TomCADem
TomCADem's Journal538: Who Is In The Top 5 of Anti-Trump Senators? Yes, Corey Booker.
538 keeps a running tally of how often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president. Looking on this board, you are starting to see a series of threads claiming that Corey Booker is a Trump ally who is supportive of his agenda. Yet, Booker's record is clear. He is among the five most anti-Trump Senators in the Senate based on 538's Trump Score. Of course, Booker has also consistently voted against most of Trump's nominees. Most actual liberals and progressives who actually review a Democrats record would see this.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/
However, we need to be aware of posts that simply repeat or recite talking point attacks. The trolls are not going to wait until the eve of the 2018 or 2020 elections to attack. If you see posters who spend most of their posts attacking Democrats from the "left," while giving Trump and his Republican co-conspirators a free pass, then you need to be vigilant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?utm_term=.b9b0c045f574
The flood of “fake news” this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
There is no way to know whether the Russian campaign proved decisive in electing Trump, but researchers portray it as part of a broadly effective strategy of sowing distrust in U.S. democracy and its leaders. The tactics included penetrating the computers of election officials in several states and releasing troves of hacked emails that embarrassed Clinton in the final months of her campaign.
Paul Krugman - Who Pays The Cost of Being Racist? Poor White People?
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Paul Krugman's article puts this into numbers.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/it%E2%80%99s-all-about-trump%E2%80%99s-contempt/ar-BBBxUpU
The bigger question is whether someone who ran as a populist, who promised not to cut Social Security or Medicaid, who assured voters that everyone would have health insurance, can keep his working-class support while pursuing an agenda so anti-populist it takes your breath away.
To make this concrete, let’s talk about West Virginia, which went Trump by more than 40 percentage points, topped only by Wyoming. What did West Virginians think they were voting for?
They are, after all, residents of a poor state that benefits immensely from federal programs: 29 percent of the population is on Medicaid, almost 19 percent on food stamps. The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare is the main reason the percentage of West Virginians without health insurance has halved since 2013.
Beyond that, more than 4 percent of the population, the highest share in the nation, receives Social Security disability payments, partly because of the legacy of unhealthy working conditions, partly because a high fraction of the population consists of people who suffer from chronic diseases, like diabetics — whom Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, thinks we shouldn’t take care of because it’s their own fault for eating poorly. And just to be clear, we’re talking about white people here: At 93 percent white, West Virginia is one of the most minority- and immigrant-free states in America.
Trump's FBI comments to Russians were aimed at cooperation -McMaster
Source: MSN/Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump raised the firing of his FBI director in a meeting with Russia's foreign minister to explain why he had been unable to find areas of cooperation with Moscow, the White House national security adviser said on Sunday.
"The gist of the conversation was that the president feels as if he is hamstrung in his ability to work with Russia to find areas of cooperation because this has been obviously so much in the news," H.R. McMaster said in an interview on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
Reports that Trump boasted to Russian officials of firing former FBI director James Comey to relieve "great pressure" from a law-enforcement probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election engulfed his administration in turmoil just as Trump left for his first foreign trip as president on Friday.
"I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said during a May 10 meeting with Russian officials, according to a report by The New York Times that cited a document summarizing the meeting and an unnamed U.S. official.
Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-fbi-comments-to-russians-were-aimed-at-cooperation-mcmaster/ar-BBBlUiy
They are all over the map. First, they deny the comments were made. Then, when it becomes clear that there was a transcript, they claim Trump was making the comments to build "cooperation."
Trumps On The Verge Of Exploding The Health Insurance Market
Source: Huffington Post
President Donald Trump has had his finger on the detonator of the bomb to blow up Obamacare for months. Now he may be about to press it.
Trump told advisers earlier this week that he wants to cut off billions of dollars in payments to health insurance companies that serve the poorest enrollees in the Affordable Care Act exchanges, Politico reported Friday.
If Trump follows through on this threat, he could wreak havoc on the health insurance system. Insurance companies are likely to hike premiums or to stop selling to people who buy coverage via the exchanges, like HealthCare.gov and Covered California, or directly (rather than obtaining coverage through their employers or government programs like Medicare and Medicaid).
The results would be higher prices and fewer, if any, choices for consumers, and the effects could be felt quickly because many states would allow insurers to drop their customers right away in the absence of these payments. In short, this part of the health insurance market could fall apart under Trump’s watch if he doesn’t pay the money the federal government owes.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-blow-up-health-insurance-market_us_591f541be4b034684b0c6212?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
Trump is betting that if enough people are deprived of their healthcare, the American people will blame Democrats for not supporting the Republican health plan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/politics/trump-death-spiral-affordable-care-act.html
Trump, Shouting ‘Death Spiral,’ Has Nudged Affordable Care Act Downward
WASHINGTON — When Aetna, the health insurance giant, announced this month that it was pulling out of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchange in Virginia in 2018, President Trump responded on Twitter: “Death spiral!”
When Humana announced plans to leave all the health law’s marketplaces next year, the president chimed in, “Obamacare continues to fail.”
Left unremarked on was a big reason for the instability: The Trump administration and Congress are rattling the markets.
The administration’s refusal to guarantee payment of subsidies to health insurance companies, the murky outlook for the Affordable Care Act in Congress and doubts about enforcement of the mandate for most people to have insurance are driving up insurance prices for 2018, insurers say in rate requests filed with state officials.
BBC - Is Mike Pence distancing himself from Trump?
The interesting question is whether Pence was merely complicit in Trump's cover-up or was Pence was actively trying to egg-on Trump to push him over the edge so that he could grab the Presidency.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39979279
In the White House game of thrones, where senior administration officials fend off adversaries at every turn while vying for power and prominence, Mike Pence has been a relatively quiet player.
The vice-president is always in the background, often looking over Donald Trump's shoulder with an approving nod as the president delivers a speech or signs yet another executive order. When it comes to engaging in the bare-knuckle brawling that has played itself out through anonymous sources and well-timed insider leaks, however, the vice-president and his associates have largely stayed out of the fray.
Thursday night, then, was quite unusual. Two major US media outlets - CNN and NBC News - ran articles, complete with quotes from anonymous White House sources, distancing the vice-president from the current chaos in the administration and the running controversy over possible Trump campaign ties to the Russian government during the 2016 US presidential election.
"We certainly knew we needed to be prepared for the unconventional," an unnamed Pence aide told CNN's Elizabeth Landers, but "not to this extent". The proximate cause for the concern among the vice-president's camp was a New York Times article earlier this week reporting that Michael Flynn, Mr Trump's prominent campaign surrogate and short-lived national security adviser, had in early January informed the presidential transition team - then headed by Mr Pence - that he was under investigation for his ties to the Turkish government.
Vox - Leaks are the only effective way to get anyones attention in the Trump administration
Good explanation of why leaks are rampant in the Trump administration. It is because Trump is Trump and he hates to pay attention, hates bad news, and loves to shoot the messenger.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/19/15662842/trump-leaks-stop
Imagine you’re a somewhat senior government official — one who doesn’t get a lot of face time with the president, but who has access to pretty important information — and you need to send a message to President Donald Trump.
You can try to write him a memo, or get the message into a briefing paper his staff is preparing. But the staff is trying to squeeze a ton of information into the incredibly narrow aperture of “what the president is actually going to read.”
Your message had better be less than a page (ideally a lot less, so that it can fit on a page with all the other messages all the other officials like you are trying to send). It had better include a visual aid — a map is good.
* * *
Or you can go the easier route: you can just leak the information to someone so that it ends up on Fox & Friends.
Bloomberg - Washington Loves General McMaster, But Trump Doesn't
I guess Trump's leaks to Russia interrupted Bannon's efforts to marginalize and fire McMaster who now has the job of damage control for Trump.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-05-08/washington-loves-general-mcmaster-but-trump-doesn-t
But inside the White House, the McMaster pick has not gone over well with the one man who matters most. White House officials tell me Trump himself has clashed with McMaster in front of his staff.
On policy, the faction of the White House loyal to senior strategist Steve Bannon is convinced McMaster is trying to trick the president into the kind of nation building that Trump campaigned against. Meanwhile the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is blocking McMaster on a key appointment.
McMaster's allies and adversaries inside the White House tell me that Trump is disillusioned with him. This professional military officer has failed to read the president -- by not giving him a chance to ask questions during briefings, at times even lecturing Trump.
* * *
Other White House officials however tell me this is not the sentiment the president has expressed recently in private. Trump was livid, according to three White House officials, after reading in the Wall Street Journal that McMaster had called his South Korean counterpart to assure him that the president's threat to make that country pay for a new missile defense system was not official policy. These officials say Trump screamed at McMaster on a phone call, accusing him of undercutting efforts to get South Korea to pay its fair share.
Lying to Congress? "Jeff Sessions used campaign funds, not Senate account, when meeting Russian"
Speaking of lying to Congress, I guess we should expect Trump to fire Jeff Sessions soon, too? After all, Comey was imprecise about the number of emails while Sessions lied about meeting with the Russian ambassador, then lied again about it being done in his capacity as a Senator, rather than on campaign business.
http://theweek.com/speedreads/683581/jeff-sessions-used-campaign-funds-not-senate-account-when-meeting-russian-ambassador
Attorney General Jeff Sessions says that he did not lie under oath when he volunteered at his Senate confirmation hearing that he had "been called a surrogate a a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians," because during the two or more meetings he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak while he was the chairman of then-candidate Donald Trump's National Security Advisory Committee, he was acting in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a Trump campaign official. During the first of the two meetings Sessions recalls, however, he was using campaign funds for his travel, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Sessions met Kislyak at a Heritage Foundation event during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and campaign finance records show that he paid for his lodging with funds from his re-election campaign, suggesting he was not in Cleveland on official Senate business. Also, a person at the event tells the Journal that Sessions and Kislyak discussed the Trump campaign at the event, specifically Trump's trade policy, and that Sessions gave the impression he was there as a Trump campaign official.
Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told WSJ she couldn't comment on his convention expenses and that aides with Sessions at the Cleveland event don't recall him discussing the election with Kislyak, though they couldn't be sure because of the noise level in the room. In a written answer to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) in January, Sessions said he had not "been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day."
Larry Nobel, the general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said he's not surprised Sessions used campaign funds to attend the convention since, as a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, it would have been hard to justify using Senate funds for a political trip. "If he was truly there solely as a member of the Armed Services Committee, then he could've used his legislative account," he said. There is no record that the Trump campaign reimbursed Sessions for his travel expenses, the Journal says. Sessions said he'll recuse himself from any investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, but rejected calls that he resign. Peter Weber.
Hospital Where Jimmy Kimmel's Son Had Open-Heart Surgery Sees Spike in Donations
Source: MSN/Time
Children's Hospital Los Angeles has seen a bump in donations after late night star Jimmy Kimmel shared an emotional tribute to the facility where his newborn son Billy successfully underwent open-heart surgery.
"I hope you never have to go there," the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host said, getting choked up on Monday night while talking about CHLA in a monologue that has been viewed millions of times online. "But if you do, you'll see so many kids from so many financial backgrounds, being cared for so well and with so much compassion."
Hospital president and CEO Paul Viviano said CHLA has seen a higher-than-normal number of donations since Kimmel's monologue. They've also received supportive calls from old patients, according to Viviano.
"We have had several hundred calls to the hospital, our heart institute, from former patients thanking us for care and from donors inspired by Jimmy's message," he said.
Read more: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hospital-where-jimmy-kimmels-son-had-open-heart-surgery-sees-spike-in-donations/ar-BBAKJm5?li=BBnb7Kz
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