doesn't really matter cause he's been hired by Fox News-guess he can sleep in the studio now.

That sound you hear is the Koch brothers clutching at their (non-existent) hearts and screeching in existential terror:

Key Republicans Want to Scrap Health Bill's Tax Cuts for Wealthy - Bloomberg

And anyone who supports or voted for 'ol Donnie Moscow that aren't already in his circle think they are getting a piece of the action...well, I have a few Carrier jobs to sell them.

Well, I mean I guess at least Mika wasn't bleeding out of every orifice like Megyn.

I'm assuming that the Twitter-In-Chief's latest doozies are ridiculous enough to misdirect/hide whatever his next brilliant piece of legislation is. Any guesses on what it is? Goldman Sachs running the Russia probe now? Taxes will be considered optional for the wealthy? FOFC's Rock Tournament declared fake news since Kenny G isnt in it?

Had no clue what you were talking about here-now I do:

Paul Ryan says Trump's Mika Brzezinski remark was not an 'appropriate comment' - The Washington Post

I'm so old I remember when the wrong color suit was considered disrespectful of the office.

that's disrespectful of the orifice

You misspelled skin.

But on a serious note, Trump's Election Integrity Commission is sending out letters to states asking for all (public) voter rolls that include age/SSN/name/DOB/address/party affiliation. Clearly meant to be used for vote suppression.

Party affiliation -- in states that require a declaration at least -- is usually part of the public record afaik.

And even where a declaration isn't required (such as Georgia) it's easy enough to figure out in most cases since the public record shows which party primary/primaries you voted in. (though I forget off hand how many years back that goes, I think it was more than five but no more than ten the last time I saw one)

Honest question, with your state's rights POV, would you consider this sort of "auditing", for lack of a better term, to be overreach by the feds?

I would actually not care much if it was more narrow in scope. There's no logical reason to ask for party affiliation unless you're trying to manufacture something.

Gerrymandering is one thing that comes to mind.

State's rights for Jon mean the right to do the things he wants. I can't imagine there's a realistic way for someone like Kobach to overstep so that Jon would object.

Well this is interesting:

Lawmakers applaud after panel approves language revoking war authority | TheHill

Not sure if it ever turns into a full law but it passed the committee almost unanimously.

Affiliation is part of the public record where it is declared. Both parties already have all of this info.

Where it's not declared, at least in Minnesota, there's no way to determine. The primaries are open and listed as one election.

I'm not sure this isn't anything more than a legal technicality (though it's getting lots of play on my social media). I heard a news story on NPR (I think) this week about bipartisan support for this measure because, in essence, we're on questionable legal grounds by extending this authorization so far and for so long. It's the job of Congress to approve military action...so this just amounts to taking that authority back to a case-by-case basis, like it should have been all along.

I'm not an expert, but it strikes me more as a procedural thing than a political thing.

They're not racist though.

#Tucker: Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here? @FoxNews

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 30, 2017

Trump's Election Fraud Commission Asked States to Send Sensitive Voter Information Over Insecure Email

Seems like server security was a big issue at one time.

So.. the big story of the morning was people in the White House called a morning politics talk show husband and wife and told them unless they personally called the president and begged him to spike the story, the National Enquirer was going to run a hit piece on them.

Let that sink in.

I mean seriously, it's not rising to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, but it's another example of why Donald Trump is completely and totally unfit for the duties of the Presidency, and a disgrace to the office he holds.

But the more important story may be the GOP operative, who said he was working with Flynn, trying to get Clinton emails from Russian hackers.

That's not much by itself, but the noose keeps tightening.

Its just e-mails, who cares?

He seems mentally ill.

I'd have to know what the purpose was. (Literally the only thing I know about this instance is what was posted here).

In & of itself, where party affiliation is part of the public record, it seems like a housekeeping thing with the request. In other words, if it's normally included with the information then to omit it would/could be forcing extra work to redact it. That's really the basis for my original reply, in & of itself the wording of the request has no red flag here.

--------------

In a broader sense, if this "Election Fraud Commission" (I think that's where the request was from, right?) is looking for patterns then it seems reasonable to have as much information as possible for the purpose of spotting any patterns that arise.

I haven't explored the legality/propriety of this EFC's very existence, nor am I likely to ... for the simple reason that I have no expectation that it will amount to much, if anything.

Mississippi seems to care about State's Rights.

MS GOP Sec of State to POTUS voting commission: "They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico & Mississippi is a great State to launch from" pic.twitter.com/iF5MvX7yCi

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) June 30, 2017

Why the fuck did I just see a commercial from Donnie Moscow asking for money? Campaign ended back in November.

He started his reelection campaign on January 20th. Grifting is a full time job.

Apparently, he didn't read any of the tweets critcizing his earlier Joe and Mika tweets:

1. Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 1h1 hour ago
   
   Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!
   
   19,503 replies 7,818 retweets 28,268 likes
   
   
   
   Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 1h1 hour ago
   
   
   I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It's about time!
   
   8,791 replies 11,581 retweets 38,665 likes
2. 
   Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 1h1 hour ago
   
   Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
   
   17,192 replies 9,757 retweets 30,883 likes
3. 
   Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 2h2 hours ago
   
   
   Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC & @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ 'Trump hate!'

The guy who won't release his tax returns wants every registered voter SSN, DOB, and party affiliation. What an ass.

He reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror we watched last night where a fucking cartoon character just insulted all the other politicians in a county race and nearly got elected.

I'd donate money to PETA before I'd give his orange ass one red cent. He's the kind of guy that would flash a 20 and then swap it for a 10 when the cashier looks away and then bitch about crappy customer service.

I tend to side with the point of view that he simply can't help himself. His tweets--both positive and negative--are so frequently direct and near-real-time responses to something from cable news that the leaked stories that he consumes a ton of it are obviously true. He's obsessed with how he's viewed in the media, and that appears to drive him to the point of serious distraction. This piece from the National Review nailed it imo.

Donald Trump’s Media Obsession -- Mika Brzezinski Tweet Is Latest Example | National Review

He isn't President, he's PR Director for Trump Inc.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

White House advisers worry that the president's attacks on Mika Brzezinski distract from his feud w/ CNN, per WaPo.https://t.co/lw21LEzKPx pic.twitter.com/WYGOJzdFyo

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 1, 2017

I see he finally responded to the people who were criticizing his social media usage with this:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump 16h16 hours ago




My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!


And then followed it up with someone who looks like him tackling somebody at a WWF event with that person's head covered up with a CNN logo. So it looks like shaming him makes him go even lower.

Stupid, unfit to be president, national embarrassment, all of that for sure... but...

Donald Trump punches CNN in a juvenile tweet - Jul. 2, 2017






A WWE meme is a "threat of physical violence?" Please.

What do you think had a greater impact on the election: the person of Clinton or Obamacare?

I'm asking because I'm wondering if obama essentially doomed the next election cycles for something that is weak then poor short game. But if it was mostly about the person of Clinton then I can see thee being room for healthcare reform.

:+1:

Yeah, many on the left are wayyyy overreacting. Call it dumb, sophomoric, unbecoming of the office, and I'm with you. But "HE IS TRYING TO INCITE TEH VIOLENCE" sounds like the kind of crazy that could get Trump re-elected.

It has to be a combo of both nominating an unlikable elderly candidate and significant premium increases so close to the election I'd think.
Plus Scalia picked a perfect time to die.

I think Clinton had a bigger impact. She single-handedly killed Democratic voter turnout. She reminded me of the politician woman from Black Sheep.

Wrong. She pulled as many total votes as Obie did.
Clinton won as many votes as Obama in 2012 — just not in the states where she needed them most - LA Times

But she helped improve Republican (and independent) voter turnout far more than she impacted Democratic turnout.

Non-voters in 2012 who voted in 2016 went Trump at a nearly 5:1 clip. How much of that was her vs how much was a candidate a lot of us could at least find some reason to hope for is debatable.

That may be the gutting of the Voting Rights Act you're thinking about.

Chris Christie with the asshole move of the year.

Due to a budget impasse, all NJ parks are closed this weekend. Christie and his family went to Island Beach park and have the whole ten mile island to themselves with police turning everyone else away.

wow good thing he's not running for office there ever again.

If we look at key swing states though (Michigan and Wisconsin importantly), she underperformed Obama, with Trump doing about the same number of votes that Romney did. Who knows the cause--probably not singularly Clinton, but the decrease in number of votes in those states, particularly the margins she won by in the key African American areas is striking.

I think this is the absolute sign of the times politically. When is the last time there was a candidate that was able to get people to vote FOR them rather than simply AGAINST the opposition? Maybe I have rose-colored glasses on looking backward, but it just feels like American politics is more (entirely?) about screw the opposition than it is about supporting someone/something you believe in these days.

I think a ton of people voted FOR Obama in 2008 and 2012. It was a much bigger phenomenon in 2008 though.

It will never happen, and I may have said it here before, I wish we would take the D and R away from a candidate's name on the ballot.

I think the bolded part is likely the biggest unsung reason. Scalia hangs on for another year and all of a sudden, we likely have President Clinton. Lot of folks held their nose for Trump due to the immediacy of a Supreme Court nomination.

Not sure if I ever told the full story here, but that is what led me to ultimately pull the trigger for Trump. I sat in the booth for a full 10 minutes before doing so. The fact he had a list of court appointments, and the ones I dug into I liked. That pushed me over the edge.

I agree that in the vast majority of instances no one would or should see it as a call for violence. However, we shouldn't underestimate a certain group of Trump supporters and what they're capable of. They already believe the Clintons are murdering people left and right.

Journalist who revealed Neo-Nazi creator of Trump's CNN tweet now receiving death threats

Clinton. As we're finding out, most people actually like Obamacare when it came down to it.

She was a bad candidate that didn't inspire moderate voters as much as she needed to. Still she ended up with more votes and it came down to a bit of dumb luck for her to lose.

In any other year we'd say she did well considering that the election was an attempt to have a third term for one party. We tend to overlook that and blame it all on her campaign, but it's extremely difficult for a party to win three in a row.

The "receiving death threats on the internet" thing is embarrassing to anyone under 40 years old (and those older with experience on the internet). It's such a cop-out to anyone who receives backlash. I'd love to see the ratio of internet threats to actual follow-through. Trillion to one maybe? Every public figure has likely received them in some form or another. Heck, everyone who has played on XBox Live has probably gotten their share.

I'm not saying it's right, just that this fake outrage we have whenever it happens is tiresome. They're expecting a generation that grew up in chatrooms and comment sections to find this appalling.


Exactly. This constant attempt to try and get people outraged over silly internet things has to be killing their credibility with normal people. I remember cringing at Clinton's campaign trying to explain why we all needed to take the depictions cartoon frog real serious.

And of course this stuff works as a nice distraction when healthcare, North Korea, and Russia should be the focus.

2/3 of the public thinks the Russia investigation is important, 3/4 thinks Trumpcare is a shit sandwich, and his approval ratings are below forty percent.

The midterm will be a referendum on Trump, as midterms always are, and what he's doing isn't working.

Joe Biden would have beaten Trump easily.

I agree with this statement.

I'm so old I remember when people said Clinton would beat Trump easily. Maybe Biden would have, but he'd face months of attacks and the Russians would have battered him, too. Biden has a decades long history of foot in mouth disease and all of that would have come out.

Maybe he would have won, but I'm not convinced it would have been easy for anyone.

Biden would not have had near the negatives Hillary had. Yes, he has hoof and mouth disease, but with Trump, any verbal gaffe would not have been in the news cycle very long. I would have considered Biden, would not have likely voted for him, but Hillary has been a flat no go for me since the 92-93 timeframe.

EDIT: I think people underestimated the feeling that many of the non-minority blue collar voters have in the Midwest (I am including PA W of I-476 in this). They feel that they have been taken for granted by the Democrats and while Trump might not follow through with any of the campaign promises, he might. They (people I spoke to in my sales territory) had no faith in Hillary and felt she would say whatever it took for her to win. I think Biden blunts that in PA to keep it blue, and I believe he would have done it in MI enough to keep that state blue as well.

Maybe focus on that instead of animated gifs on Twitter.

It's fair to say that Dems/liberals overreact to petty things like the animated gifs, but I'm not sure what kind of world you're living in where the Dems aren't focused on Russia and Trumpcare.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politi...eet/index.html

Speaking of overreacting. CNN hunted down the random guy on reddit who made the trump/CNN meme? And demanded an apology? And are "graciously" witholding the guy's name... for now:

"CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change."

are you fucking serious? Just stop, CNN... please.

Agree. It wasn't as if that guy gave the gif to Trump or okayed it ahead of time.

If that was the case, I think it is fair play to expose who he was in a short blurb.

Zero sympathy for him, he's a racist, altright/nazi wannabe.

He had one big problem- being Obama's VP-Trump would have used his hatred of anything Obama and the "swamp" against Biden. Maybe he would have done better than Clinton, but not convinced he could have won. Seemed to be the Presidency for the extremes-so Sanders perhaps?

Biden's one big problem was that he couldn't beat Clinton in the primary.

I understand why CNN put out the statement the way they did. It was a legal insert in case they did change their position, they wanted to be covered. But yeah, damn if it doesn't come across really poorly.

You can't win if you don't get in. That said, the DNC had a stacked deck for Clinton this election.

Obama was pretty popular when he left office. I think that would have helped him more than hurt him.


I'm at a point where I think the only people who care about the "foot in mouth" stuff is the media. If there is one thing we learned from the past election is that the big headline on Politico every morning has almost no sway on voters.

That's pretty amazing. A news organization is going to follow this guy around to make sure he behaves himself on social media, and doesn't criticize CNN anymore, and punish him if he doesn't comply.

Geez, maybe Trump is right about CNN.

I think (like the above posts indicate) that it is more a legal-ese statement that came across extremely poorly.

I just hope this isn't some 15 year old kid that was trying to be funny...

Yeah I completely agree with this, Biden would have made the election a laugher. PA, MI, OH would have been solidly blue and from there it wouldn't really matter what else happened.

Clinton was an awful candidate uniquely poorly suited to this election cycle who then ran a terrible campaign and topped it all off by insulting and completely ignoring a critical cross section of American voters. Biden is massively popular in exactly those places that lost the election for Hilary and the places where he's less popular are places that were never going to vote for Trump anyway.

I understand the concern with Biden's gaffes. He has had some pretty big ones over the years. I am not sure if it is wisdom with age, but he seems to have cut down on them significantly once he became VP.

This confidence in Biden is quite interesting. Let us consider that the last two times he ran for President he barely could get 1% in the primaries and had to bow out ridiculously early.

One of which was in 1988 and the other was before he'd been a pretty damn popular VP for 8 years?

Probably right. They glossed over the reddit user's post history in one sentence

"Now the user is apologizing, writing in a lengthy post on Reddit that he does not advocate violence against the press and expressing remorse there and in an interview with CNN for other posts he made that were racist and anti-Semitic."


The main story about this on Reddit that hit the front page was full of people reading it the same way as me, as a huge mistake by CNN. But there are some other discussions I was reading this morning that are talking more about that post history, which, sure, has been deleted, but its the internet, his post history is certainly still viewable.

Here's one of this user's other comments:

"America is generally a safe place to travel, however precautions are needed when entering areas populated by black people. We advise not going to any city where there is predominately a black population, and if you have to travel to those cities carry a gun aka n***** repellent"


There was a great 538 article awhile back doing some analysis on the posting habits of posters to "the_donald", showing that racist and anti-semitic subreddits were the primary subreddits that posters to t_d had in common.


The point of all of this is that it seems like CNN missed a great opportunity to shine a giant light onto what is a not insignificant portion of Trump's most loyal supporters and onto the horrible collective that is "the_donald", and instead, seriously looks like the bad guy.

It's just so ridiculous - both that the president would get so excited about a silly internet meme and that CNN would be so offended by it to the extent of actually tracking down the creator and threatening him. This is the new normal.

Why is someone connected to the WH or the Trump campaign spending time surfing in these cesspools?

The 1988 run was derailed by plagiarism IIRC, back when we actually cared about that sort of thing.

So it seems all here think it was Clinton and not Obama care. If so, I'm wondering how disastrous it would be if the republicans worked with dems on significantly fixing ACA? More or less than not having anything?
NPR was saying for compromise to happen republicans need to give up repeal and dems need to admit it is broken.

If the (R) give up repeal then they might as well punt on getting elected, the turnout won't be there again as they'll have proven themselves rather pointless.

The problem is that the Dems want to expand healthcare access with increased government funding and the Reps want to cut taxes with decreased healthcare funding.

I'm not sure how you can work together when the priorities are so contradictory.

+1, and the fact that they have shown repeatedly, they are not all in on reducing spending themselves, what would be the point to the party anymore?

I don't get to +1 you all that often, but this this, 100k X THIS.

The analogy I've used more than once is that if two people have one car between 'em but one wants to go to Los Angeles and the other wants to go to New York, either somebody isn't ending up where they want to be or they need separate cars.

Trump posts a wrestling GIF created by a reddit racist.

CNN Execs: "Yeah, but how can we make sure that WE end up looking stupid here?"

I felt that way about the current party structure 10 years ago. Still haven't found an answer.

Subsidizing millionaires/billionaires. There's a sizable enough audience for white nationalism as well.

ObamaCare is popular NOW, that people finally realize what was a part of it, but let's not think it was popular before the election.

It was written in 1973 and I think it's truer now than ever.
And, to be abundantly clear, I am talking about BOTH sides of the aisle.

Are you saying philosophically or specifically on ACA? It's hard for me to see it as a philosophical stance with things like the Prescription Drug Act. Or another way, it seems like they merely want to decrease federal funding.

I'm still trying to reconcile how this whole thing isn't just about 10-15 million working age adults who want health insurance, but can't get it or afford it. All rest: drug price regulation, prevention, malpractice, over testing and prescribing are not mentioned.

I'd also add that both parties don't want the other to be the one that "fixes" healthcare.

The effectiveness of the ACA was neutered before passing and I'd expect that for any Healthcare plan that comes through our political process.

This goes for both parties. It's not like the Democrats are saints.

Oh yeah, gotta hear both sides. No room for nuance or thinking about which side does it more often to an even greater extreme.

So one party is all about lining donor's pockets while the other does no such thing?

Heck, the reason why Johnson wanted the Great Society passed was so the poor would be sucking at the teat of the government. With the power he would wield he could help out his cronies. How is that any different.

Wait... WTF is this nonsense?

This sort of BS just pushes me to more to nol's side.

I'm specifically talking about the current healthcare bills, but the basic fundamental has held pretty constant since the 1960s. One of the fundamental tenets of the GOP is now the belief that the government shouldn't help for insurance for the "undeserving." Now, I'll grant the definition of that term gets complicated for the base, but for the money running the party it covers a lot of people.

Dems are asking people to vote on a new sticker and I'm not sure anyone in history has been as bad at this. pic.twitter.com/isYaZV60Dp

— Mazel Tov Cocktail (@AdamSerwer) July 5, 2017

How about: No ideas, but give us money!

Depends on where the Republican is located. Obamacare is popular in Nevada for instance. If the Senator votes to repeal it and kick a bunch of his constituents off health insurance, he's probably going to lose his Senate seat.

The problem Republicans have is that once you repeal it, you own the new system. Health care is such a gigantic minefield that as a party, you're almost better off being on the side that didn't implement the current policy. I think deep down there are some Democrats who secretly hope Obamacare does get repealed because they'll be able to point the finger in 2018 and 2020 when people lose their health insurance and premiums are still skyrocketing.

The popularity of something-for-nothing is so broad at this point, it probably doesn't matter who ends up in office anyway. We're already sunk as a nation, it's just about rate of descent now.

Another good thing coming out of the Trump presidency....Tomi Lahren will debate Chelsea Handler in what will likely rival Lincoln vs. Douglas in entertainment.