NEWS “You’re In Trump Country Now!”, Gay Couple In Florida Got Attacked In Sickening Way

The gay couple, named Kevin Seymour and Kevin Paul Taylor, were finishing dinner where they live in Key West, Florida, when they got attacked by drunken Trump-supporting tourists. Wrote Taylor on his Facebook page, “Feeling disheartened because we were victims of a hate crime last night biking home from dinner and a drunk tourist on a scooter harassed Kevin Seymour and me all the way down Duval, calling us faggots and a slew of other anti gay remarks such as “I bet you faggots voted for that bitch Hillary–well you live in Trump Country now.” He kept stopping in front of us and swerving into us. Finally Kevin got ahead of him and the guy charges him with his scooter and runs into him and knocks him off his bike. Kevin is okay. Luckily it happened right in front of a business with lots of cameras and also there was a witness on the porch that gave a sworn statement to the police. Thankful Kevin is okay and our emotional wounds will heal. The license plates on the scooter MCUT33. I think the cops will be able to track him down.” Are you sick of this virulent Trumper bigotry?

President Donald Trump Accuses Obama of Wire Tapping Him in October

President Donald Trump, in a series of early morning tweets Saturday, accused former President Barack Obama of having tapped phone lines into Trump Tower, an accusation for which the current president provided no evidence.

No law enforcement agency or credible source has publicly asserted that Mr. Trump’s phone lines were tapped. Mr. Trump provided no evidence for his assertions, which marked a return to the caustic tone that has often characterized the president’s remarks.

It wasn’t clear what Mr. Trump was reacting to, but the conservative media outlet Breitbart, whose former chairman Steve Bannon is Mr. Trump’s political strategist, published an article Friday based on the claims of a right-wing radio host that intelligence agencies were conducting a “silent coup” against Mr. Trump.

WSJ

Trump Snaps & Makes Early AM ‘Apprentice’ Announcement – He Lost His Mind

While the world continues to go on about its business around him, the man who is supposed to be leading America’s role in all that business is tweeting about reality television.

Quite simply, ratings don’t fire people, people fire people, and the former California Governor is, in fact, leaving his spot as host of “The Celebrity Apprentice” entirely of his own accord. You can read about that at this link.

What Trump’s tweet does is drive home the point that we’ve really, seriously, elected a reality tv star to the presidency. He’s not a changed man; he’s the very same person as that man who sat at the head of the table in “The Apprentice,” wagged his spindly finger and shouted “You’re Fired!” over and over and over again. Donald Trump still operates according to the same personal principles as if he’s starring in a reality tv show — he’s just the president of the United States now.

Bipartisan Report

Is this Presidential behavior? I say nope.

QUESTIONS MUST BE ANSWERED

Those of you who have read the blather I post here are aware that I was a Hillary supporter. Some of you probably think that when I post political stuff here, it's because I was a Hillary supporter.

Actually, as an American citizen, I have concerns that there might have been some kind of shenanigans happening in the recent Presidential elections. Questions need to be answered before we can automatically assume that this election was fair, square, and on the up and up.

Trump campaign peeps Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon (whom we know of) all had some form of meetings with known Rooshians. Questions include, WHY? IS THIS TYPICAL PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN BEHAVIOR? WHY DID TRUMP DENY THESE MEETINGS OCCURED? WHY ARE THE MEETINGS SO FREQUENT? More importantly, DID THESE MEETINGS RELATE TO ROOSHIAN INTERFERENCE IN THE ELECTION? WHY DID CANDIDATE TRUMP INVITE ROOSHIAN SPYING ON HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN, SUCH SPYING BEING CLEARLY ILLEGAL? WHY DID THE ROOSHIANS INTERFERE IN THE ELECTION? WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO GAIN? DO ROOSHIAN OLIGARCHS HAVE A FINANCIAL HOLD ON TRUMP? IS THAT WHY HE WON'T RELEASE HIS TAX RETURNS? IS THIS WHY TRUMP HAS BEEN SO "NICE" TO ROOSHIANS LATELY?

The intel community has concerns about all this. If they have concerns, why in the world wouldn't you and I have concerns, too?

NO MORE!

It was probably a bit too much to ask the 435-member Democratic National Committee to admit to their role (as the party apparatus) in the colossal failure to get the candidate the majority of Americans (by 3 million votes) said they wanted as their President. How hard can it be to get the actual winner of the vote inaugurated? I guess if you're the Democratic Party, just because you win the Super Bowl, it doesn't mean you get to wear the Super Bowl ring. That makes sense, right? 435 honchos of the party and none of them had a pencil or a map or the ability to do electoral college math? No one had a plane ticket to give the candidate to visit Wisconsin for seven long months during the campaign? Too busy polishing their "SUPER DELEGATE" plaques on their desks?

So, I get it -- this was not the group that was going to install a Bernie-loving, Detroit-bred, Muslim-American and hardcore successful grassroots organizer who had helped orchestrate turning a Midwestern red state blue a few years ago. They wanted to play it safe and so they picked a decent guy. The good news is that Tom Perez is not a step backward to the old conservative Democratic DLC days. He is not Al Frum. He is a progressive and shares most of Keith Ellison's agenda, just as Hillary had adopted 80% of Bernie's plans. So, not the end of the world, and maybe a surprise to boot down the road. We will hope and pray for this.

Of course, it was not helpful yesterday, before the election of the new chair, that the 435 leaders of the Democratic Party voted against President Obama's ban on the Party taking corporate PAC money. Corporate lobbyists can now write big checks so they can get their pipelines, their TPP trade deals (that cost them the election in the rust belt), and so they can keep the for-profit health insurance industry intact. Not a good sign. The Party still doesn't get it and they clearly don't see the millions in the streets, the thousands packing the town hall meetings or the Capitol Hill switchboards that are still jammed, 37 days in a row now (202-225-3121).

Ok, fine. We'll work with the hand we're dealt. And here's how -- with a very clear message to the old guard of the Democratic leadership: We're not "uniting" with you - you're uniting with US. We, the people, the majority, the Resistance, will LEAD and we enthusiastically welcome you to follow. We will be the ones stopping Trump and we welcome you to watch and learn how a pissed-off majority - who have twice in 16 years seen the winner we elected not being inaugurated - operates. We are fierce, we are relentless and we are right. We have the moral and patriotic wind at our backs because the majority Americans agree with us. We will not "compromise" or find "common ground" with misogynists, racists and haters. We won't give an inch and we will show you how to do that. Nonviolent mass protest. In-person visits and daily calls to our elected representatives. Running for office and throwing some of you who are appeasers and collaborators out. Writing checks to Planned Parenthood and ACLU. Pushing for true universal health care in Blue States where we can get it passed. And convincing the 100 million members of America's largest political party -- The Non-Voters Party -- to join us at the polls in 2018 for a raucous and legally riotous overthrow of the Republican Congress.

So, DNC, watch, listen, and join. Follow our lead. You essentially work for us (although none of us know how it is in this democracy you get picked to be on the DNC, but we have a feeling it has something to do with each of us running for precinct delegate in our neighborhoods, so we'll do that, too!).

Thank you for making Keith Ellison the deputy chair of the party and thank you Keith for also deciding to stay in Congress. Let's help Tom Perez and the executive committee follow the Resistance and use all the means available to them to stop Trump and do good for the country.

Meanwhile, many in the Resistance will become active in their local Democratic Parties, run for local leadership and field candidates for next year's elections. Eventually, that 435-member committee will more closely resemble what the people want. I'll say it again -- how a party like the Democrats could WIN the popular vote in SIX OF THE LAST SEVEN Presidential elections but end up holding ZERO power in ANY branch of government in 2017 is a humiliation of gargantuan proportions. Who's with me in saying "NO MORE!" Let's take the loser "L" off the "D".
~ MICHAEL MOORE

5 Ways Republicans Reaffirmed Their Awfulness This Week

Donald Trump (or more accurately, Steve Bannon) is obviously horrifying. But so is the entire Republican Party. Yes, the Democrats are a long way from ideal and politics is a dirty game on all sides. That said, who except for the very worst among us right now doesn’t wish we were fighting to make a Democratic White House and Congress move forward? Instead, we’re in a struggle to minimize the distance we get dragged backward. The reality is, that’s not just an executive branch issue. The GOP has been an absolute nightmare since about 1964, and this administration is just the least polished turd of the modern era. Trump (again, I mean Bannon) couldn’t fulfill his vision without the party onboard. Good thing they don’t have any actual decency or ethics to stop them from going with the program.

So how is the GOP doing its part to screw over anyone who isn’t lining its pockets or furthering its death cult intentions? Here’s a list of six ways Republicans reaffirmed their awfulness this week.

See the Six Ways at AlterNet.

‘I want an investigation’: Father of slain SEAL blames Trump’s carelessness and ego for son’s death

The father of a Navy SEAL killed during a mission that Donald Trump approved just a week into his administration blames the president for his son’s death.

William Owens told The Miami Herald that he refused to meet with Trump when the remains of son, William “Ryan” Owens, were returned to Dover Air Force Base.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to see him,” Owens recalled explaining to the chaplain. “I told them I don’t want to meet the president.”

“I told them I didn’t want to make a scene about it, but my conscience wouldn’t let me talk to him.”

Owens questioned Trump’s motivation for signing off on a mission just six days into his presidency.

More: Raw Story.

U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win

Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks.

More: Washington Post.

Steve Bannon’s disturbing views on ‘genetic superiority’ are shared by Trump

Former Breitbart head Steve Bannon has been a national lightning rod ever since he was appointed CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At-issue: Bannon’s deep ties to the growing white nationalist movement, which provided some of Trump’s earliest and most fervent supporters.

On Sunday the New York Times published a profile on Bannon, casting him as a “combative populist.” Buried deep within the profile is an account of Bannon talking about his belief in the “genetic superiority” of certain people and his support for restricting voting rights to only property owners.

Restricting voting to only property holders would take the country back centuries to its founding — when only white, male property holders could vote in most states. Today, such a restriction would disenfranchise huge swaths of people, including students, people of color, young Americans, many city dwellers, and low-income populations.

Far from populism, this is Revolutionary-era elitism drawn along racist lines. And for white nationalists, it’s a familiar goal.

More: ThinkProgress.

A Lie by Any Other Name

This is not a presentation of “alternative facts,” whatever that may mean, as Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s mistress of misdirection, posited over the weekend.

These are lies; good old-fashioned lies, baldfaced and flat-out lies.

Some have suggested that we in the media should focus a bit less on these lies — some of them issued in tweets and some in interviews or news conferences — and focus more on policies, particularly the ineptitude of the gathering cabinet and the raft of executive orders that Trump himself is signing.

But I take the position that this is all worthy of coverage, that there are simply different kinds of news being unearthed about this administration that exist on different strata.

To take it even further, it may be these seemingly smaller infractions that produce the greater injury because the implications are more profound. Trump does not simply have “a running war with the media,” as he so indecorously and disrespectfully spouted off while standing on the hallowed ground before the C.I.A. Memorial Wall. He is in fact having a running war with the truth itself.

Donald Trump is a proven liar. He lies often and effortlessly. He lies about the profound and the trivial. He lies to avoid guilt and invite glory. He lies when his pride is injured and when his pomposity is challenged.

More NY TIMES.

Trump Opens Mouth, Lie Emitted

Early this morning (Saturday, February 25), President Donald Trump took to Twitter to brag about the decrease in the national debt since Inauguration Day.

"The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo," Trump wrote.

One might wonder where Trump was getting those figures. As The Hill points out, those exact numbers were shared by the conservative blog, Gateway Pundit on Thursday, February 23. Their report reads, "On January 20th, the day of the Trump Inauguration, the US Debt stood at $19,947 billion. On February 21st, a month later, the US Debt load stood at $19,935 billion. Trump cut the US Debt burden by $12 billion and 0.1% in his first month in office!" Incidentally, the same report was repeated on Fox News by Herman Cain – just a little while before Trump's tweet.

However; despite the fact that the specific numbers check out, Politifact released a report this afternoon explaining that Trump's claim was "highly false" – a conclusion that contains several underlying factors.

To start, Trump hasn't passed any orders pertaining to the budget since he took office. As economist Dan Mitchell explained, "Considering that Trump hasn’t enacted any fiscal legislation, it’s a bit of a stretch for him to take credit for any changes in debt levels." Mitchell also added that the debt levels tend to fluctuate in a short-term time period.

Furthermore, Trump's proposed plans for the country are likely to increase the national debt – by a lot. A recent report from the Council on Foreign Relations determined that Trump's campaign promises could significantly broaden the budget deficit. The report cites Trump's pledge to "rebuild our military" which includes the addition of 50,000 soldiers, an expansion of the Navy's fleet, and the addition of planes to the Air Force – a plan that, to date, has not contained cost estimates.

More here.

Trump calls the media ‘the enemy of the American People’

President Trump further escalated his attacks on the news media Friday afternoon when he tweeted that outlets such as the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN are not his enemy but “the enemy of the American People.”

Although Trump has long colorfully criticized news coverage and sparred with reporters who question him, he had not yet labeled the fourth estate as being an enemy of the country. On the campaign trail, some of Trump's supporters would heckle and threaten reporters who covered his rallies, and his tweet Friday came 24 hours before his first political rally as president.

It took the president two tries to properly post his message, which came soon after he arrived at his luxury oceanfront estate for the weekend. The first tweet, which was quickly deleted, contained a number of extra spaces and listed the Times, CNN and NBC, ending with this conclusion: “SICK!” The second tweet added ABC and CBS to the list, while removing “SICK!” Both tweets labeled those organizations as being “the FAKE NEWS media.”

More here.

GOP congressman says fewer people with health insurance is a ‘good thing’

Republican efforts to build a more laissez-faire health system are “doomed to fail,” conservative health policy writer Philip Klein admitted in a candid column last month, unless they are willing to state an uncomfortable truth: Republicans must acknowledge that they “don’t believe that it is the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance.”

A handful of GOP lawmakers are now taking up Klein’s charge — with one of them even claiming that a Republican plan that leads to a higher national uninsurance rate would be a good thing.

“If the numbers drop,” Rep. Mike Burgess (R-TX) said Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “I would say that’s a good thing.” He went on to argue that more people without health care would be a positive thing for the United States because it would mean that “we’ve restored personal liberty in this country.”

More here.

You can have the personal liberty to just die already when you get sick! Say what????

FBI refused White House request to knock down recent Trump-Russia stories

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN.

But a White House official said late Thursday that the request was only made after the FBI indicated to the White House it did not believe the reporting to be accurate.

White House officials had sought the help of the bureau and other agencies investigating the Russia matter to say that the reports were wrong and that there had been no contacts, the officials said. The reports of the contacts were first published by The New York Times and CNN on February 14.

The direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations.
Late Thursday night, White House press secretary Sean Spicer objected to CNN's characterization of the White House request to the FBI.

"We didn't try to knock the story down. We asked them to tell the truth," Spicer said. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

More here.

Trump's deportation plan could cost taxpayers half a trillion dollars

As President Donald Trump rolls out more details of a plan that could deport millions of undocumented U.S. immigrants, the true cost of such an undertaking is coming into sharper focus.

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, Trump outlined what he called his administration's "swift and strong action to secure the southern border." He said his administration would be "throwing" gang members, drug dealers and criminal aliens out of the country and "will not let them back in."

Until there are more details of the plan, much of which will require congressional approval, estimates are sketchy. But by any full accounting, the fiscal and economic costs would be huge.

Recently the Trump administration has backed off earlier pledges to deport anyone in the country illegally — Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Thursday "there will be no mass deportations" after he met with Mexican officials.

Still, the Trump administration also this week directed government agencies to, among other things, begin rounding up and deporting anyone in the country illegally, whether or not they have committed serious crimes.

If the U.S. would seek to remove the entire population of the estimated 11 million undocumented workers now in the U.S., it would cost upwards of half trillion dollars, according to one estimate. It could also wipe out a chunk of the American economy roughly the size of the annual gross domestic product of Texas.

The new Trump initiative includes hiring thousands of new immigration agents, building new detention centers and constructing a southern border wall that was a centerpiece of Trump's election campaign.

More here.

Majority Of Americans Believe Trump Doesn’t Understand His Job

A new poll shows that 60% of the American public believes that Donald Trump doesn’t understand his job as a president and the complexities of this position. And that’s absolutely right – if you look at the things that he said both during and after his campaign, you really get the sense that he doesn’t understand how this job actually works.

According to a new poll reported by CBS News, six out of every 10 Americans do not believe that Donald Trump understands his job as President of the United States. They do not believe that he understands the complexities involved in this job, or the responsibilities that go along with being the President of the United States. 60% of this country doesn’t think that Donald Trump has any idea what he’s doing, and they’re absolutely right, but again, this is something Donald Trump warned us about. When he campaigned and said, “We have a problem with illegal immigration. Let’s build a wall,” not exactly a well-thought out plan. Not exactly something that’s feasible or affordable, but he just said it. During a meeting with intelligence officials, he asked three separate times, “Why can’t we just nuke them?” When talking about enemies to the United States. That is a scorched earth approach to anything, because he doesn’t understand the fine-tuned operations that the US military is capable of doing, capable of pulling off.

But that’s the problem. Donald Trump came into office as a man who had never spent a single day of his life in American politics as an elected representative of the people, and suddenly he gets thrust into the most powerful position on the planet, knowing absolutely nothing. He knows nothing about the law. He knows nothing about how to draft a law. That’s why he’s got people like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller drafting these executive orders, and apparently, according to Trump himself, he’s not even really reading them. That’s how Steve Bannon ended up on the National Security Council, because Donald Trump didn’t quite read that executive order thoroughly enough, and Bannon just slipped that in there.

This is a problem. We have a know-nothing president.

More here.

White House blocks news organizations from press briefing

CNN and other news outlets were blocked Friday from an off-camera White House press briefing, raising alarm among media organizations and First Amendment watchdogs.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico and BuzzFeed were also excluded from the meeting, which is known as a gaggle and is less formal than the televised Q-and-A session in the White House briefing room. The gaggle was held by White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

In a brief statement defending the move, administration spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the White House "had the pool there so everyone would be represented and get an update from us today."

The pool usually includes a representative from one television network and one print outlet. In this case, four of the five major television networks -- NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox News -- were invited and attended the meeting, while only CNN was blocked.

And while The New York Times was kept out, conservative media organizations Breitbart News, The Washington Times and One America News Network were also allowed in.

Both CNN and the Times protested the decision.

More here.

Election Redo 2017"™ Watch:

President* Trump said in the past that nobody in his campaign had any communications with Russia. The NYT reports LOTS of Trump campaign communications with Russia:

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the Russian government outside of the intelligence services, the officials said.

More at the NYT.

So far, there's been no evidence of cooperation in election influence, but one still has to wonder what Putin has on Trump. I still think the tax returns would shed light on that, but Trump won't release 'em. It's no surprise to me that Trump is being soft on Russia, even as Russia shoots off missiles in violation of treaties and sends spy ships off our shores.

IMPEACH, dammit!