World's Biggest Asshole Trump hosted the NRA at the White House on the anniversary of Sandy Hook massacre

Because fuck you, that's why

GOP Plan Retains Tax Break for Golf-Course Owners

Donald Trump repeatedly promised that he would not benefit from his own tax plan. Congressional Republicans repeatedly pledged that they would finance a “middle-class tax cut” by closing “special interest” loopholes — especially those that benefit the affluent. These were always transparent lies.

From the beginning, it was clear that the GOP plan would deliver a windfall to the Trump family, through its abolition of the estate tax, a giant cut in the rate for pass-through companies (like the Trump Organization), and a massive reduction in the corporate tax rate (which will primarily benefit wealthy shareholders). Meanwhile, the Republicans never did much to conceal that their plan would deliver more benefits to their preferred special-interest groups than to the middle class.

Still, few could have anticipated just how gratuitously the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act violates the president’s promises to the American people. Pretending that corporate tax cuts produce huge wage gains for middle-class workers is one thing. But ending deductions that benefit veterans, indebted students, orphans, and people who suffer from rare diseases — while preserving one that benefits owners of golf courses — requires almost superhuman chutzpah.

And this is an excellent job:

Rep Susan DelBene shows in 2min 30secs that new tax plan favors corporations over people

Yes, Trump is a Cruel Bigot

Despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, why would President Donald Trump start off this week with a continuation of his lies against Myeshia Johnson, the Gold Star widow of Sgt. La David Johnson?

Appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Johnson expressed the pain and emotions she felt when Trump called her to offer condolences after her husband was killed during a mission in Niger. She said the president’s tone was callous and that he didn’t call her husband by his name, referring to him as “your guy.” Johnson also supported the account of the call made by Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), who was in the car when Trump called and heard the conversation on a speaker phone. Wilson told reporters last week that Trump was insensitive when he told Johnson that her husband “knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”

Trump denied it all, essentially saying the Gold Star widow was a liar. “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!” Trump tweeted Monday morning.

What’s to be gained? How does the petty and petulant palaver from the President of the United States advance anything for the benefit of the nation? Or, for that matter, how does it benefit Trump to abuse his bully pulpit by lying about what he said and did to a Gold Star widow? Why won’t Trump merely apologize and let the matter gracefully disappear?

(snip) ... perhaps, Trump’s comments are, as Silver put it, “impulsive and primarily emotions,” suggesting a presidential personality that can’t tolerate criticism, especially from individuals and groups that aren’t white, male, and wealthy like himself.

Witness, for example, Trump’s Twitter rants going after Rep. Wilson, the mostly black NFL player protests, ESPN anchor Jemele Hill, former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, and, particularly resonant in the current case, Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

Silver acknowledges these theories aren’t mutually exclusive. “But the theories are in conflict because they’re about the intent and motivation for Trump’s behavior and not necessarily its effects,” Silver writes. [J]ournalists come up with overly convoluted explanations for Trump’s behavior (“This seemingly self-destructive emotional outburst is actually a clever political strategy!”) when simpler ones will suffice (“This is a self-destructive emotional outburst.”). . . .

One can understand why journalists who rely on having close access to Trump avoid explanations that portray Trump as being irrational, incompetent or bigoted. But sometimes they’re the only explanations that make sense. For those of us in Washington, and I suspect for concerned people well beyond the Beltway, across this nation and around the globe, trying to fathom Trump’s mind is a deadly serious and risky business. ... Trump’s stubborn deceit about the pain and suffering of a Gold Star widow reflects the cruel, cold heart of a bullying bigot.

Climate Assholes

The psychotic GOP death cult is making sure we are headed to catastrophic climate change.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America’s efforts to tackle global warming.

At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions.

“The war on coal is over,” Mr. Pruitt said. “Tomorrow in Washington, D.C., I will be signing a proposed rule to roll back the Clean Power Plan. No better place to make that announcement than Hazard, Kentucky.”

The repeal proposal, which will be filed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, fulfills a promise President Trump made to eradicate his predecessor’s environmental legacy. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan makes it less likely the United States can fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to ratchet down emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon that international accord.

Trump, the Eternal GOP Asshole and Nuclear Psychopath

Shit is getting real:

There is nothing more to be said about the depth of Donald Trump’s ignorance or his more consequential lack of character—his selfishness, his cruelty, his caprice, his vanity, his vindictiveness, his malignant narcissism. We know all that. What is more interesting is what it will yield. 

Last Friday, he kicked off his weekend by firing off a set of abusive tweets at Carmen Yulin Cruz, the beleaguered mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The explanation was not hard to glean: the U.S. territory is a disaster zone in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria; he had not paid much attention to the sufferings of several million Americans for reasons easily guessed, and took a bludgeoning in the media for his negligence. And so after Cruz insisted that the plight of her city wasn’t “a good news story,” Trump decided to heap abuse on the strained leader of a suffering city. A decent president who thought Mayor Cruz’s reproaches unjustified would have gently ignored them, and perhaps pointed out what the federal government has done and can do for Puerto Rico. But then again, a decent man would not have repeatedly sneered at and damned an 81-year-old war hero with a lethal cancer.

The consequences of Trump’s preference for picking fights with some black football players rather than seeing what could be done about Spanish-speaking victims of a hurricane will be felt in predictable ways. One may expect angry voters of Hispanic extraction to exact a price at the ballot box. But his weekend tweets about his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, will have consequences that may be longer term and considerably darker. 

In a series of tweets on Sunday, Trump sneered at Tillerson’s diplomatic efforts to engage with North Korea, which other members of the foreign policy apparatus (to include the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) have dutifully and appropriately supported. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done! Being nice to Rocket Man hasn't worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won't fail.” 

There are two things at work here. Trump has emasculated his secretary of state, who clearly does not speak for the administration. Some of Tillerson’s predecessors have fallen out of favor with their presidents, but none has been so undercut in such a public, dismissive way. And if Trump is serious, this means war, and a war to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons could lead not only to the devastation of much of the Korean peninsula, but the first use of such weapons—by the United States as likely as by the North Koreans—since 1945. 

There is no middle path between some combination of deterrence, containment, sanctions, covert action, and threats of preemption directed at North Korea, on the one hand, and a preventive war on the other. The forces impelling Pyongyang to acquire nuclear weapons are strong, and go well beyond the vanity of the grandson of the country’s founder. For a dictatorship whose slogan of self-reliance is national dogma, nuclear weapons are the ultimate source of autonomy in a world of wealthier and presumably hostile states. Nor will China squeeze Kim Jong Un hard enough to make him yield. It does not want chaos on its southern border. It does not want a unified Korea aligned with the United States. And above all, it does not intend to act, or be seen to act, as America’s sheriff. 

Trump has chosen to say, and compel those who speak for him to say, that North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons and threats leveled against the United States are themselves a casus belli. Yet Pyongyang has nuclear weapons and has threatened the United States. He has now repeatedly insisted that he will resolve the problem that has bedeviled three of his predecessors, and has made it clear that diplomacy is not the way. That leaves either North Korea’s surrender, which will not happen, or war, or another broken promise. 

The incalculable costs of war could include the loss of hundreds of thousands of Korean lives, and the loss of many thousands of U.S. soldiers and civilians, including military dependents in Korea. It could well bring about a Chinese intervention and direct confrontation with Beijing. It would shatter what remaining confidence America’s allies have in Washington’s good judgment.

 

Trump Is an Asshole: Victim Blaming Puerto Rico

A True Moment of National Disgrace:

On Twitter this morning, stung by criticism, President Trump attacked the people of Puerto Rico, all American citizens, as lazy and disorganized people who “want everything to be done for them.” I am cutting the verbatim text out of the tweets here.

“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

There’s more. But I don’t think we need to hear more after these words.

Thanks to reporting from the big papers, we now have a general understanding of how this all unfolded. For a critical three or four days after Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, President Trump was away at his New Jersey golf resort, ranting about the NFL and generally not paying attention. It now seems that wasn’t merely a matter of optics and presidential statements. Critical time was lost and things didn’t happen. Once the scope of catastrophe began to become clear, Trump’s inaction began to generate criticism. Once that happened Trump proceeded to fold Puerto Rico into his comfort zone politics of grievance and narcissism. The focus shifted to Puerto Rico’s debt, ingratitude and – finally this morning – laziness and disorganization.

It does not discount or diminish Trump’s penchant for racist awfulness to note that a lot of this doesn’t seem to be by design or, perhaps better to say, forethought. It is more like reflex, in response to his own bumbling. Trump provoked his battle with the NFL out of a mix of personal, racist rage and desire to stoke up his supporters with a new white rights grievance controversy. This seems a little different. His own incompetence and indifference to his job responsibilities generated criticism and led him to make critical mistakes he could not undo. Once that happened, his own personality kicked in. The greased path to narcissistic injury, grievance and racist grievance political attacks was the inevitable reflex. It’s his comfort zone, his natural inclination.

Trump Is a Cold-Blooded Psychopath

Raw Story:

Before he was president, Donald Trump told radio host Howard Stern that he turned away in disgust as an elderly man nearly bled to death in front of him. The future president recounted the story July 16, 2008, during one of his 35 appearances on Stern’s show, which have all recently been posted online, reported The Daily Beast.

Trump said the story took place at his Mar-A-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, during a Red Cross charity ball, when a man of about 80 who “a lot of people didn’t like” was badly injured in a fall. “So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head and I thought he died,” Trump said.

“And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my god, that’s disgusting, and I turned away. I couldn’t, you know — he was right in front of me. I turned away, I didn’t want to touch him.” “He’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible, you know,” Trump continued. “Beautiful marble floor, it didn’t look so good. It changed color, it became very red, and you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor, conscious, and all of the rich people are turning away, ‘Oh my god, this is terrible, this is disgusting,’ and, you know, they’re turning away, nobody wants to help the guy, and his wife is screaming, she sitting right next to him and she’s screaming.”

He told Stern that some U.S. Marines, whom he said had been given the worst table in the ballroom despite being guests of honor, rushed to the man’s aide as he and the wealthy donors in attendance watched in horror.

“So from the back of the room they come running forward, they grabbed him, they put the blood all over the place, it’s all over their uniforms, they’re taking it, they swipe — they ran him out, they created a stretcher — they call it a human stretcher, their arms out, like five guys on each side,” Trump said. “They ran him out, I never saw it, they ran him out. I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up, it’s disgusting.'”

Trump eventually learned the man had survived, but he admitted that he neglected to check on him.

Trump Is an Asshole, Part Infinity

Trump retweets edited GIF aimed at Clinton; President Trump retweeted a video that shows him striking Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball.

Needless to say, this is not funny and not presidential, and it's scary to think the US nuclear arsenal is in the hands of this idiot.


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Trump blocks woman with stage 4 cancer on Twitter after she criticized his latest health care plan.
What an asshole.

The Graham-Cassidy Healthcare Monstrosity

Pierce:

Over the past few days, I have had to abandon one of my most deeply held political beliefs: that the reservoir of deceit, mutilated history, mutant arguments, threadbare metaphors, and pure unadulterated Grade-A American bullshit that conservatives can call upon in pursuit of their political goals is fathomless.

Over the past few days, as all hands attempted to sell to the country and to their colleagues the planet-sized lemon that is the so-called Cassidy-Graham healthcare plan, I noticed that these folks had become so exhausted by the effort that they simply don’t have the energy even to lie well about it any more. The mask has dropped.

What we are hearing now from a number of people is the open admission that the goal of the Republican Party, a death-cult based on human suffering, is to strip healthcare from those people who do not vote for them, and from people the conservative mind has adjudged are unworthy of its benefits. Many of these arguments are toweringly stupid, as we shall see. But at least it’s out in the open now.

Avalere: By 2026, #GrahamCassidy cuts funding for 35 states, including Arizona and Alaska. By 2036, ALL states face massive cuts.

Never Forget Republicans on September 11th

Never Forget that Republicans blatantly lied about 9/11 being connected to Iraq and lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, then invaded Iraq and got 4,509 US soldiers killed, so they could profit off war, push through their radical conservative agenda and help get Bush re-elected.


There is also the fact that Iraq was essentially destroyed as a country, the US squandered a trillion dollars and at least 1 million people died as a result of that Republican-led war.


Also, there are serious questions about the role of the Bush administration leading up to 9/11, as well as various oddities about the 9/11 attacks themselves.

Rampaging Racism by Racist Republicans

This Is Sick': Unscripted and Unhinged Trump Reverts to Defending Neo-Nazis; David Duke among white supremacists thanking president for standing up for "the truth" on Charlottesville


Trump Pardons Notorious Racist Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio-- an abuse of power and an impeachable offense-- Arpaio is a true racist psychopath.

 "'Sheriff Joe' and Donald Trump are emblems of racism and lawlessness"



Ending DACA, which could lead to the deportation of "Dreamers" is cruel and racist. Jeff Sessions is evil.

The Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Deeply Fucked Up Trump Presidency

He is still a complete idiot and ignoramus, who can barely talk in coherent sentences. It's quite shocking for any sentient being, that this man is the "most powerful person in the world".

He is still a traitor with his inexplicable actions towards Putin, and the clear collusion of his campaign with Russia in the election.

His policies are still horrible, cruel, sick right-wing policies that will not help the people who elected him. In particular, he is appallingly ignorant on how health insurance works and how bad the GOP healthcare plan is.

His "voter integrity project" is a transparent scam to suppress minority votes, and is led by the racist Kris Kobach.

He has incredibly shady ties to the Russian mob and oligarchs, which no doubt tie into the whole collusion with Russia during the campaign.

Finally, the active denial of climate change by his administration deeply threatens the future of humans on earth.

His policies are all truly evil, he is shitting on the country.  But to be fair, Trump is a reflection of the standard Republican line on all these issues.

The GOP and their support of the greedy conservative oligarchy is the major political problem the US faces, and is a major threat to the planet.

The GOP Are All Complicit in Treason

It wasn't just Donald Trump who dismissed and rejected charges that Russian spies hacked the election last year.

Now we know that pretty much the entire Republican party team did so, too – from the Republican congressional leadership down to GOP Secretaries of State in the states whose local electoral systems were under attack. They blithely served as Vladimir Putin's defense team, even as President Obama's national security aides were uncovering a vast Russian conspiracy to undermine America's electoral process.

That's just one conclusion from a blockbuster investigative piece published Friday by the Washington Post, telling the inside story of the Obama administration's effort to grapple with the evolving Russian hack-and-leak effort in 2016.

SNIP

What we learn from the Post is that it wasn't just the U.S Conspiracy-Theorist-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who denied, deflected and ridiculed charges that Russia was a secret supporter of his (perhaps unwitting, perhaps not) electoral team.

We learn that, in August, when the Obama administration quietly approached Capitol Hill to seek bipartisan support from congressional leaders about the growing evidence of Russian involvement, CIA Director John Brennan couldn't even get top Republicans to meet with him. We learn that when a caravan of top U.S national security officials finally sat down with members of Congress, the GOP – led by Senator Mitch McConnell – flatly refused to cooperate. We learn that when Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, contacted people in charge of elections in various states whose election data had been possibly compromised, the Republicans in those states blew him off.

And we learn that Denis McDonough, Obama's chief of staff, toyed with the idea of a bipartisan commission to take on the Russia spy effort, the White House concluded that it would be impossible to get the GOP on board.

The GOP Authoritarian Nightmare Is a Twin Threat

Ever since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, critics worried about his authoritarian tendencies. He’s done much to justify those fears. At his rallies, he whipped crowds into such a frenzy that protesters were beaten. As president, he’s flouted elementary rules about nepotism and conflict of interest; undermined the independence of the judiciary by impugning judges overseeing cases involving him or his administration; obstructed justice by firing James Comey after he refused to pledge loyalty to him; and arbitrarily limited media access by, for instance, replacing daily White House press briefings with off-camera gaggles where recording is banned.

SNIP

 By Frum’s definition, Trump is indeed an aspiring autocrat. But he’s only one wing of the anti-democratic trend in American politics—in the Republican Party, to be specific. Equally dangerous, and intimately connected with Trump’s mode of authoritarianism, is the degradation of democratic norms in the Senate under Mitch McConnell. The majority leader and a dozen other senators—all of them male—wrote their Obamacare repeal bill in secret, concealed not only from the public and Democrats, but even their Republican colleagues. Now, having finally released his version of the American Health Care Act on Sunday, McConnell is trying to force the bill through the Senate as quickly as possible.

SNIP

Trump’s authoritarianism and McConnell’s are two very different strains. The president is a narcissist who gathers power for personal gain self-gratification. He cares little for the specifics of policy outcomes, and merely wants victories that he can boast about.

SNIP

This is the authoritarianism of pure spectacle. McConnell, by contrast, is withdrawn and diffident in his public. (He’s jokingly likened to a turtle because of his appearance, but behaves like one, too.) While the majority leader doesn’t crave attention, he does care deeply about a specific policy agenda: advancing the plutocratic preferences of the Republican party’s donor class. Infinitely more knowledgeable than Trump about how government functions, McConnell subverts norms with a laser-like focus on advancing that agenda. His authoritarianism, in other words, is one of procedure.

As different as they are, these two forms of authoritarianism depend on each other. It’s unlikely that the Republican Party would have won a unified government last fall without Trump’s theatrical flair. To judge not only by last year’s election, but also this week’s special congressional election in Georgia, Trump’s tribalist politics have far more appeal with the Republican base than a forthright agenda of tax cuts for the rich and entitlement cuts to the poor. And when it comes to that agenda, all that really matters is that the policies be sold through the lens of negative partisanship. After all, Trump campaigned on a promise not to cut Medicaid, whereas McConnell’s version of the AHCA would slash the program by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

SNIP

If the Republican Party needs Trump, the president is equally dependent on the GOP. Given his manifest disinterest in policy and the details of governance, he would be unable to pass anything without crafty leaders like McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan. But there is a more sinister dimension to Trump’s alliance with these Republican leaders: Congress has the power to check the president, including impeachment and removal if necessary. Ryan and McConnell are the bulwarks protecting Trump from a wide range of areas where he should be held accountable. If they wanted to, they could push for laws requiring him to reveal his taxes, force him to place his assets in a blind trust, and use nepotism rules to limit the power of family members, among a range of other checks.

Republicans in the House and Senate have implicitly made a devil’s bargain with Trump, giving him a free hand to indulge his kleptocratic and autocratic tendencies in exchange for what they want: stalwart conservative judges for the Supreme Court, and a presidential signature on whatever bills Ryan and McConnell manage to pass. And make no mistake: He will sign any major legislation that crosses his desk.

It IS the Right's Fault

Reactionary demagogues have effectively programmed millions in their audiences to argue in this willfully — indeed, proudly — ignorant manner. Hence the demonic, furious, malicious, sneering comments that routinely populate right-wing blogs and comments sections, not to mention social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Based on their language, often incoherent and always full of rage and indignation, one would think that President Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi march into their homes every day, steal their money and food, and then — on the way out — ridicule them for all their adversity.

Needless to say, such baseless, inflammatory comments do not measure up to the kind of rational political dialogue envisioned by our Founding Fathers and encouraged by academic institutions. Just the opposite, they are the odious residue of minds poisoned by exposure to thousands of hours of manipulative, deceptive, McCarthyist filth. This kind of cynical indoctrination and the divisions it has caused not only among citizens but also among family members are vividly captured in Jen Senko’s brilliant but tragic movie, The Brainwashing of My Dad.

The Senate GOP hid the meanest things very deeply in its Obamacare repeal bill.

The Affordable Care Act repeal bill unveiled Thursday by Senate Republicans has aptly drawn universal scorn from healthcare experts, hospital and physician groups and advocates for patients and the needy. That’s because the bill is a poorly-disguised massive tax cut for the wealthy, paid for by cutting Medicaid — which serves the middle class and the poor — to the bone.

Yet some of the measure’s most egregious, harshest provisions are well-disguised. They’re hidden deep in its underbrush or in the maze of legislative verbiage. We’ve ferreted out some of them and present them here in all their malevolent glory. In this effort we’ve built on ace detective work by Adrianna McIntyre, Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan, David Anderson of Duke University and balloon-juice.com, Andy Slavitt, the former head of Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama administration, and others.

Some of these provisions match those in the House Republicans’ repeal bill passed May 4, and some are even harsher — more “mean,” to use a term President Trump himself applied to the House bill. That bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would cost some 23 million Americans their health coverage by 2026. The Senate bill wouldn’t do much better, and might do worse.

—States will have more authority to reimpose lifetime and annual benefit caps and eliminate essential health benefits. This may be the most insidious provision of the repeal bill, and certainly is the most deeply hidden.

SNIP

—Protection for people with preexisting conditions is destroyed. Senate Republicans claim in their talking points that the measure protects people with preexisting conditions from being denied coverage or priced out of the market. Don’t believe them. As Gene Sperling, a former economist for the Clinton and Obama administrations, and Michael Shapiro observe, “the Republican plan may not allow insurers to discriminate … through the front door, but they’ve created a backdoor way in.”

SNIP

Older Americans would get socked with much higher premiums and costs. The Senate bill changes the ACA’s premium subsidies in ways that severely hurt older customers. The bill expands the permissible range of premiums for older buyers compared to younger from a ratio of 3 to 1 in the ACA to 5 to 1. In other words, older buyers could be charged much more. It reduces subsidies for older buyers in other ways. The ACA’s subsidies are based entirely on income, and are provided to households with income up to 400% of the federal poverty line. That ceiling is $48,240 for an individual.

SNIP

—The biggest tax cut for the rich is retroactive. As we’ve reported before, the repeal measure delivers an estimated $346 billion in tax cuts over 10 years, all of it going to households with income over $250,000. But the biggest component of the cut — repeal of a 3.8% surcharge on capital gains and dividends for those taxpayers — would be retroactive to the beginning of this year. That turns it into more of a free handout for wealthy people who already had sold securities or collected dividends since Jan. 1.
Even the Wall Street Journal is aghast. “Retroactive tax cuts like this don’t create an incentive and can yield windfall gains for people who already made decisions,” the paper observed. A millionaire who already had booked a $1-million gain on a stock sale, for example, would collect a $38,000 benefit.

This provision in particular is heavily loaded toward the richest of the rich. According to the Tax Policy Center, 90% of the cut goes to the top 1% (those with income of $699,000 or more); they’d get an average tax benefit of about $25,000. And almost two-thirds goes to the top 0.1% (with income exceeding $3.8 million); they’d get an average $165,000.

 SNIP

—The fight against opioid addiction is crippled. Opioid addiction has emerged as perhaps the worst public health crisis in America. But as much as 40% of the cost of treatment of addicts has been paid by Medicaid. The harsh cuts in that program imposed by the Senate bill would force more of that expense onto states that simply can’t afford it. Meanwhile, the projected loss of medical coverage by as many as 23 million Americans under repeal will keep many victims of the epidemic from finding treatment.

SNIP

—Salaries for health insurance chief executives can go through the roof. This provision matches one that was buried in the House bill, and is similarly obscured in the Senate version. It removes a limit on the deductibility of CEO pay in the health insurance industry written into the ACA.

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

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

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

Trump’s business empire intersects with government in countless ways, from taxation to permitting to the issuing of patents, but the housing subsidy is one of the clearest examples of the conflicts experts have predicted. While there is no indication that Trump himself was involved in the decision, it is nonetheless a stark illustration of how his financial interests can directly rise or fall on the policies of his administration.

Republican Healthcare Bill Gives Tax Cuts to the Rich by Gutting Safety Net for Poor & Middle Class

The whole thing is a horror show:

AMY GOODMAN: After weeks of secret deliberations, Republican senators Thursday released a healthcare bill that would reduce key benefits for millions of Americans. The Better Care Reconciliation Act would fund a large capital gains tax cut for the rich by removing millions of low-income and disabled people from Medicaid. According to the Center on Budget [and] Policy Priorities, $33 billion of the tax cuts would benefit the 400 wealthiest U.S. households. The Senate bill would also reduce subsidies to individuals to purchase health insurance, and would allow states to eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The measure would defund Planned Parenthood for a year, making breast cancer screenings and basic reproductive services more difficult for women to secure.

SNIP

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: This is a bill designed to strip away healthcare benefits and protections from Americans who need it most, in order to give a tax break to the folks who need it least. This is a bill that would end Medicaid as we know it, rolling back Medicaid expansion, cutting federal support for the program even more than the House bill, which cut Medicaid by $800 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as scores of disabled protesters held a sit-in outside Senator Mitch McConnell’s office on Capitol Hill Thursday and demonstrators gathered at Washington, D.C.’s National Airport to target Republican lawmakers as they left town for their home states.

Also on Thursday, Barack Obama weighed in on efforts to scale back his signature healthcare law. He posted a scathing statement on Facebook that said, quote, "The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America," President Obama said.

Evil Healthcare Legislation from the GOP

13 white male Republicans bought off by insurance companies are deciding the fate of health insurance & 1/6th of the economy in SECRET 

And there's no doubt they will cut medicare deeply and take away insurance from millions.

Mick Mulvaney and Trump's Psychopathic and Cruel Budget

Trump’s budget is ruthless to disabled and poor people. This budget would set the clock back for the rights of people with disabilities by 50 years, experts say.

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Mulvaney went on to say “you have to have compassion for folks who are receiving the federal funds, but also you have to have compassion for folks who are paying it.”
The budget offered by the Trump administration aims to cut Medicaid by $800 billion, nutritional assistance by $192 billion, and $272 billion from welfare programs overall. Critics have pointed out that the plan is unworkable because it’s paid for by a “$2 trillion is a double-counting error”

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John Oliver showed that a president's budget is a moral document, a window into the 'soul' of the President and his administration. Trump's budget reveals him as a soulless monster (who likely has no idea exactly what's in this budget).

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Longtime federal budget experts quickly slammed the White House’s proposed 2018 budget on Tuesday. Its $1.4 trillion in cuts over the next decade would endanger tens of millions of households, especially the poor and vulnerable, while rewarding the wealthy with unneeded tax cuts and giving contracts to military contractors and others to privatize many government functions.

But inside the right-wing bubble that is the Trump White House and GOP-majority Congress, what’s taken as serious policy ideas, spending principles and rationales for the president’s 2018 budget is reality-averse craziness.

Even as budget watchers say there’s no way Trump’s blueprint will make it through Congress, the starting line—before compromises, concessions and deals begin—is not just mean, cruel and uninformed; it’s delusional. Not only would the budget hit working-class white voters who bet on Trump like a lottery ticket, but the budget also shows a White House living in a land of make-believe.

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EPA Chief Pruit Refuses to Say Whether He and Trump Discussed Climate Change Before Withdrawing from Paris Accords

What a pair of massive assholes.

Trump the Psychopath

Jerk. Liar. Bully. Thug. Con artist. Scumbag. Asshole.

In the four months since the inauguration of Donald Trump, these terms have regrettably become aptly descriptive staples of our political lexicon. We’ve officially arrived at a dystopian moment in our nation's history when our elected officials don’t earn respect because they don't give it.

If it isn’t a flippant remark from a Republican “representative” to his outraged constituents at a health care town hall, it’s Trump shoving another world leader to get to the front of the line, a Republican sailing to victory after publicly assaulting a journalist, or an entire Republican Congress looking the other way as allegations of treason engulf the Trump administration in seemingly never ending scandal.

It feels as though everywhere we turn we are inundated with not just unbridled arrogance and entitlement, but a refusal by the “powers that be” to hold any of the bad actors accountable. In fact, it's as though acting badly has now become a virtue in Trump’s America, and those who behave the worst are being rewarded rather than punished for their misdeeds. Or to quote Donald Trump explicitly, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

So we watch in horror and disgust as the man who bragged about getting away with serial sexual molestation not only fires the very people tasked with leading the investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, but boasts about his efforts to obstruct justice. By day he makes the mundane rounds required of the office, but by night he’s a keyboard commando, hurling defensive accusations and insults at his detractors online in response to the latest breaking corruption allegations.

He has become the social media equivalent of Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, prowling the Twitter streets wielding his cellphone as a makeshift chainsaw. He inhabits the fantasy world of his own self-serving mind, in which nothing he does is wrong or unjustifiable, and his actions are rendered legitimate and lawful simply by virtue of the fact that he took them. He and his underlings spare no expense in defending the indefensible.

Trump the Asshole Withdraws from the Paris Climate Accords

A perfect summation from Charlie Pierce:

I didn't think he could top his ghastly American Carnage inaugural address for sheer fact-free and paranoiac mendacity, but he managed to do it on Thursday. By announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the groundbreaking Paris Accords regarding the world climate crisis, the president* wallowed in rank, xenophobic victimhood while basking in the scattered applause of the otherwise unemployable yahoos whose self-respect is sufficiently low that they still work for him. Any doubt that Steve Bannon is running this White House now, either personally or through his finger-puppet, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, now has evaporated. The transformation of the American government into a Breitbart comments thread is complete.

It was appalling. It was condescending. It was awful content delivered by a dolt who wouldn't know the Paris Accords from a baguette without the shoddy talking points that someone put in front of him. (snip)

The least objectionable element of the speech was its utter internal incoherence.

The United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian economic and financial burden the agreement imposes on our country.

Paris was a non-binding and ineffective agreement, but it was "draconian" nonetheless. The economy is booming under his leadership, but the Paris Accord was destroying it at the same time. This was a speech written by a fool, to be delivered by a fool, with the presumption that a great percentage of its target audience is made up of fools.

But the really noxious stuff was the attempt at transforming a worldwide agreement to combat an existential threat to life on this planet into what he stupidly called a scheme to redistribute our wealth to China, as if we're all not going to be buying our solar panels from China for the next 50 years because of this cluck. The really noxious stuff was all that simpering about how the rest of the world is playing us for suckers and laughing at us, as though the rest of the world doesn't think we've lost our mind as a nation simply by electing a vulgar talking yam. The really noxious stuff was all his crocodile tears about the Forgotten People, as though a lot of them are not suffering through drought, or losing their houses to floods and to landslides, about which he and his people care nothing at all. (snip)

It was a speech written by an angry child, to be delivered by an angry child, with the assumption that its targeted audience was made up of angry children, too. And it was of a piece with that lunatic Wall Street Journal op-ed from Tuesday in which H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn pretty much decided that international diplomacy is nothing more than a larger-than-usual barrel of cannibalistic crabs. (snip)

The idea that these people put together a party in the Rose Garden to celebrate the withdrawal of American leadership in the world leads me to believe that they'd host a barbecue to celebrate a public execution. None of that matters. While the president was speaking, as it happens, a huge chunk of Antarctica was preparing to break off. Meanwhile, Wednesday was the first day of hurricane season, and this president*, who cares so much about the duties of his office and the people of this great land, still hasn't bothered to appoint a FEMA director yet. The nonsense he spewed on Thursday doesn't matter, either, even if it continues to gull the suckers out in the sticks. The oceans are not listening to him.

(emphases added)

This "decision" (which thankfully won't matter too much in the grand scheme of fighting climate change, because most of the US is actually committed to reducing carbon emissions) easily moves Trump into the lead for WORST PRESIDENT EVER. It's just a complete bone-headed, petty move, that cedes any moral authority or global leadership by the US. In his few short months as POTUS, Trump has greatly diminished the stature of the US, much more than Bush, and of course, it must make his boss Vladimir Putin very happy.

GOP Assholes in US House of Representatives Pass Horrible Health Care Bill that Will Throw Millions Off Healthcare, Kill People, Inflict Cruelty

Senator Bernie Sanders and leading Democrats are calling the Republican health care bill a death sentence for thousands of Americans. The Republicans’ proposed replacement for Obamacare narrowly passed the House Thursday, with all 193 Democrats voting no.

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The bill's recently added MacArthur Meadows Amendment would ditch the ACA's protections for pre-existing conditions — sexual assault being one of them.
Under the amendment, states would have the all-clear to waive the ban preventing insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on pre-existing conditions. That means companies could also deny preventive health care services, like mammograms and gynecological exams, to these patients, which many sexual assault survivors in particular rely on following an attack.

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A Little-Noticed Target in the House Health Bill: Special Education
Disabled children will be hurt by this law if it eventually is signed.


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HHS Secretary Tom Price ‘welcomes’ the chance to roll back birth control coverage 


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HHS Secretary Price On Premium Hikes For The Older: ‘Somebody’s Going To Pay’


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Here are the premiums Increases a 40-year old with certain pre-existing conditions could see from the new GOP health bill

Aren't Republicans supposed to be pro-life???

Jason Chaffetz Doesn't Think Obama Should Get a Lot of Money for Speeches

Obama's $400,000 speech could prompt Congress to go after his pension:

WASHINGTON — Last year, then-president Barack Obama vetoed a bill that would have curbed the pensions of former presidents if they took outside income of $400,000 or more. So now that former president Barack Obama has decided to accept $400,000 for an upcoming Wall Street speech, the sponsors of that bill say they'll reintroduce that bill in hopes that President Trump will sign it. "The Obama hypocrisy on this issue is revealing," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and sponsor of the 2016 bill. "His veto was very self-serving."

It's self-serving but not hypocritical at all.

This also seems kind of racist on the part of Chaffetz to go after Obama's pension.

Meanwhile, I just can't see Trump signing this law.

"A Hundred Days of Trump"-- A Hundred Days of America's Biggest Asshole

On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days.

For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this.

His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite.

The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious,

Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office. Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world.

In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” This is the brand that Trump has created for himself—that of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. “I am what I am,” he has said.

But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the world’s autocrats.

When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Korea’s radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment,” does one man sound more immediately rational than the other?

When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkey—or when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt—how are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership?

Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a “good person,” blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment.

A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”

Every Day of the Trump Presidency Is a Hellish Game of Ethics Whac-A-Mole

Since the inauguration, Trump Hotels have drawn gobs of lobbyist cash, both foreign and domestic, and the Trump Organization is considering opening a second hotel in Washington. During the same time period, the Chinese government has approved at least five trademarks for Ivanka Trump, though both parties claim everything is on the up-and-up. Three of those approvals were granted after Ivanka Trump and Kushner dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Where were they dining? At Mar-a-Lago, of course!)

This is the Whac-A-Mole problem of the Trump presidency. There are so many bad things going on at once—so many minor corruptions and shady deals and strings that if tugged will surely lead to more evidence of self-dealing—that it’s impossible to concentrate on one at a time.

The flagrant, prima facie corruption of the Trump administration is so transparent and so all-encompassing that, perversely, it’s impossible to get people to care about it. The most pressing threat to our democratic norms isn’t Russia’s meddling in the election, it’s the endless stream of details of political corruption becoming white noise, proving each day that our system isn’t equipped to deal with officials who cannot be shamed or embarrassed into voluntarily avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

 

Look, here’s a piece in the New York Times on Jared Kushner’s financial ties to an Israeli mogul whose billionaire uncle is under investigation for bribery and money laundering. If reporters whose jobs are to follow this stuff can’t keep up, how are citizens supposed to?

Chomsky on the GOP: Has Any Organization Ever Been So Committed to Destruction of Life on Earth?

I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it.

Take a look at the last primary campaign—plenty of publicity, very little comment on the most significant fact. Every single candidate either denied that what is happening is happening—namely, serious move towards environmental catastrophe—or there were a couple of moderates, so-called—Jeb Bush, who said, "Maybe it’s happening. We really don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because fracking is working fine, so we can get more fossil fuels." Then there was the guy who was called the adult in the room, John Kasich, the one person who said, "Yes, it’s true. Global warming’s going on. But it doesn’t matter." He’s the governor of Ohio. "In Ohio, we’re going to go on using coal for energy, and we’re not going to apologize for it." So that’s 100 percent commitment to racing towards disaster.

Then take a look at what’s happened since. The—November 8th was the election. There was, as most of you know, I’m sure, a very important conference underway in Morocco, Marrakesh, Morocco. Almost roughly 200 countries at the United Nations-sponsored conference, which was—the goal of which was to put some specific commitments into the verbal agreements that were reached at Paris in December 2015, the preceding international conference on global warming. The Paris conference did intend to reach a verifiable treaty, but they couldn’t, because of the most dangerous organization in human history. The Republican Congress would not accept any commitments, so therefore the world was left with verbal promises, but no commitments. Well, last November 8th, they were going to try to carry that forward. On November 8th, in fact, there was a report by the World Meteorological Organization, a very dire analysis of the state of the environment and the likely prospects, also pointed out that we’re coming perilously close to the tipping point, where—which was the goal of the—the goal of the Paris negotiations was to keep things below that—coming very close to it, and other ominous predictions. At that point, the conference pretty much stopped, because the news came in about the election.

And it turns out that the most powerful country in human history, the richest, most powerful, most influential, the leader of the free world, has just decided not only not to support the efforts, but actively to undermine them. So there’s the whole world on one side, literally, at least trying to do something or other, not enough maybe, although some places are going pretty far, like Denmark, couple of others; and on the other side, in splendid isolation, is the country led by the most dangerous organization in human history, which is saying, "We’re not part of this. In fact, we’re going to try to undermine it." We’re going to maximize the use of fossil fuels—could carry us past the tipping point. We’re not going to provide funding for—as committed in Paris, to developing countries that are trying to do something about the climate problems. We’re going to dismantle regulations that retard the impact, the devastating impact, of production of carbon dioxide and, in fact, other dangerous gases—methane, others.

OK. So the conference kind of pretty much came to a halt. The question—it continued, but the question was: Can we salvage something from this wreckage? And pretty amazingly, the countries of the world were looking for salvation to a different country: China. Here we have a world looking for salvation to China, of all places, when the United States is the wrecking machine that’s threatening destruction, in—with all three branches of government in the hands of the most dangerous organization in human history.

And I don’t have to go through what’s happened since, but the—in general, the Cabinet appointments are designed to—assigned to people whose commitment and beliefs are that it’s necessary to destroy everything in their department that could be of any use to human beings and wouldn’t just increase profits and power. And they’re doing it very systematically, one after another. EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, has been very sharply cut. Actually, the main department that’s concerned with environmental issues is the Department of Energy, which also had very sharp cuts, particularly in the environment-related programs. In fact, there’s even a ban on posting and publishing information and material about this.

And this is not just at the national level. The Republican Party, whatever you want to call it, has been doing this at every level. So, in North Carolina, a couple of years ago, where the Legislature, mostly thanks to gerrymandering, is in the hands of the Republicans, there was a study. They called for a study on the effect of sea level rise—on what sea level rise might be on the North Carolina coast. And there was a serious scientific study, which predicted, in not—I forget how many years—not a long time, about roughly a meter rise in sea level, which could be devastating to eastern North Carolina. And the Legislature did react, namely, by passing legislation to ban any actions or even discussion that might have to do with climate change. Actually, the best comment of this—I wish I could quote it verbatim—was by Stephen Colbert, who said, "If you have a serious problem, the way to deal with it is to legislate that it doesn’t exist. Problem solved."

Trump’s Proposed Tax Plan Could Cost the Government $6 Trillion While Benefitting Himself and Super Rich

President Donald Trump will outline major tax cuts for Americans Wednesday that could take trillions of dollars away from the federal government over the next decade and lump it on to the national debt.

The president will be "pretty broad in the principles" of tax reform that he lays out with more details coming in the summer, his director of legislative affairs, Marc Short, told the Associated Press. But what it boils down to is major hikes in the amount people can deduct from their taxes and large cuts for small businesses and corporations.

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New Trump Tax Plan Would Aid Billionaires, Add Trillions to Deficit

The White House on Wednesday outlined a tax plan that would add trillions of dollars to the U.S. deficit while overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthiest corporations and individuals—including President Trump. The skeletal plan, which the White House unveiled as a single-page document, would lower the corporate tax rate to 15 percent—though corporations rarely pay the current rate of 35 percent. Trump’s plan would also end the estate tax, referred to by opponents as the "death tax." This is White House economic adviser Gary Cohn.

Gary Cohn: "We’re going to repeal the death tax. The threat of being hit by the death tax leaves small business owners and farmers in this country to waste countless hours and resources on complicated estate planning to make sure their children aren’t hit with a huge tax when they die. No one wants to see their children have to sell the family business to pay an unfair tax."

IRS statistics show the estate tax is paid by just the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans. Trump’s tax plan would also end the alternative minimum tax, a move that would benefit the richest Americans, including President Trump. A leaked 2005 tax return shows Donald Trump paid out $36.6 million in federal income taxes that year—most of it due to the alternative minimum tax. At the White House, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the president would not make his tax returns public, even though Trump previously said he would release the returns after a "routine audit."

Reporter: "My second question is: Will the president release his tax returns, so that Americans—"

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin: "The president has no intention. The president has released plenty of information, and I think he’s given more financial disclosure than anybody else. I think the American population has plenty of information on this."

Trump’s tax proposal would also lower the capital gains tax rate and would decrease the number of income tax brackets from seven to just three, while lowering the tax rate for the wealthiest individuals by nearly 4 percentage points. The plan was blasted by congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who called it a "wish list for billionaires." We’ll have more on Trump’s tax plan after headlines with James Henry of the Tax Justice Network.

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"A Land Grab by the Ruling Elites": Trump's Tax Plan Derided for Benefiting the Rich

Republicans exempt their own health insurance from their latest health care proposal

Republican legislators want to keep popular Obamacare provisions for themselves and their staff, while they repeal the law for everyone else.

The GOP Steals a SCOTUS Seat

GOP assholes!

It’s official—the rules were changed, a 51-vote majority would suffice to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and 49-year-old Neil M. Gorsuch has officially been confirmed as the 113th justice of our nation’s highest judicial body, where he will sit, presumably, from now until the day he dies.

This is the final result of a process that began when Republicans refused to hold even a committee hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee, based on a rather flimsy argument that a president shouldn’t appoint a justice in an election year, despite heaps of examples of that exact outcome. In retaliation, Senate Democrats ran a successful filibuster against Gorsuch yesterday, to which their Republican counterparts responded by changing the rules so that 60 votes were no longer required to confirm. And today, the process ended with a 54-45 vote in favor of Gorsuch.

This so-called “nuclear option” worked, technically, but it also made it plain that a seat was stolen, and called the legitimacy of both the judicial and legislative branches into question—at a time when the executive branch is dealing with its own legitimacy issues. This is, without a doubt, a low point in the history of American politics.

And Gorsuch is a rightwing extremist, in contrast to Garland, who is a moderate centrist.

GOP motherfuckers.

Trump the Hypocrital Asswipe

Trump is currently at Trump International Golf Club in Florida, his 15th trip to the golf course in 11 weeks. Trump in 2013 tweets: "PresObama is not busy talking to Congress about Syria..he is playing golf ...go figure"

Trump bombs Syria because of poison gas attacks on children...

-- won't take Syria refugees from Assad

-- previously criticized Obama for wanting to take military action against Assad  after the 2013 gas attack.

-- attacks on an airfield didn't prevent planes from taking off and bombing Syrians again

Trump Loves Saddam Hussein

In an October exclusive with NBC's Chuck Todd, Trump asserted that the Middle East would be better off today if Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein were still in power. "It's not even a contest," Trump told Meet the Press. Trump continued to push this idea at a rally in Franklin, Tennessee, telling the crowd that despite Hussein's "vicious" rule in Iraq "there were no terrorists in Iraq" while he ruled.

"You know what he used to do to terrorists?" Trump polled the Tennessee crowd. "A one day trial and shoot him…and the one day trial usually lasted five minutes, right? There was no terrorism then."

Trump didn't just praise Hussein for keeping terrorists at bay, but seemed to tacitly accept the dictator's use of chemical weapons. During a December rally in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Trump took a cavalier attitude toward Iraq's use of chemical weapons under Saddam.

"Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, 'oh he's using gas!'" Trump said. Describing the way stability was maintained in the region during that time, Trump said "they go back, forth, it's the same. And they were stabilized."

Trump Doesn't Understand Health Insurance, Thinks Medical Coverage Is Trivial

What an asshole:

President Donald Trump was reportedly skimpy on the details of the now-failed American Health Care Act in a meeting with conservative Republicans Thursday, apparently telling them to "forget about the little shit," multiple unnamed sources told Politico.

The report described a meeting that Trump had with members of the Freedom Caucus, in which members pelted him with "wonkish concerns" about specific aspects of the Republicans' bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump cut them off, according to the report, wanting to keep it simple.

"Forget about the little shit," Trump said, unnamed sources told Politico."Let's focus on the big picture here."

That reportedly did not sit well with members in attendance.

"We’re talking about one-fifth of our economy," an unnamed member told Politico's Tim Alberta.

The report is in line with others that have said Trump does not like to be bogged down with many details and prefers short intelligence briefings made up of bullet points.

Members of the Freedom caucus reportedly also took issue with Trump when he apparently "called out" Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) during a meeting earlier that week with the GOP conference, joking that he may have to "come after" Meadows if he didn't vote for the bill. He then reportedly said that he thought Meadows, a longtime Trump ally would "get on board."

"That was the biggest mistake the president could have made," an unnamed Freedom Caucus member told Politico. "Mark desperately wanted to get to yes, and Trump made it impossible for him. If he flipped after that he would look incredibly weak.

Ultimately, Freedom Caucus members, as well as some moderate Republicans, did not get on board with the legislation, which was pulled on Friday after not getting enough support.

Haha, he's an idiot AND an asshole.

GOP Assholes Don't Want Health Care Insurance to Cover Maternity Care

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, one of the top administration officials who had been working to pass the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, on Friday morning brushed off concerns about a new provision in the bill that repeals the Essential Health Benefits requirement.

That provision would repeal a requirement that insurers cover a list of 10 essential benefits, including maternity care. Asked about this on CBS' "This Morning," Mulvaney argued that states can still require that insurance companies cover the EHBs.

"If you live in a state that wants to mandate maternity coverage for everybody, including 60-year-old women, that’s fine," he said.

Co-host Alex Wagner asked Mulvaney about people who do not live in a state that requires maternity coverage.

"Then you can figure out a way to change the state that you live in," Mulvaney replied.

Asshole Trump Tries to Bill Germany for NATO

Donald Trump handed the German chancellor Angela Merkel a bill — thought to be for more than £300bn — for money her country “owed” Nato for defending it when they met last weekend, German government sources have revealed.

The bill — handed over during private talks in Washington — was described as “outrageous” by one German minister.

“The concept behind putting out such demands is to intimidate the other side, but the chancellor took it calmly and will not respond to such provocations,” the minister said.

The Black Hearts of GOP Assholes

They will die whether or not they trusted Hillary Rodham Clinton, or thought Barack Obama was a tool of the Kenyan Chinese Communists, or whether or not they believe in the climate crisis.

The companies are going to laugh off these toothless "compliance reviews" and be as heedless of the safety of their employees as they've ever been. Then there will be an explosion, or a fire, or a cave-in, and people will die, and there won't even be a sufficient investigation into why because there will be nobody to conduct it, and no new regulations will result because there won't be anyone there to write them or enforce them.

This is the profound emptiness at the heart of conservatism when it gets into government. Even in triumph, it can't turn off the autonomic anti-government nerve system that has animated modern conservatism for the past 50 years.

It has relied on so much that is contrary to human nature and human experience that it doesn't know how to relate to the world any other way. This is the profound emptiness at the heart of conservatism.

This is a movement that believes that, to be free, a 68-year-old Alzheimer's patient should shop for his own health insurance, which will be provided to him at a reasonable price because, if it isn't, some market magic will make the health insurance company go bankrupt for being mean to its customers.

This is the movement that produces critters like Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who, when asked why he voted against the Violence Against Women Act, replied that violence against women was a state issue and not a federal one. When asked, and I'm paraphrasing here, whether or not he realized how very stupid his first answer was, Barton replied, Shut up.

This is a movement that believes that government's relationship with industry should be a silk hand in a velvet glove, that corporations like those which mine and sell coal have a vigorous social conscience, and, therefore, when they find that they are endangering their workers, they will spend what it takes to make them safe. There are people who believe this bunk, just as there are people who believed Donald Trump. God, and they say liberals are the ones who don't know the real world.

Inhofe: the EPA is Brainwashing Our Kids

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is accusing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of releasing "propaganda" that is "brainwashing our kids."

"We want to deliver the services. We ought to make things clean," Inhofe said Thursday on CNN's "New Day." "But we ought to take all this stuff that comes out of the EPA that's brainwashing our kids, that is propaganda, things that aren't true, allegations."

The EPA is facing a budget cut of 31 percent under President Trump's proposed federal budget blueprint. The budget blueprint provides $5.7 billion for the EPA, down from $8.3 billion.

It "discontinues" $100 million in funding for several climate change programs within the agency, including enforcement for a major Obama-era climate regulation, climate change research and international climate change support.

Inhofe did during the CNN interview, however, describe Clean Air Act amendments as "very successful." "All these things have worked. Our air is cleaner, pollution is down," he said.

In February of 2015, the Oklahoma Republican threw a snowball on the Senate floor to make a statement about climate change. Inhofe used the snowball to argue against claims that the Earth's temperature is rising due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Inhofe is a mother-fucking GOP asshole.

The Budget from Hell

Every year, during the run-up to Halloween, when Jim DeMint goes to Hell's mega-mall and sits on Satan's lap, he has a list of things he wants for the holiday. The parents of the assembled demons and imps behind him in line often get frustrated because the list is so long.

On Thursday, the Trump Administration released its proposed national budget. It's been a long time coming, but DeMint and the rest of the greasy barbarians at Heritage finally got most of what they asked for. This proposed budget isn't extreme. Reagan's proposed budget in 1981 was extreme. This budget is short-sighted, cruel to the point of being sadistic, stupid to the point of pure philistinism, and shot through with the absolute and fundamentalist religious conviction that the only true functions of government are the ones that involve guns, and that the only true purpose of government is to serve the rich.

Republicans' Problem with Ryancare: Too Nice! There is an increased stirring among allegedly respectable conservatives to separate themselves from the president* and his more manic supporters in the Congress and out in the country. To hell with them. Like Haman, they're dancing on a gallows they spent years devising. This budget represents the diamond-hard reality behind all those lofty pronouncements from oil-sodden think tanks, all those learned disquisitions in little, startlingly advertising-free magazines, all those earnest young graduates of prestige universities who dedicated their intellects to putting an educated gloss on greed and ignorance, and ideological camouflage on retrograde policies that should have died with Calvin Coolidge—or perhaps Louis XVI.

This is it, right here, this budget. This is the beau ideal of movement conservative governance. This is the logical, dystopian end of Reaganism, and Gingrichism, and Tea Partyism, and all the other Isms that movement conservatism has inflicted upon the political commonwealth. This is the vast, noxious swamp into which all those tributaries of modern conservative thought have emptied themselves. People die in there, swallowed up in deep sinkholes of empowered bigotry and class anger.

Meals on Wheels? Who in the hell zeroes out Meals on Wheels? Who decides that a program that spends $3 million to help volunteers feed the elderly and infirm in their communities is something that the country can no longer afford? Who are the men in the meetings who make this kind of call? What are their names? Trot them out so the country knows who they are.

C'mon, David Brooks, find out who they are and explain why National Greatness Conservatism has a problem with starving elderly shut-ins. The National Endowment For The Arts? The National Endowment For The Humanities? The Corporation For Public Broadcasting? Who in the hell zeroes out the NEA, or the NEH, or the CPB? Who decides that rural museums, and Ken Burns, and Antiques Roadshow are too elitist for a country full of righteous bumpkins?

I'll tell you who does. Newt Gingrich does, that's who, and 23 years ago Newt Gingrich was the superstar of the conservative movement, the intellectual anchor of the modern Right, until, of course, he became a public embarrassment. You know who else does? George Effing Will, just today, that's who.

These programs did not become targets last November. Who the hell eliminates research funding for the climate crisis in an age of mega-storms, and wildfires, and steadily vanishing coastlines? Who pulls the country out of the Paris Agreement? Who takes the United States of Goddamn America out of the fight against the biggest existential crisis the planet has faced since the asteroid landed near the Yucatan? Gee, why don't we take a wild guess and say it's the political party—and the political movement that is its only life force—that for decades has taken billions from the extraction industries, placed a climate denier at the head of the EPA—where he isn't going to have much to do, anyway—and appointed an oilman to be Secretary of State.

Which reminds me… The fcking State Department? Who the hell virtually defunds the goddamn State Department?

The party that tolerates a Tea Party hack like Mick Mulvaney, taking him as such a serious person that he can become to be the director of the Office of Management and Budget, instead of the extremist loon he's always been. Mick Mulvaney didn't need the rise of Donald Trump to become a crackpot who would be marginalized in any sane democratic republic. He was always there on the fringes. He is as much a creature of movement conservatism as Paul Ryan is, even more so because Mulvaney was one of the prime movers in the defenestration of John Boehner. Now, he's in a position to enact all those policies that made him a star.

From ABC News: The president's vision is to add $54 billion to military spending and cut the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development by 28 percent. "There is no question this is a hard power budget, it is not a soft power budget," the president's budget director, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters Wednesday.

"The president very clearly wanted to send a message to our allies and our potential adversaries that this is a strong power administration, so you have seen money move from soft power programs, such as foreign aid, into more hard power programs." While Mulvaney described the cuts to the State Department as "fairly dramatic," he said the country's core diplomatic functions will not be impacted by the cuts, which he said are focused on reducing foreign aid. "That is not a commentary on the president's policies toward the State Department, that is a comment on the president's policies toward what is in their budget," he said. "The foreign aid line items just happen to fall in State."

(snip)

These programs did not become targets last November.

A lot of this is going to make the members of Congress choke, so a lot of it may not pass. It's very existence is important, though, as a document that lays out quite clearly the vision of government shared almost everywhere in modern conservatism.

This is a DeMint Budget, a Heritage Budget, a Gingrich Budget, a Reagan Budget, and a Tea Party Budget. It may be crude and lack a certain polish, but its priorities and goals are clear.

There is no modern Republican Party without movement conservatism, and this budget is the most vivid statement yet of that philosophy. None of the people who have become rich and influential through shining this philosophy up needed the election of Donald Trump to become what they are. If the country allows them to step away from him and his budget—the way they all stepped away from Gingrich when he became toxic, or Reagan when he became senile, or George W. Bush, when everything went wrong—then the country does itself no good service.

This budget isn't what they want. It's who they are. Meals on wheels? Jesus Christ, these really are the fcking mole people.