 17, 2017 10:14 AM

Thanks - I was about to have lunch!

death hurts less

arguably Yam at his most "presidential"

xp

I'm starting to think that some malformed "compromise" (but still terrible) version of AHCA/ACA repeal is going to pass tbh. It will please no one and doom the GOP's mid-term prospects, but the desperation to show any kind of accomplishment seems likely to override any principled stands (or, at least, enough of them). Not expecting anything to come up to a floor vote and fail, neither McConnell nor Ryan will expose themselves to that kind of humiliation. Currently seems like best hope to block it is for it to get delayed in the Senate long enough - ie, until after the spring recess, during which Senators will get pummeled by the public/town halls/etc. - and that might doom it. idk.

current AHCA= HEAD FAKE!!! trial balloon!!!

Govs. Kasich, Snyder, Sandoval and Hutchinson (all GOP) just formally rubbished AHCA via a statement to McConnell/Ryan

http://www.healthtransformation.ohio.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=S_gEqkALBFY%3d&tabid=160

Has there ever been a time when the stance of the federal government was so overtly (OVERTLY, I said) 'fuck most of you'?

Probably Reagan.

Is this a new thing, pushing to pass a piece of shit bill with the understanding it will be fixed after it passes?

As for whatever Trump is claiming:

https://twitter.com/freedomcaucus/status/842763614004109314

The House Freedom Caucus still opposes the GOP replacement bill in its current form.

Dems did it in 2010!

xpost

sort of (LBJ's first civil rights bill springs to mind) - but what they're doing here is p unique since no one's ever successfully rescinded an entitlement program, and using reconciliation to enable them to do it in stages is a novel approach, to say the least.

so afaik no one posted about the EPA-Monsanto revelations?

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53906/monsanto-glyphosphate-roundup-epa/

news to me but not surprised

See, Crooked EPA is in bed with companies. Sad! That's why we must dissolve this agency immediately to #MAGA.

https://twitter.com/BroderickGreer/status/842780279005691906

The White House included that Washington Post column in their daily email of press clips. So either they didn't read past the headline, or someone in the Press Office is trying to send a message...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7IdpK1W4AAev8B.jpg

SIT UP STRAIGHT YOU FUCKING MAN BABY