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!

The New American Resistance

This is where I stand. I make no apologies to any or all of my FB friends for this. I know some of you are tired of political postings and rants. But apart from the cutesy posts of recipes, flowers, seashells, balloons, and my daily diary, FB is a vehicle to express my outrage of how far my country has fallen on the humanity scale. To me it is a useful vehicle for my activism. The person who lost the popular vote and now occupies the White house - and the majority of the Republicans in congress - are a threat to me and my way of life, to my children, and to my grandchildren. So I will #RESIST and I will be part of the resistance. You can join in or not. If not then you probably need to unfriend me now. I won't play nice. Our country's well-being demands it.

Those who say we should give 45 a chance, need to realize that I will not forget how he refused to admit the legitimacy and even the citizenship of President Obama and I will always remember how badly his supporters treated that president for 8 years. Those who tell me that we should "work together" with him because he won the election and he is everyone's president, need to know that this is not going to happen.

•I will not "work together" to build a wall.
•I will not "work together" to persecute Muslims.
•I will not "work together" to break up families and deport parents.
• I will not "work together" to roll back protections for LGBTQ communities.
•I will not "work together" to help Russia destroy America.
•I will not "work together" to make propaganda equal fact.
•I will not "work together" to shut out refugees from countries where we destabilized their governments, no matter how bad they might have been, so that we could have something more agreeable to our oligarchy.
•I will not "work together" to lower taxes on the 1%.
•I will not "work together" to increase taxes on the middle class and poor.
•I will not "work together" to help him line the pockets of himself and his cronies.
•I will not "work together" to weaken (or demolish) environmental protection.
•I will not "work together" to sell American lands to companies which then despoil those lands.
•I will not "work together" to remove civil rights from anyone.
•I will not "work together" to waste trillions more on our military when we already have the strongest in the world.
•I will not "work together" to alienate countries that have been our allies for as long as I have been alive.
•I will not "work together" to slash funding for education.
•I will not "work together" to take basic assistance from people who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
•I will not "work together" to allow torture and "black op" prison sites.
•I will not "work together" to "take their oil."
•I will not "work together" to get rid of common sense regulations on guns.
•I will not "work together" to eliminate the minimum wage.
•I will not "work together" to suppress scientific research, be it on climate change, fracking, or any other issue where a majority of scientists agree that Trump and his supporters are wrong on the facts.
•I will not "work together" to criminalize abortion or restrict health care for women.
•I will not "work together" to increase the number of nations that have nuclear weapons.
•I will not "work together" to put even more "big money" into politics.
•I will not "work together" to violate the Geneva Convention.
•I will not "work together" to give the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party and white supremacists a seat at the table, or to normalize their hatred.
•I will not "work together" to deny health care to people who need it.
•I will not "work together" to increase the profits of the insurance companies.
•I will not "work together" to deny medical coverage to people on the basis of an alleged or actual "pre-existing condition."
•I will not "work together" to increase voter suppression.
•I will not "work together" to normalize tyranny.
•I will not "work together" with anyone who is, or admires, tyrants and dictators.
•I will not "work together" with 45 or anyone who supports him, because I will not allow one man to feed upon the fears of the populace, blaming minorities for their condition or their inability to thrive.

Instead, I will use my voice and my hands, to reach out to the uninformed, and anyone else who will LISTEN. I will call a lie a lie, a fact a fact, and alternative facts propaganda. If you agree, please copy and re-post and if you can, sign your name below mine. Also, if I have left anything out, feel free to add it to this list. This is the first step in becoming part of The Resistance.

Russian mole resigns. One down one (or more?) to go

After a month of trying to make the story go away, our Mole In Chief™ finally fired his assistant Russki mole.

"America The Humane"™ Report

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Eh, forget all that. Trump sez they're gonna kill us all and taek are jerbs. Just look at that little terrorist!

Arrest Trump and Flynn (and others?) for treason!

It comes out tonight that Trump's "Administration" has known for a month that General Flynn could be blackmailed by Russia. The "Administration" sat on this info for a month. How is this possible?

It becomes more and more evident that Trump and Flynn are sellouts to Russian strongman Putin. The government of the USA is in the hands of RUSSIA! It's evident that Putin has Trump by the financial nuggets. That would explain two things: 1). Trump won't release his taxes, which undoubtedly show deep financial dealings with Russia, 2). Trump is protecting his fellow Russian mole Flynn.

This crap isn't funny any longer. Trump and Flynn (and others?) need to be arrested NOW and charged with treason.

Our Russian mole in the White House...

President Donald Trump and several associates continue to draw intense scrutiny for their ties to the Russian government.

A dossier of unverified claims alleges serious conspiracy and misconduct in the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign. The White House has dismissed the dossier as fiction, and most of the claims remain unverified. The timeline of major events, however, lines up.

The document includes one particularly explosive allegation — that the Trump campaign agreed to minimize US opposition to Russia's incursions into Ukraine in exchange for the Kremlin releasing negative information about Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. The timing of events supporting this allegation also lines up.

More here.