DonViejo
DonViejo's JournalMcConnell: 'We're going to stick with' ObamaCare repeal and replace despite Trump tweet
Source: The Hill
BY JOHN BOWDEN - 07/01/17 12:02 PM EDT
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters on Friday that the Senate will continue to pursue a joint repeal and replace of ObamaCare, despite President Trump's tweet urging a clean repeal followed by a later replacement.
The Associated Press reported Friday that McConnell said he has no plans to abandon the current bill being considered by Senate Republicans. "We are going to stick with that path," McConnell said at an event in Kentucky. "Failure has to be possible or you can't have success."
-snip-
McConnell said he's still working to get to 50 votes for the bill. This week, McConnell and other Senate GOP leaders announced that the vote would be delayed until after the July 4 recess.
We're "trying to figure out how to twist the dials to get to 50 to replace this with something better," McConnell told reporters. The original version of the Senate's healthcare legislation, unveiled last week, did not have the support it needed among Republicans to pass. No Democrats support the bill.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/340360-mcconnell-were-going-to-stick-to-obamacare-repeal-and-replace-despite-trump
Trump ignores backlash in ongoing feud with the media
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 07/01/17 11:18 AM EDT
180
President Trump continued his blitz against major U.S. media outlets on Saturday, despite the wave of backlash that followed his particularly personal attack on a female MSNBC host this week.
Trump's very public duel with MSNBC's "Morning Joe," taking place over the course of several days this week, earned bipartisan pushback and frustration from some in his party who felt the back-and-forth distracted from the GOP legislative push to reform healthcare.
But on Saturday, Trump signaled that for him the battle is far from over. He also expanded his media targets.
The morning salvos began with Trump leveling an accusation that NBC and its parent company Comcast had forced out MSNBC anchor Greta Van Susteren this week in retribution for her alleged refusal to go along with what he has deemed negative coverage of him and his administration.
more
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/340356-trump-continues-feud-with-the-media-despite-controversies
Democrats go in for the kill on ObamaCare repeal
BY JORDAIN CARNEY, RACHEL ROUBEIN AND NATHANIEL WEIXEL - 07/01/17 06:01 AM EDT
Democrats are going in for the kill on the GOP push to repeal and replace ObamaCare.
Buoyed by Republican infighting and the backlash against the GOP legislation, Democrats believe they have momentum as they head toward a final showdown in July.
They got a boost on Friday when President Trump muddied the waters for his party by suggesting senators repeal ObamaCare now and replace it later — an option that was roundly rejected by Republicans in January.
The GOP tug of war comes as Democrats are united around a single political message: That the bill will give tax breaks to the rich while taking healthcare away coverage for the poor.
more
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/340322-democrats-go-in-for-the-kill-on-obamacare-repeal
Now We Have a Roadmap to the Trump Campaign's Collusion with Russia - Jonathan Chait
July 1, 2017
9:34 am
Most of the commentary surrounding the Russia scandal has treated the possibility that Donald Trump’s campaign deliberately colluded with Moscow as remote, unfounded speculation. The new reporting that has broken this weekend suggests instead that this collusion likely did take place. It provides a roadmap to the, or perhaps a, likely avenue through which this occurred.
The figure carrying out the operation in question was Peter W. Smith, who died at the age of 81 earlier this year. Smith is hardly a lone kook. He’s an established Republican donor with a demonstrated history in financing ethically murky investigations, such as paying Arkansas state troopers for stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances.
Smith surfaced earlier in the week in an explosive Wall Street Journal report by Shane Harris, which Harris followed-up Friday night. What really underscores the significance of Harris’s reporting, though, is a detailed account, also published Friday night, by Matt Tait, a British cybersecurity expert who dealt extensively with Smith. Tait’s report makes it clear that Smith had access to Michael Flynn, at the very least, and was working not only to obtain stolen Clinton emails but also to hide the Trump campaign’s involvement.
Tait had established some expertise analyzing Clinton’s emails. As Tait explains, he warned Smith that Russia had been conducting an attack on the U.S. elections, but Smith appeared completely unconcerned about it. Smith tried to hire Tait for his project, and showed him a document creating an independent-looking organization to try to acquire the stolen emails. The document, Tait reports, “detailed a company Smith and his colleagues had set up as a vehicle to conduct the research: ‘KLS Research’, set up as a Delaware LLC ‘to avoid campaign reporting,’ and listing four groups who were involved in one way or another.” This certainly appears like an attempt to mask the Trump campaign’s involvement in the plot.
The document listed a series of high-level Trump campaign officials: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and Lisa Nelson. Bannon and Conway, contacted by the Journal, deny any involvement with Smith. But Smith’s comments to Tait indicate a fairly close understanding of Trump campaign internal dynamics. It is possible he was bluffing, but he seemed to be displaying authentic insider credentials.
more
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/now-we-have-a-roadmap-to-trump-campaigns-russia-collusion.html
American Dignity on the Fourth of July (from the NY'er)
Comment
July 10 & 17, 2017 Issue
Reading Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day address from 1852 may ease the despair caused by listening to the President.
By David Remnick
More than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:
<< I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. >>
The dissection of American reality, in all its complexity, is essential to political progress, and yet it rarely goes unpunished. One reason that the Republican right and its attendant media loathed Barack Obama is that his public rhetoric, while far more buoyant with post-civil-rights-era uplift than Douglass’s, was also an affront to reactionary pieties. Even as Obama tried to win votes, he did not paper over the duality of the American condition: its idealism and its injustices; its heroism in the fight against Fascism and its bloody misadventures before and after. His idea of a patriotic song was “America the Beautiful”—not in its sentimental ballpark versions but the way that Ray Charles sang it, as a blues, capturing the “fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top.”
Donald Trump, who, in fairness, has noted that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job,” represents an entirely different tradition. He has no interest in the wholeness of reality. He descends from the lineage of the Know-Nothings, the doomsayers and the fabulists, the nativists and the hucksters. The thematic shift from Obama to Trump has been from “lifting as we climb” to “raising the drawbridge and bolting the door.” Trump may operate a twenty-first-century Twitter machine, but he is still a frontier-era drummer peddling snake oil, juniper tar, and Dr. Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure for profit from the back of a dusty wagon.
As a candidate, Trump told his followers that he would fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed for your country.” But he is a plutocrat. His loyalty is to the interests of the plutocracy. Trump’s vows of solidarity with the struggling working class, with the victims of globalization and deindustrialization, are a fraud. He made coal miners a symbol of his campaign, but he has always held them in contempt. To him, they are luckless schmoes who fail to possess his ineffable talents. “The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” Trump once told Playboy. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’ ”
more
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/american-dignity-on-the-fourth-of-july
CNN's Jake Tapper shreds Trump for wasting his time whining on Twitter while ignoring America's...
CNN’s Jake Tapper shreds Trump for wasting his time whining on Twitter while ignoring America’s problems
TOM BOGGIONI
01 JUL 2017 AT 12:12 ET
In a tweetstorm Saturday morning, CNN host Jake Tapper shamed President Donald Trump for wasting his time on Twitter, indulging in petty squabbles with the media, while ignoring the problems facing the U.S.
-snip-
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/881143316821233664
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/881143861799772161
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/881144688429936640
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/881145017850613760
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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/cnns-jake-tapper-shreds-trump-for-wasting-his-time-whining-on-twitter-while-ignoring-americas-problems/
MSNBC guest: Trump keeps 'weak-minded women' like Kellyanne Conway around because they'll defend him
TOM BOGGIONI
01 JUL 2017 AT 11:38 ET
Appearing on MSNBC’s AM Joy, attorney Tamara Holder called out the women who have defended President Donald Trump’s misogynistic comments about his female critics, saying their minds are as small as his hands.
After host Joy Reid ran a series of clips of female Trump advocates — including adviser Kellyanne Conway and spokesperson Sraah Huckabee Sanders — defending his recent attack on Mika Brezinski, accusing her of bleeding from a face lift, Reis turned the floor over to Holder.
“I think the women in Donald Trump’s life probably have smaller minds than his small hands because if they had any decency as women –,” she said before pausing. “Joy, you have a father. If your father ever said anything like this about another woman, you would probably grab him by the back of the neck, just like I would to my dad and say, ‘what are you doing? Apologize.'”
‘He has continued to surround himself with very, very weak-minded women who are afraid of him. We are seeing Donald Trump explode from very, very far away,” Holder continued. “Imagine the fear that these women have when they’re up close and personal with him. You can’t fight fire with fire if you’re standing right next to it. It’s going to explode and you’re going to blow up. So this is why he has surrounded himself with women who can’t do anything other than defend him. Kind of defend him or just not say anything.”
“I want to go to one other thing as well. This isn’t just Donald Trump’s attack on the media. This is Donald Trump now using co-conspirators, that is the National Enquirer — co- conspirators to carry out his crimes, blackmail and extortion,” she concluded.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/07/msnbc-guest-trump-keeps-weak-minded-women-like-kellyanne-conway-around-because-theyll-defend-him/
Trump Failed to Recognize Pride in June. That Matters
BY CHRIS RIOTTA ON 6/30/17 AT 9:57 AM
My president appeared on the cover of OUT, a gay magazine I used to flip through in Barnes & Noble as a curious little boy.
He officially proclaimed June as Pride month throughout his two terms in office—my entire adult life—to recognize and celebrate those of us considered to be "other." My president was the first president to push for marriage equality, which eventually happened under his watch.
For a young American man coming to terms with their own identity in a society that stresses heteronormativity, these acts genuinely mattered. For the first time in this nation's history, queer folks saw their commander-in-chief embracing them, supporting them and bringing their community's voices to the forefront. President Barack Obama made the fight for tolerance his fight, implementing a series of federal policies over the course of eight years to defend marginalized groups. My president seemed to genuinely care about us—the others.
Then came along my next president, who promised to "defend and protect our LGBT Americans" along the campaign trail. Donald Trump offered an alternative to the traditional Republican candidate: despite numerous concerns over statements he made about women, minorities, his apparent enemies and the left, the New York business mogul seemed to boldly endorse the LGBTI community, at one point unfurling a rainbow flag at a rally and posing for photographs while holding it.
"Trump made history," gay conservative strategist Chris Barron wrote of that October night in 2016. "He's the most pro-LGBT presidential candidate ever nominated by either party."
Leading up to Inauguration Day, I was cautiously optimistic a Trump presidency may not completely derail the many leaps forward my community has been fighting for in this country for decades. But a few months into his tenure in the White House, Trump has steadily rolled back many of the freedoms we’ve only just recently begun enjoying.
more
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-pride-month-gay-americans-campaign-promises-defend-lgbt-rights-630228
Trump Rails Against States Rejecting His Shady Election Commission's Requests
Source: Talking Points Memo
By ESME CRIBB Published JULY 1, 2017 10:22 AM
President Donald Trump on Saturday accused states rejecting his bogus “election integrity” commission’s request for sensitive voter information of “trying to hide” something.
Trump claimed the shady commission is a “very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL.”
-snip-
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881137079958241280
On Friday, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — who heads the commission — said he will not hand over voter information to his own panel.
A laundry list of states including California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia have announced they will not comply with the commission’s request.
Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-rails-against-states-election-commission
An almost-forgotten moment of country over party: Bill Clinton's 1993 strikes on Iraq
SATURDAY, JUL 1, 2017 09:30 AM EDT
An almost-forgotten moment of country over party: Bill Clinton’s 1993 strikes on Iraq
When Bill Clinton ordered air strikes in Iraq — because Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush
MATTHEW ROZSA
Earlier this week, Americans passed an important anniversary in the history of our foreign policy. On June 26, 1993, President Bill Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Baghdad. Why? Clinton was responding to intelligence reports that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush — the man Clinton had defeated less than eight months earlier.
Although Clinton and Bush became quite close in the years after both left the White House, they were bitter partisan enemies in 1993. Indeed, Bush’s intensely negative campaign against Clinton the previous year — and Clinton’s attempt to contrast that with a deliberately optimistic approach — became hallmarks of the political zeitgeist in the early ’90s. Clinton decisively bested Bush in both the electoral and popular vote in the ’92 election, even though Bush had had sky-high approval ratings only a few months earlier.
According to David Gergen, the veteran political operative and commentator who served as counselor to Clinton at that time, the high quality of leadership displayed by Clinton on that occasion is sorely needed in Washington today.
“I came into the Clinton White House in May-June of that year, and shortly after I got there the intelligence arrived that made it very clear that Saddam Hussein had ordered the strike against President Bush,” Gergen recalled in an interview, noting that Clinton had earlier vowed to retaliate against the individuals responsible for the attempt on Bush’s life. As a result, after collecting his top advisers (including Gergen), Clinton faced a critical dilemma.
“He had never issued an order for a military strike that would inevitably bring death on the other side of the strike,” Gergen recalled. Clinton had learned that the attempt against Bush had come from Iraq’s intelligence headquarters, so the president “wanted to think about it carefully, because he felt that while the United States had to show that it would follow through, that it would use force, that it had a club in the closet, he [also] wanted to minimize the loss of life, especially innocent Iraqi lives.”
more
http://www.salon.com/2017/07/01/an-almost-forgotten-moment-of-country-over-party-bill-clintons-1993-strikes-on-iraq/
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Name: DonGender: Male
Hometown: Massachusetts
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