All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[Tendrin]

Texas ObamaCare Blunder
A judge’s ruling will be overturned and could backfire on Republicans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-o...er-11544996418



Editorial from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Even they think this decision was terrible.

I mean, the Republicans are stuck in a hell of their own making on health care.

[Malvolio]

Slate had a better take on why it closing is not a good thing, while still condemning the worst the Weekly Standard often printed.

I agree with most of this column. However, my point was that we are saddened by this only because the Weekly Standard had turned on Trump. In fact, they were never on Trump's side to begin with. But if this had happened back when Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush were the front-runners in the Republican primaries, we on the left would have cheered. You know we would have.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Honestly, screw Bill Kristol. He's a hack. I'm glad his rag failed and I'm glad that he still has to eat crow even if it is coming from Trump

[Gray Lensman]

Honestly, screw Bill Kristol. He's a hack. I'm glad his rag failed and I'm glad that he still has to eat crow even if it is coming from Trump

Kirby already said it, the bad part of it closing is that there are fewer places to be conservative outside of Trump. You are either a Trumpist or on the Left.

[Tendrin]

We ought not pretend that the Standard was some kind of bearer for what's left of 'responsible conservatism'. It's more like that it was consumed by the beast it had helped create. Kristol and others like him helped create the conditions for Trump to rise in the GOP, helped empower the elemnets that lead to this inevitability within modern conservatism. They don't now get to pretend that they are anything but responsible. I'm sure they'd all love to be gain some credibility on the backs of their opposition to Trump and we all ought to let them speak to the finite audiences they have left and make their points, but we should not paint them any other light than what they are.

There are plenty of anti-Trump voices from the right but very few of them have any authority, since most of them engaged in all the same things quietly that Trump has made loud.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of the U.S. House Representative from South Carolina’s 2nd Congressional District, Joe Wilson, who made himself notorious back in 2009 at President Obama’s first State of the Union speech when he took the unprecedented act to disregard all decorum by standing up and screaming, “YOU LIE!” at the leader of the free world during a nationally televised speech. At least when Waldorf and Statler heckle on the Muppets, they make it funny. The GOP closed ranks, and only one member of the GOP voted to admonish him for it. Perhaps that should come as little surprise, because he once expressed his disappointment that nobody in the Democratic Primary in 2008 addressed Obama’s birth certificate. That seems to also fall into a pattern, because Joe Wilson was also a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans while a state legislator, tried denying his former boss on Capitol Hill, Strom Thurmond, had ever had an affair with an African-American woman, calling it “unseemly” and a “smear” that anyone would do so (meanwhile, genetic tests proved it true). In a debate about the soon-to-be Iraq War in 2002, Rep. Wilson denied that the United States supplied WMDs to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to justify a need for force… and since voting to send our brave young men and women to fight in that conflict, Wilson has voted over a dozen times now against healthcare funding for veterans. He’s still using military conflicts to make irrational political points, though, as he claimed President Obama had only started airstrikes against ISIL because he wanted to distract Americans from Benghazi (where investigators found no administration wrongdoing), the IRS Scandal (where no malicious wrongdoing was found), and Obamacare (which is actually a positive thing). Which is to say, Rep. Wilson spends a lot of time jumping at shadows, as he also was highly suspicious of Planned Parenthood after watching the hoax videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress.

So, while Joe Wilson has a district tailor fit to keep electing conservatives, things were hardly copacetic down in South Carolina’s 2nd District. Rep. Wilson hosted a town hall back in April that, quite frankly, devolved into his constituents chanting “YOU LIE!” back at him, because he was feeding them some less-than-honest statements regarding the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. His district’s lean, though, remains at a +12, so Joe Wilson was re-elected to a tenth term in 2018 with 56% of the vote.

But not all the news is awful. For we can also report that Joe Wilson was another of the GOP’s witless morons who was duped by Sasha Baron Cohen on “Who is America?” within the past year, and Wilson was recorded on video endorsing the idea of arming toddlers. He still insists he’s not a lunatic.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Oooof, that crap with Stephen Miller today. The only upside was seeing the pathetic attempt at covering up his balding.

It should be noted that Kid Jackboot is only 33! I'm pushing 60, but have more hair than him. This is what happens when you're so goddamned EVIL, your hair betrays you by falling out early.

Texas ObamaCare Blunder
A judge’s ruling will be overturned and could backfire on Republicans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/texas-o...er-11544996418



Editorial from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Even they think this decision was terrible.

Everyone knew from jump street that Obamacare was far from perfect but could have been fixed. All the GOP had to do was reach across the aisle and work with Democrats to repair the ACA's flaws, but, that would have meant giving Barack Obama a big win with his signature legislation, and that, Republicans couldn't stomach, given their hatred for the nation's first black president. And everyone knew that too. With Republicans, there was only ONE option: kill Obamacare and to hell with what would happen after that because they NEVER had a viable alternative healthcare plan and never cared to come up with one. Still don't.

====================

Fox News Analyst Hits Trump’s Latest Tweet With A Blistering Fact-Check

Andrew McCarthy warns Trump about a word he keeps using. The word in question is "rat", and that dare means Trump will continue using said word.

**********

Donald Trump Whines Over ‘Unfair’ Coverage On NBC, ‘Saturday Night Live’

“Should be tested in courts,” the president tweeted. God in heaven, what a freaking baby! Barack Obama was pilloried almost daily for eight years and not ONCE did he complain, but Trump is going insane after less than three. Pathetic!

**********

Jake Tapper Shuts Down Susan Collins’ Attempt To Spin Trump Hush Money Payments

The Maine senator said we don’t have the full picture, but the CNN host was quick to show otherwise. Good on Jake for calling Spineless Susan to task.

**********

Fox News’ Chris Wallace Tears Into Rudy Giuliani: ‘I’m Asking You For The Truth, Sir’

“We’re talking about something that doesn’t matter,” Giuliani claimed about Trump’s alleged hush money payments. Problem is, Rantin' Rudy no longer knows what the truth is.

**********

Donald Trump Has Never Actually Put America First

On Friday, we recognized the sixth anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 26 students and staff dead. There have been 1,920 mass shootings since then, and the United States still has the most gun deaths of any country in the developed world, as well as the weakest gun laws.

Last week, a court said Cyntoia Brown would have to serve at least 51 years in prison for killing a 43-year-old man she said hired her for sex as a teenager and threatened to kill her. Here, in the U.S., we have only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet 25 percent of its inmates.

In the last few weeks we’ve also seen escalation at the border, where migrants seeking asylum (including children) have been tear-gassed and detained. And just a few days ago, we learned of a 7-year-old migrant girl who died in Border Patrol custody.

If the Trump administration were truly trying to make America great again, it would be paying attention to issues that inherently keep us from being great, like the deaths of children in mass shootings, our flawed prison system, and the institutionalized racism that leads to violent reactions against any foreigner trying to enter our land.

Yet President Donald Trump and his supporters prove time and again that they would rather shift focus and fight with migrants and refugees than show any concern for issues taking place within U.S. borders.

No one displays this more than the infantile caricature of patriotism that is Tomi Lahren. In midst of all that happened this week, in her continued ideological crusade for a border wall, she tweeted, “$5 billion spent on a wall will be the BEST $5 billion taxpayers EVER spent! Build the wall. Secure the border. America FIRST!”

Lahren scrapes the bottom of the barrel of political commentary, using hyperbole and sarcasm to create media uproars. So, when 11-year-old Mari Copeny responded to this tweet and it’s more problematic ideas on Twitter, Lahren found herself bodied by a young girl from Flint, Michigan.

Copeny tweeted, “$5 billion for water infrastructure upgrades and testing in schools seems like a much better way to spend that much money...but what do I know...I’m just a kid from Flint who was forced to learn all things water after the government poisoned us.”

[Tami]

The ‘Global Cybercrime Problem’ Is Actually the ‘Russia Problem’

Moreover, it’s also become more clear that the “global cybercrime problem” is actually primarily a “Russia problem,” as Putin’s corrupt government and intelligence services give cover and protection to the world’s largest transnational organized crimes, cybercriminals, schemes, and frauds that cost the West’s consumers millions of dollars. Earlier this year, the Justice Department broke up one cybercrime ring based in Russia whose literal motto was “In fraud we trust.” The Justice Department charged 36 individuals, many of whom live in Russia beyond the law’s reach, and outlined a scheme by which they stole more than a half-billion dollars. It’s hardly the only example from this year; last week, the FBI announced that it had dismantled two other cybercrime rings and charged eight people—seven of them Russian—with running a multimillion-dollar ad-fraud scheme. (Three of those charged were able to be caught overseas in friendly countries that respect the rule of law: Malaysia, Bulgaria, and Estonia.)

We should consider building more “dead man’s switches” into our counter-foreign-influence work—such as automatic triggers that, when foreign efforts are detected and charged, would put in place new sanctions authority and even boost our own government’s spending on democracy-building efforts that counter Russia’s influence campaigns. Russia might think twice about the value of investing the approximately $30 million allegedly spent on Project Lahkta if doing so would presumptively trigger tough new sanctions as well as a fivefold or tenfold American investment in democracy-building NGOs or institutions such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that beam free and independent news in the Russian language.

Too often, the responses to these incidents get caught up in political debates and bureaucratic stalemates. The dead man’s switch would cut through the inertia by setting up our response in advance—putting Putin on notice that if our intelligence community concludes that a country has targeted our elections, either through online influence operations or direct attacks on the voting systems, that assessment would trigger automatic sanctions against the head of state personally as well as against senior government, intelligence, or foreign-business figures. One credible way to make Putin reassess the cost-benefit analysis of attacking our democracy would be to announce in advance that we’d target his personal wealth for sanctions or that his most powerful oligarch allies would have a harder time vacationing on their super-yachts in the Mediterranean.

[Tami]

Giuliani: ‘I can produce 20 witnesses’ to defend hush money payments

Rudy Giuliani, U.S. President Donald Trump’s attorney, claimed Sunday he could “produce 20 witnesses“ to testify that hush money payments to women ahead of the 2016 election were intended to protect then-candidate Trump’s family — not purely to influence the outcome of the race.

“I can produce an enormous number of witnesses,” the former New York mayor told journalist George Stephanopoulos during an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” adding: “I can produce 20 witnesses to tell you what he was concerned about.”

Whose side is Giuliani on?

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Giuliani: ‘I can produce 20 witnesses’ to defend hush money payments



Whose side is Giuliani on?

Clearly he’s on Trump’s side. Maybe he’s sucking up for a position in the Abominable Administration, in any event, Rantin’ Rudy abandoned whatever morals or scruples he had left to blindly defend the Orange Menace.

[Tami]

Clearly he’s on Trump’s side. Maybe he’s sucking up for a position in the Abominable Administration, in any event, Rantin’ Rudy abandoned whatever morals or scruples he had left to blindly defend the Orange Menace.

And do it as poorly as Trump is doing as President

[Tami]

Here’s How The Chief Palestinian Negotiator Described His Last Meeting With Jared Kushner

DOHA, Qatar— Things continue to not look great for Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner’s push for a Middle East peace deal.

How could this be? It’s not for a lack of meetings, of which there have been 37 in the almost two years since Trump took office, Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Sunday at the Doha Forum in Qatar. Erekat himself has met with Kushner and others in the Trump administration 33 times, and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has had four summit meetings of his own. But Erekat’s last meeting with Kushner took place more than a year ago and it did not go well, according to his account of the situation.

In fact, you could fairly describe it as a disaster. Kushner revealed Trump’s plan to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, blowing up a long-standing agreement by US presidents to hold back on such a move until the final status of Jerusalem is resolved. It didn’t go well from there.

Rather than trying to shoehorn Erekat’s description of what happened into the usual news article format, here’s a transcript of Erekat’s account of his final meeting with Jared Kushner — at least for the time being — which happened on November 30, 2017. Less than a week later, President Trump announced publicly he would move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

[Handsome men don't lose fights]

here’s how the chief palestinian negotiator described his last meeting with jared kushner

"Don't be sarcastic!"

[Gray Lensman]

And do it as poorly as Trump is doing as President

He seems to be approaching things from a public opinion perspective, which means a Republican voter's opinion.

[Jack Dracula]

We ought not pretend that the Standard was some kind of bearer for what's left of 'responsible conservatism'. It's more like that it was consumed by the beast it had helped create. Kristol and others like him helped create the conditions for Trump to rise in the GOP, helped empower the elemnets that lead to this inevitability within modern conservatism. They don't now get to pretend that they are anything but responsible. I'm sure they'd all love to be gain some credibility on the backs of their opposition to Trump and we all ought to let them speak to the finite audiences they have left and make their points, but we should not paint them any other light than what they are.

There are plenty of anti-Trump voices from the right but very few of them have any authority, since most of them engaged in all the same things quietly that Trump has made loud.

This.
Though I do reserve sympathy for any average employees who may be losing their jobs, Bill Krystol gets none from me.

It should be noted that Kid Jackboot is only 33! I'm pushing 60, but have more hair than him. This is what happens when you're so goddamned EVIL, your hair betrays you by falling out early.

His allegiance to the dark side is taking it's toll.