EPA Bows to Coal Industry, Moves to Weaken Mercury & Air Toxics Standards

More environmental evil from Trump and the GOP:

In its latest attack on clean air protections, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its new proposal to weaken the Obama-era Mercury & Air Toxics Standards (MATS), putting public health at risk from more than 80 dangerous pollutants, some of which are known to cause brain damage in children. 

"This is an unconscionable rollback to serve the coal industry at the expense of all Americans, especially our children," said John Walke, director of NRDC's Clean Air program. "And it says EPA's just fine with allowing brain poisons mercury and lead and toxic carcinogens to fill our skies." 

The standards were the first national limits on air pollution from coal-fired power plants that release toxins like mercury, arsenic, lead and acid gases into the air. Among those, mercury is especially toxic, especially for pregnant women and their babies. 

The stakes are high: Each year, the standards prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths, 13,000 asthma attacks and nearly 5,000 heart attacks. In fact, MATS delivers up to $90 billion in health benefits. Nearly everyone supports the standards—including utilities that have already invested $18 billion for pollution-control equipment and are complying with the rules at nearly every coal- and oil-burning power plant in the country. Even Congress is showing bipartisan opposition to a rollback. 

The standards' few opponents include coal and industry executives. In particular, coal tycoon Bob Murray, the head of Murray Energy, has long been pushing for a rollback—going so far as to include it in a wish list to the Trump administration soon after inauguration. Murray has financial ties to the Trump campaign and is a former client of the EPA's acting head Andrew Wheeler.

Killing Butterflies with the Stupid Wall

Most Diverse Butterfly Center in the U.S. to be Bulldozed for Trump’s Border Wall 

The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas is the most diverse butterfly sanctuary in the U.S. Some 200 species of butterflies find a home there each year, including the Mexican bluewing, the black swallowtail and the increasingly imperiled monarch. And, as soon as February, almost 70 percent of it could be lost to President Donald Trump's border wall, The Guardian reported Thursday. "It's going to cut right through here," Center Director Marianna Wright told The Guardian as she indicated where the wall's construction would cut off the center's access to its own land in the Rio Grande Valley at a point 1.2 miles from the border. Wright said the wall threatened to end the center entirely and harm the butterflies and other species like the Texas tortoise, Texas indigo snake and Texas horned lizard that also find refuge on its land.

Trump's Insane, No Good, Ridiculous, Self-Centered, Obnoxious, Partisan, Idiotic Thanksgiving

PALM BEACH, Fla. —President Trump’s Thanksgiving began, as his days often do, with an all-caps tweet: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL!”

Minutes later, he tweeted of potential “bedlam, chaos, injury and death,” a harbinger of what would be a frenetic Thanksgiving morning.

Over the span of a few hours, the president would mix the traditional pablum of Thanksgiving tidings with renouncing the findings of his Central Intelligence Agency, threatening Mexico, criticizing court decisions, attacking Hillary Clinton over her emails, misstating facts about the economy, floating a shutdown of the government — and per usual, jousting with the news media.

Asked what he was most thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day — a question that for commanders in chief usually prompts praise of service members in harm’s way — Trump delivered a singularly Trumpian answer. “I made a tremendous difference in our country,” he said, citing himself.

The whole article is worth a read as a clear window into this insane clown president.

Trump: 'I can't imagine anybody else' other than myself for Time Person of the Year

Trump politicizes Thanksgiving call with troops to attack migrants, judges

The Massive Criminal and Immoral Monstrosity That Is Trump

Digby again:

One of Trump's longstanding desires, going all the way back to the 2016 campaign, was to see his opponent Hillary Clinton imprisoned. His crowds still gleefully chant "Lock her up!" which likely has led Trump to believe that prosecuting Clinton (for something) would be a very popular decision. I've been sure that he was serious about that for some time, largely because he keeps saying it. Contra Leonard Leo, he has actually succeeded in having the DOJ take action.

Recall that under pressure from Trump, Fox News and GOP henchmen in the House, Sessions assigned a Trump-friendly U.S. attorney in Utah to investigate Clinton's alleged Russia connection, a bogus charge on which she'd already been investigated and cleared. None other than the reformed maverick and born-again Trumper, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who will take the gavel as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, has said he is eager to investigate Hillary Clinton.

On Tuesday, the New York Times validated my assumptions about Trump's seriousness. The paper reported that former White House counsel Don McGahn had to talk Trump out of ordering the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, explaining that it could lead to his impeachment for abuse of power. The Times report isn't specific about when this happened, only saying it was last spring. But that's also when Sessions assigned the imaginary Clinton case to the Utah U.S. attorney's office, so it's likely this was all happening at the same time. (Sessions said at the time that this would obviate the need for a special counsel, for which Fox and the House henchmen had been agitating.)

Today, McGahn and Sessions are gone. FBI director Christopher Wray, Comey's successor, has not been mentioned as one of the senior Trump appointees on the chopping block. But the Times reports that Trump is unhappy with Wray because he's "weak" for failing to go after Clinton, so who knows? The article says Trump frequently brings up the notion of prosecuting Clinton, suggesting he hasn't given up on it.

If that grotesque illustration of Trump's authoritarian instincts wasn't bad enough, I'm afraid Tuesday brought an even worse example. The world has been waiting for our government to offer some kind of official conclusion about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last month. It got one in the form of a White House statement written as if it had originally been a series of presidential tweets, replete with exclamation points.

Basically, the president declared that despite the high confidence of his own intelligence community, we can never know for sure if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered Khashoggi's murder. Even if he did, it doesn't matter, because he also promised to buy a lot of weapons from the U.S. and that's what really matters. In other words, the world's most powerful superpower can be bought off. (The arms sales Trump endlessly references are only theoretical so far -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says they're still being "negotiated.")

Autocrats and dictators must be very relieved to know that all they have to do is hand over the envelope and the American capo di tutti capi will look the other way when you "take care of business" -- if you know what I mean.

Axios reported last week that Trump had never really cared whether or not the crown prince had ordered this grotesque assassination because "other countries do bad things too." This is consistent with his general amoral attitude toward world affairs. He consistently attacks the leaders of Western democracies for failing to pay proper tribute and makes excuses for tyrants and dictators. As the president wrote in his tweet-style official statement, "the world is a very dangerous place!" Apparently this means we can't even afford to pay lip service to such niceties as international law or common human decency; certainly not when there's money on the table.

Just in case everyone didn't get the message, Trump added that "some say" Khashoggi was an "enemy of the state," echoing his own frequent complaints about the press here at home. (Can you hear me, Jim Acosta?)

The Awful Trump Statement on Saudi Arabia

Digby:

Trump just told the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia that he has a free hand to murder anyone he chooses. Because "America First!" means, all Americans care about is money and if other governments want to go around the world assassinating people we don't give a damn as long as they pay tribute to Donald Trump.

Apparently, he thinks that makes us "safe." I'm sure it's going to work out just swimmingly for all of us to be the most loathed and despised, immoral, super-power in world history.

Here's the embarrassing, immoral, idiotically exclamation point-laden statement:

Statement from President Donald J. Trump on Standing with Saudi Arabia

America First!

The world is a very dangerous place!

The country of Iran, as an example, is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more. Likewise, the Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” Iran is considered “the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave. They would immediately provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has agreed to spend billions of dollars in leading the fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism.

After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States. This is a record amount of money. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors. If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries — and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business. It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!

The crime against Jamal Khashoggi was a terrible one, and one that our country does not condone. Indeed, we have taken strong action against those already known to have participated in the murder. After great independent research, we now know many details of this horrible crime. We have already sanctioned 17 Saudis known to have been involved in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, and the disposal of his body.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but my decision is in no way based on that — this is an unacceptable and horrible crime. King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi. Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!

That being said, we may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They have been a great ally in our very important fight against Iran. The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region. It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!

I understand there are members of Congress who, for political or other reasons, would like to go in a different direction — and they are free to do so. I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America. After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world. They have worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my requests to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels — so important for the world. As President of the United States I intend to ensure that, in a very dangerous world, America is pursuing its national interests and vigorously contesting countries that wish to do us harm. Very simply it is called America First!

Oh, by the way, speaking of governments going around the world assassinating their enemies whenever and wherever they choose, this is happening too:

An international firestorm erupted over the possibility that a Russian official could become the new president of global police agency Interpol, as Moscow denounced a demand by U.S. senators that the Trump administration block the candidacy of a Kremlin-backed nominee.

Interpol confirmed Tuesday that Maj. Gen. Alexander Prokopchuk a veteran Russian Interior Ministry official, had been nominated for president, amid allegations that Moscow has used the international police agency to go after political foes.

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Florida Republican Marco Rubio and Chris Coons (D. Del.), issued a joint statement Monday, accusing Russia of routinely abusing Interpol “for the purpose of settling scores and harassing political opponents, dissidents and journalists.”

Electing Mr. Prokopchuk as president, would be “akin to putting a fox in charge of a henhouse,” the senators said in the statement.

The Kremlin was quick to fire back, charging that the senators’ intervention was tantamount to “a kind of election interference, the election held by this international organization,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

Interpol’s former president, Meng Hongwei, resigned in October after Chinese authorities arrested him on charges of alleged corruption.

Interpol’s general assembly will vote for the new president in Dubai on Wednesday. Kim Jong-yang, currently acting president, is also a nominee for the presidential post.

Mr. Prokopchuk has headed Interpol’s National Central Bureau for Russia since 2011 and has also served as the agency’s vice president since 2016.

Kremlin opponents, human rights activists and several Western officials have accused Moscow of exploiting Interpol’s international arrest-warrant system, called red notices, to prevent its opponents from traveling, freeze their bank accounts and try to force their extradition to Russia. 

Pompeo said this morning that the US is endorsing Kim, but you know, whatevs. And anyway, can we really ever know if President Putin is routinely having his critics murdered at home and all over the world? I think not. So he might as well have the apparatus of the international police agency at his fingertips.

This whole thing is sick. Pompeo repeated Trump's claim that it's a "mean, nasty world" out there (it's full of dangerous foreigners!) so there's no point in having any kind of standards, laws, norms or anything else to try to keep the whole thing from blowing up.

Let's just get as much money as we can before the world explodes.  We might all die but we'll be rich and what more can you hope for, amirite?

Michael Cohen Says Trump Repeatedly Used Racist Language Before His Presidency

Not shocking but needs to be documented:

Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

This conversation, he noted, was reminiscent of an exchange that the two men had engaged in years earlier, after Nelson Mandela’s death. “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” Cohen recalled, a statement that echoed the president’s alleged comments about African nations earlier this year. (White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied those comments at the time. She added that “no one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct—he isn’t.” She subsequently noted that it was “one of the reasons the American people love him.”)

Cohen also recounted a conversation he had with Trump in the late 2000s, while they were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting. “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a head-to-head between two contestants, Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’” (Jackson told me that he had heard that the president made such a comment. “

Trump Exhibiting "Bunker Behavior" as Democrats Pick Up Biggest House of Representative Gains Since After Watergate

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.

Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety.

Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

The end of Trump (cannot come too soon):

How can we be so certain that Trump’s political days are numbered? First, now we can see more clearly that the blue tide kept rising as many of the closest races, especially for the House, flipped to the Democrats as the final votes were counted. Democrats are now set to gain nearly 40 seats in the House — their biggest gain in decades. Second, we have the smart analysis this past weekend from Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg that the shift away from Trump in 2018 was more profound than many initially believed. In fact, Greenberg makes a strong case that the election was “transformative” with Trump losing support, not only with suburban, college-educated women, but all women. And Democrats gained ground in other areas, too, including working-class men and in rural areas.

The likelihood that Democrats will maintain these gains though the 2020 election is very promising. Unlike many incumbent presidents who have retooled their approach in the face of stinging midterm rebukes, Trump has signaled he’s sticking with his risky behavior. The attack tweets, the latest puerile joke about a congressman’s name and indefensible behaviors, such as believing a foreign power instead of the CIA about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, will continue. Trump will not pass from our politics suddenly from a single dramatic cause, but rather from the accumulation of self-inflicted wounds. It has taken much longer and done more damage than many hoped, but the end of Trump is finally in sight.

Trump of course continues to act like the world's biggest crook and asshole (etc, etc, etc), and it's just hard to imagine a president who so widely loathed as Trump, but he is in fact reviled by over half the country, and for good reason.

I mean, how can anyone so fucking stupid and delusional still be president?

He complained at length that a new Navy ship was using electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off ships. He said steam was better and was incredulous the military would consider otherwise. “Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic, unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” he asked. “You have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here, as well. But we’re doing that very well. I would go, sir, with electromagnetic,” the officer responded.

Trump repeatedly asked military commanders what they were seeing in their regions, a conversation not usually held on a televised broadcast. He asked if those serving in Afghanistan were enjoying themselves. (Later, he demurred when asked by reporters whether he would pull troops out of the country.)

He bragged during part of the conversation about sending troops to the Mexico border, a mission that is controversial and seen by many as a waste of time. He expressed no second-guessing about the constitutionality of signing an order giving soldiers the right to use lethal force at the border, although many in his government harbor such concerns.

Trump's Attacks on Voting and Democracy

The explicit, openly-stated position of the President of the United States is now that a full vote count in the Florida elections *cannot* render a legitimate result.Thus, he says, Rs must be declared winners. This is not the conduct of an actor in a democracy.

In retrospect, Trump previewed everything we're seeing now in the run-up to the 2016 election. Trump repeatedly declared that the outcome would only be legitimate *if he won.* This put a new spin on longtime GOP "voter fraud" lies. From my book: amazon.com/Uncivil-War-De…

Today, Trump claimed the vote in Florida has been "infected." Trump uses this word constantly, to describe alleged undermining of our country by undocumented immigrants. As a GOP pollster told me, GOP voters are open to such claims because of race...

GOP lawmakers are now validating Trump's lies about vote fraud in Florida. This gross misconduct weakens faith in our system. But there's a long history here...

But this authoritarian style goes far beyond just lying about voter fraud. We're seeing it on one front after another right now. It *escalated* as Democrats closed in on winning the House, which means imposing accountability on Trump's corruption and lawlessness.

Let's run through the pattern. Trump used the military as a prop to dramatize the central message at the core of the Trump/GOP propaganda campaign in the election's final days... 

Trump installed a loyalist to constrain the Mueller investigation. He did this without Senate confirmation, for the obvious purpose of shielding his choice from questions about his intentions towards Mueller. How many Rs have raised a peep about this?

In FL, GOP governor ordered law enforcement to investigate Dem vote counters in an election in which *he* is the candidate. In GA, GOP gov candidate oversaw his own election and engaged in conduct @rickhasen described as among worst he's ever seen...

White House circulated an apparently doctored video designed to create a fake rationale for punishing a reporter for asking Trump tough questions. *Trump himself* confirmed there may be more to come.

This quasi-totalitarian contempt for the truth and constant casting of the media as the "enemy" add up to conduct towards the independent press' institutional role that in important respects is something new...

The crowning absurdity of all this is that pundits are dithering around wondering whether *Democrats* will go "too far" in using their legitimate authority to act as a check on this lawless, out of control president.

Desperate, Disgusting Racism Before the Midterm Elections

‘Assault On Our Country’: Trump Goes All In On Nativism To Salvage The Midterms

The revelation Tuesday morning that President Trump has plans to end birthright citizenship by executive order is the culmination of the President’s weeks-long effort to inject nativism into the midterm elections as his party desperately tries to hold on to its congressional majorities.

In the closing weeks before voters head to the polls, Trump has repeatedly railed against undocumented immigrants, used nationalist rhetoric to appeal to his base and unleashed anger towards the “other.” Trump’s language of late harkens back to his 2016 presidential campaign, when he offered his supporters a scapegoat, telling them that immigrants were snatching up their jobs and bringing violence to their communities, and only a big, beautiful wall could protect them.

Though Trump has largely avoided talk of his proposed border wall this cycle, he has demonized immigrants at rally after rally while stumping for Republican candidates throughout the country. His language has not been subtle. He’s claimed that undocumented immigrants are “criminals,” described a migrant caravan headed toward the U.S. as an “invasion,” and warned of non-existent “riots” against sanctuary cities.

In case he wasn’t clear enough while describing his immigration policy and disdain for immigrants, Trump told a crowd in Houston that he is a “nationalist,” a term linked to the far-right fringe of the Republican party that helped propel Trump to the presidency.

Trump’s racist ad shows how low Republicans have sunk

President Trump’s blatantly racist ad — showing an illegal immigrant boasting about killing police officers — is a fitting final pitch for a party and a campaign that are now nearly entirely focused on whipping up xenophobia.

And of the ad features a HUGE lie.

The GOP is a malignancy on this country and need to be removed.

Senate Leader Mitch McConnell Blames Entitlements, Not Massive GOP Tax Cut, for Rising Deficits

What an asshole. 

Though he said he wants to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which *IS* potent ammunition for the Democrats.

Trump Calls His Former Mistress "Horseface" on Twitter and Thinks It Was Genius

World's biggest asshole.

No Low Too Low for Trump as He Coddles Saudi Killers and Promotes Violence Against Journalists

One can hardly fathom the twisted psyche of a president who, after acknowledging that Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Post’s Global Opinions, had likely been murdered, would go before a cheering mob to lavish praise on a U.S. congressman who physically attacked a journalist.

“Any guy who can do a body-slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said in a Montana campaign appearance on Thursday, referring to Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) who pleaded guilty to assaulting the Guardian’s reporter Ben Jacobs, who had the temerity to ask Gianforte a health-care question. “I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. And he was way up. … I said ‘Oh this is terrible, he’s gonna lose the election,’ ” Trump continued. “Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him.’ And it did.” And his ghoulish fans ate that up.

The Guardian’s U.S. editor responded with a statement: “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” said John Mulholland. “In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats. We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the president will see fit to apologize for them.”

Trump won’t apologize, of course, nor will his devoted base hold his remarks against him. To the contrary, this is what they love about him — the contempt for a free press, the celebration of male thuggishness, the mindless emotional outbursts. Somehow it empowers them, to side with brutes and bullies, to revel in the silencing of a free press.

And in case you thought such moral depravity was limited to a few thousand fans, a concerted smear campaign against Khashoggi is underway. The Post reports:

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. …

Also, as ever, fuck Saudi Arabia.  FUCK SAUDI ARABIA.

America's Worst Human Is Still President, Part 9,282

Trump mocks sexual assault victim and lies about her account at campaign rally. 

Later justifies it, saying "It doesn't matter, we won".

What an asshole.

WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

Trump and the GOP-- Climate Change Denying Assholes

Paul Krugman:

Climate change is a hoax. Climate change is happening, but it’s not man-made. Climate change is man-made, but doing anything about it would destroy jobs and kill economic growth.

These are the stages of climate denial. Or maybe it’s wrong to call them stages, since the deniers never really give up an argument, no matter how thoroughly it has been refuted by evidence. They’re better described as cockroach ideas — false claims you may think you’ve gotten rid of, but keep coming back.

Anyway, the Trump administration and its allies — put on the defensive by yet another deadly climate change-enhanced hurricane and an ominous United Nations report — have been making all of these bad arguments over the past few days. I’d say it was a shocking spectacle, except that it’s hard to get shocked these days. But it was a reminder that we’re now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends.

About those cockroaches: Details aside, the very multiplicity of climate-denial arguments — the deniers’ story keeps changing, but the bottom line that we should do nothing remains the same — is a sign that the opponents of climate action are arguing in bad faith. They aren’t seriously trying to engage with the reality of climate change or the economics of reduced emissions; their goal is to keep polluters free to pollute as long as possible, and they’ll grab onto anything serving that goal.

McConnell Blames Entitlements, Not Massive GOP Tax Cut, for Rising Deficits

What an asshole.

Yep, America's Worst Human Is Still President

Here’s what the President of the United States has been up to:

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000....

...This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

(from Trump's twitter)

I think I’m never quite unaware that the president of the United States is insanely awful.

Like probably most other people, I wear it around at all times, like a sodden and rotting wool sweater, scratchy at my neck and damp in my armpits and always, always, inescapably reeking. But still. Sometimes that awfulness crystallizes itself; sometimes it is like that crystallization has been chopped to a fine powder and blasted up my nose.

Holy shit, man. The worst person alive—the pettiest, smallest, emptiest, most dishonest, most malignant shit-for-brains you could ever imagine, just an absolute worthless interpretively man-shaped lint clump from the absolute bottom of the human genetic drain—is the president.

It’s not like presidents have never before rhetorically erased the preventable mass deaths of innocent people, and their own complicity therein. They certainly have!

But there’s a horror particular to the blithe way this senile penny-ante crook rolls out of bed, whips out his goddamn phone, and just straight-up belches it out.

How easily he’d feed to the memory hole any number of real whole actual people—their whole lives, their nightmarish early deaths, the monstrous failure of the society he oversees to look after them and help keep them safe—to ease what’s, for him, unburdened as he is by conscience or accountability or decency, no more than an itch on the side of his nose.

Not empty thoughts and prayers, not even It wasn’t my fault, but They never existed. They don’t even get to have existed, if what happened to them, how they died, doesn’t gratify Donald Trump.

The Trump/GOP Scam Comes into Clearer Focus

Eugene Robinson lays out the big Trump lie:

The Trump administration is an aberration, an outrage, a threat to the nation’s very soul. But most of all, it’s a great big fraud.

Voters who thought President Trump would at least try to fulfill his populist, America-first campaign promises were cynically and cruelly deceived. Trump placates these supporters with rhetoric, distracts them with cultural warfare and encourages them to seek refuge in cultural chauvinism. What he doesn’t do for them is deliver. (snip)

Remember how the president promised a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports and railroads? Well, he claims to be doing even more — $1.5 trillion in infrastructure spending over the next decade. But the promise comes with little or no new federal money, which means it barely qualifies as an idle wish. Trump says he wants to spend just $200 billion over 10 years on infrastructure, with cities and states providing the rest. But mayors and governors don’t have $1.3 trillion lying around; ask them, if you don’t believe me. And since the $200 billion is supposed to come from savings elsewhere in the budget, Trump effectively plans to give with one hand and take away with the other.

Anyone who expected projects on the scale of Hoover Dam or the interstate highway system should realize that Trump will never come through, because he has no idea how. (snip)

Trump campaigned as the purported champion of a working class that was being robbed blind by dastardly elites. He has governed, however, as robber in chief. The tax bill that Republicans passed and Trump signed into law delivers the lion’s share of its benefits to corporations and the rich. The president hopes that middle-class taxpayers will be so transfixed by seeing a little more in their paychecks that they fail to notice how other costs, such as health care, are rising because of his policies.

Trump has changed GOP dogma in one regard: The party no longer even pretends to stand for fiscal responsibility. Republicans are apparently wild-eyed Keynesians now, cutting taxes and boosting spending in an attempt to stimulate the economy. Trump anticipates ballooning the national debt by $7 trillion over the next decade.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), a supposed champion of small government and balanced budgets, goes along like a little mouse.

Trump drew loud cheers at his campaign rallies when he complained about the high cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying all that money would be better spent at home. But the deal he signed last week will increase defense spending by $195 billion over the next two years, and his budget director suggested the military could get even more. (snip)

The president pledged to maintain or strengthen the social safety net, but — sit down, you won’t believe this — he lied. His budget cuts $554 billion in Medicare spending over 10 years, which is of concern to anyone over 65. It cuts up to $250 billion in Medicaid spending, which has implications for anybody who has a loved one in a nursing home. Trump wants to cut $214 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, a vital source of help for the working poor.

The idea of Donald Trump as some sort of Man of the People was laughable from the start — a boastful plutocrat who lives in a gold-plated aerie above Fifth Avenue, claiming lunch-bucket solidarity with factory workers and coal miners. He sold it, though, largely by cementing a racial and cultural kinship and shamelessly misrepresenting his intentions.

Trump tells little lies all the time. But this is the Big Lie that must be constantly exposed between now and the November election: Trump is worsening society’s bias in favor of the wealthy — and laughing at the chumps who put him in office.

Tinpot Asshole Trump Wants a Military Parade

Trump’s ‘marching orders’ to the Pentagon: Plan a grand military parade

Because what looks more like fascism than a line of tanks driving through the heart of the capitol city? It's just fucking grotesque.

Trump Admin Looks to Impose Lifetime Limits on Medicaid Coverage

Ben Wikler‏ @benwikler

 This is just gruesome. The Trump administration looking at limiting the number of months adults can get Medicaid coverage. There are people in this administration who get up every day and brainstorm ways to make life harder for the ill and the poor. Vile.

After approving Medicaid work requirements, Trump’s HHS aims for lifetime coverage limits

Trump Is a Blatant Racist

Trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers. Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway, whose prime minister he met with Wednesday.

The president, according to a White House official, also suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.

In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said. “Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out.”

The president of the United States is racist.

“This is CNN Tonight, I’m Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist. A lot of us already knew that.” The CNN anchor’s ice-cold open to his newscast on Thursday night was stunning and yet 100 percent spot-on — and a sign that America has crossed a Rubicon of sorts in our tortured, centuries-long history of how this nation treats race and ethnicity, which is the defining debate in our ever-present schizophrenia over what this nation really stands for.

In the Donald Trump era’s crack-addled hyperactive news cycle, it was a long time ago — a.k.a. Thursday — that the 45th president of the United States sat at his desk in the Oval Office and told some 50 lawmakers and aides that he didn’t want a flood of immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa, part of a longer rap in which he denigrated immigration from places where the people are black — Haiti, Africa — while talking up blond and blue-eyed arrivals from Norway. It’s impossible to find the right word to express the inhumanity of Trump’s open-for-all-to-see beliefs. Horrific? Morally unconscionable? None seems to express the full outrage.

On the weekend when America honors what would have been the 89th birthday of our greatest advocate for human rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the nation is now led by a man who clearly judges people not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. The president of the United States is racist. But as Don Lemon stated with high-def clarity, a lot of us already knew that.

When America went to the polls on Nov. 8, 2016, we already knew so much. We knew that the federal government slammed Trump and his dad — who’d been arrested in his younger days at a KKK rally — for not renting to blacks in the 1970s, that Trump said in the 1980s that he wanted Jews and not blacks counting his money, that he purchased a full-page New York Times ad calling for the death penalty for five young blacks later found to be completely innocent (for which he still won’t apologize), that he re-ignited his political fortunes by insisting the first African American president couldn’t be a real American, and then ran a campaign centered on a wall to keep out Mexican “rapists,” a travel ban based on people’s Muslim religion, and punctuated by trafficking in the worst stereotypes about “inner cities.”