In her final “Full Frontal” of the year (on TBS), host Samantha Bee began by digging into Fox News’ obsession with undermining Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia.
User-Supported News Commentary Hosted by Craig Crawford
also by ms bee as reported by nytimes:
Making ‘Armageddon’ Happen
On “Full Frontal,” Samantha Bee looked at Christians United for Israel, a small group of evangelicals whose leader, John Hagee, said he pushed President Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
She showed footage of Steve Cioccolanti, the leader of Discover Ministries, saying, “Trump has truly signaled the End Times.”
Then Ms. Bee played a clip of Mr. Hagee saying that he had told Mr. Trump, “This is the year to move the embassy and make that declaration, because it is a biblical timing of absolute precision.”
Holy day here…the solstice arrives in a few hours. Dark days still ahead while the entire congress and cabinet head up donnie’s butt. There was a time when mika and joe used to hang there with the food taster. Times have changed and we are all inside the nightmare brain of trump. Had enough?
Kosher meat exec gets commuted prison sentence by trump.
Money laundering and immigration issues — not a big deal after all. Message to Moscow Mueller in this — get parallel state indictments to outwit the twit.
So the balance of power in the Va house will be determined by drawing a name out of a hat? That sounds fair. I wonder if Va voters agree.
Phony attacks? McCabe gets grilled behind closed doors today by repug thugs.
Dems are looking like a bunch of old jackasses…time for a new mascot animal, retire the old jackasses of the party. Maybe a gorilla, cheetah or an adorable sloth. Time for a rally, dems and get a better animas for 2018!
What about a lion, Blonde Wino? They are one of the few animals that prey upon elephants, especially on their young.
Question is, are there any Dems fit to live up to this symbol … seem to be populated by more mice than lions. Perhaps tech wizardry can whip up a hologram of LBJ to bedevil the Republicans with his particular brand of deviousness & balls. Or resurrect FDR with his razor sharp wit. Or RFK with his nasty meanness/post JFK humanity (now that’s a full package.) Isn’t it funny transformative Democrats end up as initials. Quick, draft the candidate who fits that bill.
It actually would be a hoot if someone created figures from America’s past to respond to this administration in real time. Theodore Roosevelt crashes a #45 Rally. Bully! Lincoln sits in the front row of a Sarah Sanders’ verbal loop-de-loop word barrage. Fala photo bombs the First Lady. Franklin Pierce passes out … anywhere … everywhere …
How about we just swap mascots? They get the donkey because they are jackasses and we get the elephant because we don’t plan to forget any of their shit.
don’t forget that elephants are on endangered list for extinction but there are plenty of jackasses still around….problem is to get them harnessed, pointed and moving in the same direction
excerpt from the hill: Broken health care pledge tests Collins-McConnell relationship
Collins isn’t accusing McConnell of breaking his pledge but is disappointed in the outcome, according to sources familiar with the negotiations on health care legislation.
Those sources added that Collins might think twice the next time GOP leaders promise her something.
“She’s disappointed, but she doesn’t see this as a breach of the agreement, she sees it as slipping,” said a Senate GOP aide. “These bills remain very important to her and she’s committed to getting them done.
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said McConnell will have to keep a close eye on Collins next year when the Senate GOP majority will shrink to 51 because of the election of Doug Jones in Alabama this month.
“I used to have to work on her all the time,” he said. “You don’t wait to talk to Susan until the end, you talk to Susan every day and you have to be sensitive to where her concerns and needs are.”
[….continues…]
the guardian:
Trump will personally save up to $15m under tax bill, analysis finds
Jared Kushner will save up to $12m, while five other members of Trump’s inner circle will also see benefits worth millions of dollars
[…]
Along with Trump himself, Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary; Linda McMahon, administrator of the Small Business Administration; Betsy DeVos, the education secretary; Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary; and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, will benefit to the tune of $4.5m from changes to the estate tax, according to the CAP.
More than 90% of businesses in the US are “pass-through businesses”, meaning their income passes through to the owners’ individual tax returns, where it is taxed at ordinary income tax rates, instead of being filed on a separate business return like a corporation. The sweeping tax bill cuts the top rate on “qualified” pass-through business income from 39.6% under current law to 29.6%.
Assuming the full benefit of this, the CAP roughly estimates a tax cut of $11m to $15m for Trump (based on an estimate of $150m of passthrough income from reviewing his financial disclosure, and the $109m in real estate/pass-through income on his 2005 tax return); $5m to $12m for Jared Kushner, White House senior adviser and Trump’s son-in-law; and $2.7m for Betsy DeVos, the education secretary.
The bill that passed the Senate had a “guardrail” that prevented businesses with too few employees from claiming the full benefit of the deduction, the CAP noted. But at the last minute, a special exception was added that is especially beneficial to real estate firms.
[….continues…]
🙂
Did anyone expect anything different? I mean really, he’s not going to get a wall built or kick out 12 million illegal workers – those ideas are beyond insanity. But, most certainly within the realm of possibility is a huge tax cut for those who took over the country and their friends. A few months down the road there this won’t be a front page issue – something else will – like what to do with all of the South Korean refugees?
Democrats and Progressives have to be cunning and smart to plan how we get out of this – and start the repair. I fear they are not that smart or organized.
I have had enough of phony public policy from the Goopers
Susan Collins and Paul Ryan will be unelectable by the time they have to face voters
for an AP wire lead I find this one unusually blunt: “WASHINGTON — You wouldn’t know it from President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, but the tax overhaul coming into effect is heavily tilted to the rich. It also leaves “Obamacare” in place, despite his assertion that the tax plan repeals the health care law. Nothing about the plan provides the fuel to achieve economic growth at the levels he’s predicted.”
I say we make the goopers animal a lemming and the Dems animal a cat (they may be hard to herd, but they ain’t stupid).
You go Mueller… go!
Dems are gearing up for impeachment if they win control in midterms:
https://a.msn.com/r/2/BBH7mDJ?m=en-us
I think the DNC should have a contest and ask Americans what the new mascot animal should be…tell them they ARE firing the old jackasses. Make it exciting and finally get the party to listen to ideas from citizens instead of asking for money at every turn.
Now we are preparing for the worst in this country. Yeah, trump won’t fire Moscow Mueller, but his gop thugs will. The resistance prepares.
J-20 protesters — First six protesters on trial found not guilty.
As a supporter of the B!LL!ONA!RE Welfare Queens’ Tax Act, Collins can move to put it up to another vote. This would give both Collins and Flake the chance to reverse their votes and kill the damn thing.
A fella can dream, can’t he ?
Collins has proven herself to be the same as all the other republicans. All dipshits. But they don’t care about being that, and probably are even proud of it.
I hope karma is real and gets every last one of them, just like it got Lee Atwater.
#BoilsandShingles
that dem donkey is pretty long in the tooth
history: 1870
First appearance of the Democratic donkey
On January 14, 1870, the first recorded use of a donkey to represent the Democratic Party appears in Harper’s Weekly. Drawn by political illustrator Thomas Nast, the cartoon is entitled “A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion.” The jackass (donkey) is tagged “Copperhead Papers,” referring to the Democrat-dominated newspapers of the South, and the dead lion represents the late Edwin McMasters Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war during the final three years of the Civil War. In the background is an eagle perched on a rock, representing the postwar federal domination in the South, and in the far background is the U.S. Capitol.
Four years later, Nash originated the use of an elephant to symbolize the Republican Party in a Harper’s Weekly cartoon entitled “The Third-Term Panic.” The cartoon referred to the disparaging response by The New York Herald to the possibility that Republican President Ulysses S. Grant might seek a third-term. The New York Herald is depicted as a donkey wearing lion’s skin labeled “Caesarism.” This bogus lion is frightening several timid animals identified with the names of opposing newspapers, such as The New York Times and The New York Tribune, while a berserk elephant, labeled “Republican vote,” is tottering above a chasm labeled “Chaos” as it tosses to the right and the left the few remaining platform planks holding its weight. The caption of the cartoon reads: “An Ass having put on the Lion’s skin, roamed about the Forest, and amused himself by frightening all the foolish Animals he met with in his wanderings.”
wapo: Watch Sen. Al Franken’s full speech on the Senate floor on Dec. 21.
betcha can’t listen to al’s speech without shedding a tear especially when he says “that’s why i’m a democrat”
former republican now indie bruce bartlett makes the same point some of us on the trail have been saying… here’s the concluding paragraphs in his op ed
times herald:
Trump and GOP just wrote themselves out of jobs
[….]
With the end of the GOP agenda in Congress in sight, Republicans want to lock in as much as possible. Tax cuts effectively do that by creating huge budget deficits. The minute the ink is dry on the tax cuts, Republicans will become born-again budget-balancers. Of course, a GOP president guarantees that there will be no tax increases or defense cuts. Because interest on the debt cannot be reduced, that really just leaves “entitlement” programs such as Social Security and Medicare to bear the brunt of the deficit reduction.
I don’t think Trump has any appetite for a big deficit reduction fight. His weariness with the presidency becomes more pronounced daily as special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation moves ever closer to the Oval Office. Moreover, Trump will be encouraged to make an early exit by members of his own party, who see him as an albatross around their re-election hopes and can only do so much to protect Trump if the dam breaks and those closest to him, such as son-in-law Jared Kushner, must choose loyalty to Trump or going to jail.
Sadly, those who ultimately push Trump over the side to save their own necks will probably been seen as statesmen, like those who delivered the coup de grace to President Nixon after the Watergate scandal made his continuation in office untenable.
But the truth will be that for most congressional Republicans, Trump was never much more than a tissue to be used and disposed of.
repeated from above for emphasis:
Moreover, Trump will be encouraged to make an early exit by members of his own party, who see him as an albatross around their re-election hopes and can only do so much to protect Trump if the dam breaks and those closest to him, such as son-in-law Jared Kushner, must choose loyalty to Trump or going to jail.
….the truth will be that for most congressional Republicans, Trump was never much more than a tissue to be used and disposed of.
The sad effect of the greedy old perverts attacking the FBI, and intelligence agencies, is it does put agents at risk in their duties. When stupid people follow stupid people and believe those who protect America are the enemy it means Putin won – again. So far as I can tell faux snooze should be registered as a foreign agent, just like RT, formerly Russia Today. I am waiting for Nunes to be handcuffed and frog marched out of the Capitol. The man is amazing for getting away with stuff that would not have been possible under McCarthy.
This is my hour of getting PO’d at things in the evening. Then back to Bach and delightful hits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After learning my ancestors from England arrived here to take over the lands of my other ancestors I am trying to learn all they would have known. In one area is music. Shakespeare was possibly alive when a few of the English settlers showed up here in the Chesapeake Bay region. He was for those who came in to the colonies earlier. Would his plays have been seen by those in the early colonies? How about Bach? Of course his music was known. But was it played here?
So, in a few minutes I will leave the political world and enter my world which is blocked off from the intense and quite disturbing world of SFB and his minions. I can imagine the critters going back home and sucking in a fifth of Jim Beam and then crying themselves to sleep because they are so weak and stink of SFB on their souls.
I put a topic in the ‘New Draft’ drawer, Boss. Mses Wino, Renee, and Patd inspired me. Also Mr Pogo, Esq.
I spent the past day & 1/2 driving and hanging with LP, bringing the boy back home for his FIVE WEEK Christmas break. (How do I get one of those?). Took a bit of a break from politics but saw just enough to piss me off
So going to spend a few days with Mrs. P’s mom. Nothing like a bit of Cleveland winter to make me appreciate WV lowlands winter weather.
Mr Pogo, A guy I know was yakking about his 4wheel drive, that nothing could stop. I told him he hadn’t tried to drive around in Cleveland early on a December morning after a storm : wheels are NOT an asset. Double that for Buffalo.
Be careful, sir.