So I heard a smart take from Dan Pfeiifer on what will likely happen with the GOP healthcare bill.

First of all, the Trump WH is totally clueless and useless in this process, so they are more or less a non-factor.

Second of all, Paul Ryan is committed to get the bill through the House, but he won't get any Dem votes so he has to make it more appealing to the radical GOP House members, and that will make the bill worse-- more cuts, less healthcare.

So Paul Ryan will likely get a bill out of the House, but it will be far to extreme to pass the Senate, so it will die there, and basically nothing will happen.

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This is basically the story of the last several years since the hard right took over the House. Few things that pass the House can get passed in the Senate and vice versa.

Hopefully the GOP failing to reform the ACA will demotivate their voters a bit and help us take back freaking Congress

Source: Telegraph

The US has made a formal apology to Britain after the White House accused GCHQ of helping Barack Obama spy on Donald Trump in the White House.

Sean Spicer, Mr Trump's press secretary, repeated a claim on Thursday evening – initially made by an analyst on Fox News - that GCHQ was used by Mr Obama to spy on Trump Tower in the lead-up to last November's election.

The comments prompted a furious response from GCHQ, which in a break from normal practice issued a public statement: "Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct 'wiretapping' against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored."

Intelligence sources told The Telegraph that both Mr Spicer and General McMaster, the US National Security Adviser, have apologised over the claims. "The apology came direct from them," a source said.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/17/us-makes-formal-apology-britain-white-house-accuses-gchq-wiretapping/

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Once again-- great job, conservatives

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53897/trump-budget-meals-wheels/

You can draw a straight line from Reaganomics to Trump's budget.

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.

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?

Read the rest--
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53897/trump-budget-meals-wheels/

since they are such big obstacles to Trump's plans... are we sure that it couldn't happen here? I obviously hope not, but this administration is beyond nuts, and clearly has authoritarian designs.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53869/maddow-trump-taxes/

Those of us who are fans of Kindly Doc Maddow and her electric teevee show occasionally are driven to distraction by what we can only term her opening monologue. This nightly trip all around Robin Hood's barn to get to the point of the A-block story is a rare exercise in genuine television eccentricity (Hooray!), and, like the old chief's magic in Little Big Man, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and it always feels like it should begin with, "Call me Ishmael," or, "In the beginning."

Such was the case last night, when she rolled us through all the smoke surrounding the Trump administration's purported ties with grifters and bagmen and plutocrats of many lands before getting to the big reveal: that somebody had mailed the president*'s 2005 Form 1040 to David Cay Johnston, and that he was now prepared to share it with the country. The electric Twitter machine went instantly aflame with anticipation. Trump! Taxes! And if there wasn't news to match the hype, and there wasn't, that doesn't mean the evening was completely lost.

There is a line of thought, beloved of the clergy of that which Jay Rosen calls The Church of the Savvy, that holds that this whole thing was a clever scam by the White House—and, indeed, that the administration may have been the source of the leak. But overrating the cleverness of this crowd has become reflexive. A lot of what they've done is just stupid, their efforts at spin control an insult to the memory of Michael Deaver, and their strategy roughly on the level of, as President Jed once put it, "Hey, your shoe's untied!" Chief among these explanations is the notion that this was meant to be a distraction from the other bad news engulfing the White House on the subjects of healthcare and whatever-the-hell James Comey is going to say next.

However, if the distraction argument is true, then it is a massive dereliction of duty on the part of the members of the media who make it true. In essence, coming from anyone in this business, the distraction argument denies that the media has any agency in what it covers. If you are an editor—or a reporter—and you decide that a story is a shiny object, then don't cover it. Or, at the very least, don't emphasize it. The decision by the elite political media to make Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server a central issue in the campaign was a deliberate choice. It wasn't forced on them by anyone or anything. If you can choose to emphasize something, you can choose not to do that. If you can choose to concentrate on HRC's email practices, you can choose not to concentrate on what you judge to be obvious diversions from the White House.

Do your freaking job.

The distraction argument denies that the media has any agency in what it covers.

As to the actual story itself, well, it was a bit oversold, but there was actual news to be found. If I read the substance of the information correctly, the president* made most of his income that year selling off properties he already owned. (And this is coming from a self-proclaimed real estate genius at the beginning of the fraud-financed real estate bubble.) It can be extrapolated from this information that the Trump operation already was taking on water. Not only does this blow a hole in his proclaimed net worth, it also raises questions of whether or not it was shortly after this that he went looking for more, ahem, exotic sources of financing. This is certainly worth further investigation.

Read the rest--
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53869/maddow-trump-taxes/

https://patribotics.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/wikileaks-hands-keys-to-putins-russian-hacker-readers-leakers-tracked/

Exclusive analysis by Laurelai Bailey, published by Patribotics this week confirmed that Julian Assange and Wikileaks obtained two new servers in Russia just one week before the hacked Podesta emails were released. Laurelai reported that the ultimate registrant of the servers was one Peter Chayanov, of Russia, a known cyber-criminal and hacker. Julian Assange has been identified by the US intelligence community as a front for Russian distribution and ‘deniability’ of Russian government-sponsored hacking. Today, however, as a result of our reporting on the dox by Op Ferguson, that link is far clearer.

The internet is tightly controlled in Russia. Cyber criminals have to answer to Putin. Mr. Chayanov is the head of a firm called Hostkey, which hosts mail spammers and other malware and hacking tools, despite offering web space to Wikileaks. Wikileaks chose to use a Russian hacker to host their site – and they knew that he was connected to Vladimir Putin and operated with the blessing of Putin’s government. Putin and Assange are thus already linked.

Bottom line:

* Wikileaks has handed Chayanov access to everything stored on its site and servers

* The Russian hacker and spammer can ‘monitor traffic’

* He can tell who is reading anything on the Wikileaks site anywhere in the world

* The Russian hacker has access to all documents that have been sent to Wikileaks

* He can probably bust the anonymity of any computer or user who thought they were anonymously donating to Wikileaks

* It is not reasonable to suggest that this hacker is other than linked with Russia’s GRU – if he has it, they have it

* Through Julian Assange and his website, it appears that the Russian hacker and his government can track any readers of the Wikileaks site and any donors of material to it, thus allowing Russia to ‘blackmail’ anyone who ‘sent secrets’ to Wikileaks as a ‘whistleblower’.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/connections-trump-putin-russia-ties-chart-flynn-page-manafort-sessions-214868

What is the real story of Donald Trump and Russia? The answer is still unclear, and Democrats in Congress want to get to the bottom of it with an investigation. But there’s no doubt that a spider web of connections—some public, some private, some clear, some murky—exists between Trump, his associates and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These charts illustrate dozens of those links, including meetings between Russian officials and members of Trump’s campaign and administration; his daughter’s ties to Putin’s friends; Trump’s 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant; and his short-lived mixed martial arts venture with one of Putin’s favorite athletes. The solid lines mark established facts, while dotted ones represent speculative or unproven connections.

There’s nothing inherently damning about most of the ties illustrated below. But they do reveal the vast and mysteriously complex web behind a story that has vexed Trump’s young presidency from its start—and is certain to shake the White House for months to come.

e.g.