https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/997544409695768576?s=20


Manu Raju
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@mkraju
Paul Ryan on Santa Fe shooting: "While we need to learn more about what took place here, it is urgent that we implement the reforms Congress recently passed to make schools safer and keep deadly weapons away from those who should not have them."

1:28 PM - May 18, 2018
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President Trump has personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages, according to three people familiar with their conversations, a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of dollars.

Brennan has so far resisted Trump’s demand, explaining in multiple conversations occurring this year and last that these arrangements are bound by contracts and must be reviewed by a regulatory commission, the three people said. She has told the president that the Amazon relationship is beneficial for the Postal Service and gave him a set of slides that showed the variety of companies, in addition to Amazon, that also partner for deliveries.

Despite these presentations, Trump has continued to level criticism at Amazon. And last month, his critiques culminated in the signing of an executive order mandating a government review of the financially strapped Postal Service that could lead to major changes in the way it charges Amazon and others for package delivery.

Few U.S. companies have drawn Trump’s ire as much as Amazon, which has rapidly grown to be the second-largest U.S. company in terms of market capitalization. For more than three years, Trump has fumed publicly and privately about the giant commerce and services company and its founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, who is also the owner of The Washington Post.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/trump-personally-pushed-postmaster-general-to-double-rates-on-amazon-other-firms/2018/05/18/2b6438d2-5931-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html

WATCH: Trump fan shows up at Texas high school shooting scene wearing a gun and waving a giant flag


A Trump supporter earned the rebuke of a fellow Second Amendment fan when he brought his open-carry pistol and an American flag to the scene of a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas that resulted in the reported deaths of multiple students.

When asked what his first thought was upon hearing about the active shooter at Santa Fe High School, the unnamed Trump supporter said he first thought he needed to “get to the school,” and then the phrase “make America great again.”

He told a reporter from Houston’s KHOU that he was there “offering support,” and that a “god bless y’all will go a long way right now.”

As he walked away, the camera panned to the man’s hip to show that he had a pistol holstered on his belt — a fact that enraged another resident interviewed by the news station.


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/watch-trump-supporter-shows-texas-high-school-shooting-gun/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas needed a favor: Before retiring, he wanted to anoint a local activist as his successor. Mr. Hensarling, a veteran conservative, reached out to President Trump for help, but the White House hesitated to intervene, according to a person familiar with the overture.

Instead, Mr. Hensarling found a willing ally at Mr. Trump’s right hand: Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Pence backed the congressman’s favorite, Bunni Pounds, last month in a tweet that blindsided key White House aides.

The eager assistance Mr. Pence provided a senior lawmaker reflected the outsize political portfolio that the vice president and his aides have seized for themselves as the 2018 elections approach. While Mr. Trump remains an overpowering personality in Republican politics, he is mostly uninterested in the mechanics of managing a political party. His team of advisers is riven with personal divisions, and the White House has not yet crafted a strategy for the midterms. So Mr. Trump’s supremely disciplined running mate has stepped into the void.

Republican officials now see Mr. Pence as seeking to exercise expansive control over a political party ostensibly helmed by Mr. Trump, tending to his own allies and interests even when the president’s instincts lean in another direction. Even as he laces his public remarks with praise for the president, Mr. Pence and his influential chief of staff, Nick Ayers, are unsettling a group of Mr. Trump’s fierce loyalists who fear they are forging a separate power base.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/us/politics/pence-trump-midterms.html#click=https://t.co/dnMwHrYkSZ

In the endless search for the magic key that Democrats can use to unlock the hearts of white people who vote Republican, the hot new candidate is “respect.” If only they cast off their snooty liberal elitism and show respect to people who voted for Donald Trump, Democrats can win them over and take back Congress and the White House.

The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive. It ignores decades of history and everything about our current political environment. There’s almost nothing more foolish Democrats could do than follow that advice.

<snip>

If you doubt this, I’d encourage you to tune in to Fox News or listen to conservative talk radio for a week. When you do, you’ll find that again and again you’re told stories of some excess of campus political correctness, some obscure liberal professor who said something offensive, some liberal celebrity who said something crude about rednecks or some Democratic politician who displayed a lack of knowledge of a conservative cultural marker. The message is pounded home over and over: They hate you and everything you stand for.

This machine is extraordinarily powerful. It may not be able to guarantee Republican victory at the polls, but it absolutely can determine how conservatives — including those Trump voters — view what happens on a day-to-day basis in the political world, including efforts by Democrats to reach out to them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/05/15/why-democrats-cant-win-the-respect-of-trump-voters/?utm_term=.987372e55f6f

Conservatives Freak Out at Miami Cheesecake Factory Over MAGA Hat Incident

A brave, free-speech MAGA warrior is under attack, America. Eugenior Joseph, a Miami native and former Westwood Christian School basketball star, says he walked into the Cheesecake Factory outside the Dadeland Mall with his girlfriend's family on Mother's Day wearing a "Make American Great Again" hat, sat down, and was — we can barely muster the strength to utter these words — ridiculed by the staff for supporting President Trump.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/trump-supporter-says-he-was-harassed-at-miami-cheesecake-factory-10353155

As U.S. President Donald Trump announced his decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, the White House discreetly released an official proposal to cut funding for children’s health programs, Medicare, and Ebola responses. The two policies may seem unrelated, but they share the same basic design — assuming vast national security risks simply for the sake of dismantling former President Barack Obama’s legacy.

“I herewith report 38 rescissions of budget authority, totaling $15.4 billion,” reads Trump’s health program edict, referring to cuts — mostly in health care and emergency responses overseas — that he wants Congress to make in the current 2018 budget. By law, Congress has 45 days to agree to the cuts, throw them back to a veto challenge, or insist on further White House justification for the actions. The $15.4 billion slice off the $4.1 trillion federal budget is trivial, amounting to less than half a percent of government spending and making no appreciable dent in the $440 billion deficit created by the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act, enacted in March. In other words, there is no way Trump’s actions can be said to be motivated by fiscal responsibility, deficit reduction, or pursuit of a balanced federal budget.

Trump’s anti-Obama motive becomes apparent in rescission R18-27, which cuts $252 million in emergency response funding that had been set aside in the 2015 fiscal year during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, which claimed more than 11,300 lives. Obama, recognizing that the West African epidemic had the potential to become a national security crisis at home, asked Congress for roughly $1 billion in emergency funds to help the three affected countries combat the virus, deploy U.S. armed forces personnel, and sustain an all-hands-on-deck Centers for Disease Control and Prevention response that lasted well over a year. The $252 million that remained in the fund in 2018 had been reserved for use in building local capacities to spot and react to future Ebola outbreaks all over Africa.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/09/ebola-is-back-and-trump-is-trying-to-kill-funding-for-it/amp/?__twitter_impression=true