Tag Archives: record

Trump Simmers and Priebus Lies: Just Another Weekend at the White House

by EdithCMYkdwjq Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Over at the Washington Post, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker report on the Trump White House:

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad….“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.”…At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated….Trump [] has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures….The next morning, Trump exploded….Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage….In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago….Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said….But he found reason to be mad again.

That’s the president. Here’s his chief of staff, Reince Priebus:

As reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had actually happened, according to a senior White House official….Ultimately, Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news, as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous outlets Saturday.

In other words, the president’s chief of staff spent a full hour of his time on Friday lying to reporters off the record. Why? To cover up for the fact that Trump routinely melts down when he gets bad press. The only thing that cheered him up was all the attention he got when he told an outrageous lie about Barack Obama.

Finally, this: “Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One.” This is truly their world view. Trump let Rubio fly on Air Force One, so Trumpworld expected Rubio to back up Trump’s lie. Transactional to the end.

And this: the Post’s story was based on 17 interviews with “top White House officials, members of Congress and friends of the president.” In other words, people who are basically sympathetic to Trump. What’s up with that? Do these people really think that painting Trump as a petulant two-year-old will make him look better?

Continue reading: 

Trump Simmers and Priebus Lies: Just Another Weekend at the White House

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Simmers and Priebus Lies: Just Another Weekend at the White House

Sean Spicer Imagines Coretta Scott King Would Change Her Mind About Jeff Sessions

by KOPManuela Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

Amid mounting outrage over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to silence Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as she read Coretta Scott King’s 1968 letter opposing the appointment of Sen. Jeff Sessions’ to the federal bench, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Wednesday said he “respectfully disagreed” with the assessment by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow that Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, was a threat to civil rights.

“Like the late Arlen Specter,” Spicer said, “I can only hope that if she was still with us today, that after getting to know him and to see his record and his commitment to voting and civil rights,” she would have agreed with Specter when he said he regretted his vote to kill Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship decades before.

“I would hope that if she was still with us today,” Spicer continued, “she would share that sentiment.”

The remarks were swiftly mocked on social media, with many slamming Spicer for appearing to recast King’s views on civil rights and Sessions’ controversial record on the issue.

Warren was forced to stop reading from King’s letter, in which she accused Sessions of using his office to “chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens,” Tuesday night after McConnell invoked an arcane rule prohibiting senators from impugning one another. The incident sparked widespread protest among Democrats, who in turn used it as further evidence against President Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general.

Spicer’s statement on King came shortly after he angrily defended the president’s anti-terror raid in Yemen in January in which civilians and a Navy SEAL were killed. He suggested anyone who questioned the success of the mission was doing a “disservice” to the Navy SEAL killed in the mission.

When asked if his comments included Sen. John McCain, who previously described the raid as a “failure,” Spicer replied that the message was for “anybody.”

Original article – 

Sean Spicer Imagines Coretta Scott King Would Change Her Mind About Jeff Sessions

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sean Spicer Imagines Coretta Scott King Would Change Her Mind About Jeff Sessions

Trump "Agrees Completely" That Repeal-and-Delay Is a Terrible Idea

by HarrisWhitt869 Posted on January 10, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rand Paul says Donald Trump isn’t happy with “repeal and delay”:

President-elect Donald Trump backed waiting to repeal the Affordable Care Act until a replacement proposal is in hand in a Friday night phone call with Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican said Monday, adding to momentum for changing GOP leaders’ strategy on dismantling the 2010 health-care law.

….“I believe we should vote on replacement the same day we vote on repeal,” Mr. Paul said in an interview Monday. Mr. Trump called the senator on Friday night “to say he agrees completely,” Mr. Paul said.

Uh oh. That’s a mistake, though it’s an easy one for an amateur to make. For the record: Mr. Trump calls no one. Other people call Mr. Trump. This is very important to Mr. Trump. He’s very insistent on following proper protocol, which is that others should be seen groveling to him, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, there’s a more serious mistake here too: Paul spoke publicly about Trump’s wishes before Trump did. This gives others plenty of time to corner Trump and talk him into changing his mind and then “explaining” that Paul didn’t get things quite right. It’s much better not to alert others to your conversation.

All that said, this fits the various smoke signals that have come out of Trump Tower for a while now, so maybe Trump really is serious about offering a replacement for Obamacare at the same time as repeal. I hope so. Obviously I’d prefer no repeal at all, but at the very least the American public deserves to know what Trump has in mind when the health coverage they currently have is ripped away from them.

View this article: 

Trump "Agrees Completely" That Repeal-and-Delay Is a Terrible Idea

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump "Agrees Completely" That Repeal-and-Delay Is a Terrible Idea

These are the indigenous-led climate movements to watch out for in 2017.

by SharylLightfoot Posted on December 28, 2016

This year was chock-full of superlatives — and not the good kind — thanks to a sweltering El Niño on top of decades of climate change:

1. The longest streak of record-breaking months, from May 2015 to August 2016. It was the hottest January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and September since we began collecting data 137 years ago, according to NOAA.

2. The largest coral bleaching event ever observed. As much as 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef experienced record-breaking bleaching over the Southern Hemisphere summer, which also wreaked havoc to reefs across the Pacific in the longest-running global bleaching event ever observed.

3. The Arctic is getting really hot. Alaska saw its hottest year ever, with temperatures an average of 6 degrees F above normal. Arctic sea ice cover took a nosedive to a new low this fall, as temperatures at the North Pole reached an insane seasonal high nearly 50 degrees above average. Reminder: There is no sun in the Arctic in December.

4. The first year we spent entirely above 400 ppm. After the biggest monthly jump in atmospheric CO2 levels from February 2015 to February 2016, those levels stayed high for all of 2016.

5. The hottest year. Pending an extreme plunge in global temperatures in the next few days, 2016 will almost certainly be the warmest year humans have ever spent on the Earth’s surface.

Even if it weren’t the hottest year yet, context matters more than year-to-year comparisons. The last five years have been the hottest five on record. The last 16 years contain 15 of the hottest years on record. We are living in unprecedented times.

See?

NOAA

Continue reading here: 

These are the indigenous-led climate movements to watch out for in 2017.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These are the indigenous-led climate movements to watch out for in 2017.

Raw Data: The US Trade Deficit

by NiklasBaldwin Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I don’t have any special reason to post this except for the fact that trade is very much in the news following Donald Trump’s election victory. For the record, then, here’s the US trade deficit since 1980:

And just for extra fun, here’s the same chart excluding trade with China and imports of crude oil:

The main lesson here is that the US trade deficit hasn’t been spiraling out of control for the past decade. It’s been declining. And practically all of it for the past five years has been accounted for by oil and China.

See original:

Raw Data: The US Trade Deficit

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Data: The US Trade Deficit

Help Me Understand the Republican View on Russia’s Election Hacking

by EdgarStinson Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Just for the record, I want to make sure I understand something:

During the presidential campaign, Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans promised to raise hell if President Obama responded aggressively to Russia’s interference in the election.
Now that the election is over, Republicans are bashing Obama for not having a more aggressive response to a ruthless cyberattack by a hostile foreign power. It’s yet another example of Obama’s fecklessness on the foreign stage.

Do I have this right? Just curious.

Original article – 

Help Me Understand the Republican View on Russia’s Election Hacking

Posted in Cyber, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Help Me Understand the Republican View on Russia’s Election Hacking

Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

by Teofilnpc Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The current hotness in Republican circles is “repeal and delay.” That is, they want to pass legislation that repeals Obamacare in, say, 2019, but doesn’t replace it with anything. Then they can spend the next couple of years figuring out what should take its place. There’s only one problem with this:

Republicans. Can’t. Repeal. Obamacare.

Oh, they can repeal big parts of it. Anything related to the budget, like taxes and subsidies, can be repealed via the Senate procedure called reconciliation, which needs only 51 votes to pass. But all the other parts can be filibustered, and it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.1

This leaves quite a few elements of Obamacare that can’t be repealed via reconciliation, but I think Democrats should focus on one: pre-existing conditions. This is the provision of Obamacare that bans insurers from turning down customers or charging them extra for coverage, no matter what kind of pre-existing conditions they have. I tell the whole story here, but there are several reasons this is the best provision to focus on:

It’s an easy thing to understand.
It’s very popular.
Republicans say they favor keeping it.
Donald Trump says he favors keeping it.
It’s not a minor regulation. It is absolutely essential to any health care plan.
It’s fairly easy to explain why repealing Obamacare but leaving in place the pre-existing conditions ban2 would destroy the individual insurance market and leave tens of millions of people with no way to buy insurance.

The last point is the most important. Take me. I’m currently being kept alive by about $100,000 worth of prescriptions drugs each year. If I can go to any insurer and demand that they cover me for $10,000, that’s a certain loss of $90,000. If millions of people like me do this, insurance companies will lose billions. In the employer market, which covers people who work for large companies, this is workable because insurers have lots and lots of healthy, profitable people at each company to make up these losses. In the individual market—after you’ve repealed the individual mandate and the subsidies—they don’t. They will bear huge losses and they know it.

What this means is not just that Obamacare would collapse. It means the entire individual market would collapse. Every insurance company in America would simply stop selling individual policies. It would be political suicide to make this happen, and this means that Democrats have tremendous leverage if they’re willing to use it. It all depends on how well they play their hand.

The current Republican hope is that they can repeal parts of Obamacare, and then hold Democrats hostage: vote for our replacement plan or else the individual insurance market dies. There’s no reason Democrats should do anything but laugh at this. Republicans now control all three branches of government. They’ve been lying to their base about Obamacare repeal for years. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and they’re responsible for whatever happens next. If the Democratic Party is even marginally competent, they can make this stick.

Plenty of Republicans already know this. Some have only recently figured it out. Some are still probably living in denial. It doesn’t matter. Pre-existing conditions is the hammer Democrats can use to either save Obamacare or else demand that any replacement be equally generous. They just have to use it.

1Of course, Republicans do have the alternative of either (a) getting rid of the filibuster or (b) firing the Senate parliamentarian and hiring one who will let them do anything they want. If they do either of those things, then they can repeal all of Obamacare and replace it with anything they want. I don’t think they’ll do either one, but your mileage may vary on this question.

2Just for the record, it’s worth noting that Republicans can’t modify the pre-existing conditions ban either. Democrats can filibuster that too.

Jump to original – 

Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

by AngieCervantes Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Are Republicans really going to start off the 115th Congress by mucking around with Medicare?

For nearly six years, Speaker Paul D. Ryan has championed the new approach, denounced by Democrats as “voucherizing” Medicare. Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the House Budget Committee chairman and a leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, has also embraced the idea, known as premium support.

….Democrats say that premium support would privatize Medicare, replacing the current government guarantee with skimpy vouchers — “coupon care for seniors.” The fear is that the healthiest seniors would choose private insurance, lured by offers of free health club memberships and other wellness programs, leaving traditional Medicare with sicker, more expensive patients and higher premiums.

….Republicans say their proposal would apply to future beneficiaries, not to those in or near retirement. But the mere possibility of big changes is causing trepidation among some older Americans.

….“I’m scared to death,” said Charles Drapeau, who has multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, and takes a drug that costs more than $10,000 a month. “We don’t know exactly how it will work, but just the fact that they are talking about messing with Medicare, it’s frightening to me.”

Just for the record, that drug is actually $10,500 every four weeks. So Mr. Drapeau should be 14 percent more scared to death than he already is.

But back to Medicare vouchers premium support. It’s pretty plain that it would be worse for seniors than the current Medicare system. After all, if it were better, Ryan wouldn’t feel like he has to exempt current Medicare recipients. But everyone currently on Medicare is keenly aware of how their benefits would be affected by Ryan’s vouchers, and if they aren’t, AARP will tell them in no uncertain terms. So they’ll fight Ryan’s cuts tooth and nail.

So why is Ryan doing this, anyway? I suppose because it’s one of the few ways to open up a significant amount of budget room for his gigantic tax cuts. If you want big tax cuts, after all, you need big spending cuts too, and that means cutting big programs. Unfortunately for Ryan, there really aren’t all that many big spending programs, especially once you take defense off the table. So he has little choice but to chop away at Medicare if those top marginal rates are going to come down.

And yet, why now? In one sense, I suppose doing it right at the start, when political capital is highest, makes sense. You do the hard stuff when you have the biggest majorities and everyone is eager for change. That’s why Obama went after health care first. At the same time, this would be a huge, messy battle that would almost certainly be wildly unpopular. Medicare is probably even more beloved than Social Security, after all. A battle like this could easily up in an epic defeat, and wipe out whatever goodwill the new Congress has.

So it’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t think Ryan can win this battle unless he offers up a plan that doesn’t really save much money. That’s possible, of course: just take a look at the difference between Ryan 2011 and Ryan 2014. But if you don’t save much money, what’s the point?

I dunno. If it were me, I’d do the popular stuff first. Cut taxes, build the wall, repair some bridges, bomb the shit out of ISIS, etc. More to the point, if I were Donald Trump, that’s what I’d do. Trump wants to be adored by the masses, not hated by them. Voucherizing Medicare is very definitely not the way to get there.

View this article:

Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

The Case Against Voting Booth Selfies

by AmieSilersfzdft Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Justin Timberlake snapped a selfie in the voting booth yesterday, and lots of people were outraged that apparently there are laws against this. What happened to free speech!?!

Just for the record, then, there is a reason for selfie bans in voting booths: it prevents vote buying. After all, the only way it makes sense to pay people for their votes is if you have proof that they voted the way you told them to. Back in the day that was no problem, but ever since secret ballots became the norm vote buying has died out. Selfies change all that. If I give you ten bucks to vote for my favorite candidate for mayor, I can withhold payment until you show me a selfie proving that you voted for my guy.

How big a deal is this? I don’t know. Maybe we should go ahead and allow voting booth selfies. But the ban isn’t just a dumb bureaucratic rule. It’s a sensible attempt to prevent voter fraud that has very little cost.

Link: 

The Case Against Voting Booth Selfies

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Case Against Voting Booth Selfies

Oil industry supporters are getting ever more creative with their memes

by Gidget1126 Posted on July 27, 2016

Bad Internet

Oil industry supporters are getting ever more creative with their memes

By on Jul 27, 2016 6:06 amShare

A Canadian advocate for oil sands recently learned just how fickle the internet can be.

Robbie Picard, a former Alberta oil sands worker, posted a homemade meme to the Canada Oil Sands Community Facebook page this week. It showed two women kissing, and read:

In Canada lesbians are considered hot! In Saudi Arabia if you’re a lesbian you die! Why are we getting our oil from countries that don’t think lesbians are hot?! Choose equality! Choose Canadian oil!

The backlash was swift. People from within the group and beyond did not hold back their anger, although the source of that anger varied. Some objected to the treatment of women as sex objects, others to lesbianism itself, and still others to the idea that Canadian tar sands oil is any better for the planet than importing oil from Saudi Arabia. (For the record, they’re both bad.)

Then, naturally, the backlash to the backlash started: “People who legitimately complained about it being offensive should be banned from Universities,” Charles Garand weighed in on the Facebook page. “I urge you to reupload the picture back to your page because I really do love it.”

The point of the meme, according to Picard, was to raise awareness about how imports from Saudi Arabia are hurting the local economy. This is not the first time Picard, who lost his home in the recent wildfires in Fort McMurray, has said something controversial about oil exaction.

In 2015, he claimed that “[t]he oil sands are the best thing that ever happened for aboriginal people.” The aboriginal people of Alberta, however, may disagree. In fact, Canada’s First Nations people have been on the front lines of working against tar sands oil extraction for years. But Picard certainly has a creative way of thinking.

“When I say lesbians are hot, I don’t think there is anything wrong about saying that,” he told the National Post. “I think all lesbians are hot and I’m not opposed to putting a picture of two guys up there. It was just to strike up a conversation. I find anybody is hot. I think two women kissing is hot. I think that something that is part of the fabric of our city — that we can do whatever we want in our country — that is hot.”

It certainly is, Mr. Picard.

ShareElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

Original post:

Oil industry supporters are getting ever more creative with their memes

Posted in alo, Anchor, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil industry supporters are getting ever more creative with their memes