The LA Times has some questions:
Trump railed as a candidate and as president about people living in the country without permission, calling them rapists and violent gang members.
Last year, in a White House meeting discussing so-called sanctuary cities and states with sheriffs and other local California officials, the president said:
Trump displays his profound understanding of how life is for people who are not rich.
Trump says he can relate to those affected by the government shutdown, telling reporters, "I'm sure that the people that are on the receiving end will make adjustment. They always do." pic.twitter.com/ChRTFL4NDU
— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) January 6, 2019
It’s totally fine to have your salary suddenly cut off, all you have to do is make an adjustment. It’s easy. Student loans? Rent? Mortgage payment? Childcare? Debt for that stay in the hospital? Food? Car payment? Relatives you help support? Don’t worry about any of that, all you have to do is adjust it. There’s a little dial somewhere, just give it a small twist and everything will be fine.
Oh hey, Trump and the Trumplings didn’t realize that the government shutdown would actually do harm, and now they’re scrambling to figure out how they’re supposed to be doing their jobs.
Food stamps for 38 million low-income Americans would face severe reductions and more than $140 billion in tax refunds are at risk of being frozen or delayed if the government shutdown stretches into February, widespread disruptions that threaten to hurt the economy.
The Trump administration, which had not anticipated a long-term shutdown, recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact, several senior administration officials said. The officials said they were focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.
Well thank god they didn’t bother to figure that out before they shut it down.
The potential cuts to food stamps and suspension of tax refunds illustrate the compounding consequences of leaving large parts of the federal government unfunded indefinitely — a scenario that became more likely Friday when President Trump said he would leave the government shut down for months or even years unless Democrats gave him money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Oh well. It’s only poor people not being able to eat, so who cares, right?
“People in this country will go hungry,” said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.). “It’s simple. They go hungry. . . . These are working people. We’re not talking about people who are dogging it.”
The disruption would hurt not only the families that receive the assistance but also grocers and other retailers where the money is spent.
But it won’t touch people who build gaudy condo towers, so that’s ok then.
Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale, explains how illegal Trump’s plan to use emergency powers to build Wall would be. Trump’s plan is to take military funding to pay for Wall, and use the military to build it.
While it is hard to know exactly what the president has in mind, or whether he has any conception about what it would entail, one thing is clear: Not only would such an action be illegal, but if members of the armed forces obeyed his command, they would be committing a federal crime.
There are laws against it.
In response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Congress created an express exception to the rules, and authorized the military to play a backup role in “major public emergencies.” But in 2008 Congress and President Bush repealed this sweeping exception. Is President Trump aware of this express repudiation of the power which he is threatening to invoke?
But, Trump would say, they’re terrorists.
It is, I suppose, possible to imagine a situation in which the president might take advantage of the most recent exception, enacted in 2011, which authorized the military detention of suspected terrorists associated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. But despite President Trump’s unsupported claims about “terrorists” trying to cross the border, it is an unconscionable stretch to use this proviso to support using the military for operations against the desperate refugees from Central America seeking asylum in our country.
There could be terrorists (or a terrorist) among them, just as there could be terrorists anywhere else. But we don’t imprison the whole population because who knows, there might be terrorists or school shooters among them, so why would be unleash the military on refugees because there might be terrorists among them?
The law is clear; how it would play out is less so. But undoubtedly, we would see a period of passionate debate on Capitol Hill, with scores of representatives, from both parties, condemning the president’s move as an unconstitutional abuse of his powers as commander in chief.
This would play out in public, with millions of service members watching closely. They would immediately be obliged to decide whether to obey President Trump — and risk criminal punishment. For the president to put these men and women in such a position, simply out of petulance over congressional opposition, would be especially unconscionable.
…
What this all adds up to is a potential crisis much graver than whatever immigration emergencies the president has in mind: A legally ignorant president forcing our troops to choose between his commands and the rule of law in a petty political struggle over a domestic political question.
Let’s hope he doesn’t step over the brink.
Here again – trans people can absolutely say what it’s like to have gender dysphoria, but no one else can. Trans people and trans people only know what gender dysphoria is and what gender nonconformity is and that they are different and exactly how they are different.
Let's be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had "gender dysphoria" as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.
— Serial Experiments Sloth (@CaseyExplosion) January 5, 2019
Let’s be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had “gender dysphoria” as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.
But why? Why would that be true? Why should we believe it? Why is it the case that they know all about what it’s like to be what we are, but we don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be what they are? Where did they get this absolute knowledge that we have no access to?
https://twitter.com/FaithNaff/status/1081606417214246912
TERF women claiming “I got made fun of for being a tomboy” is the exact same thing as “I wanted to die because everyone kept calling me ‘she,’ and that’s not who I am” need to check themselves. You have no goddamn idea what dysphoria is like.
How do they know that? How can they know that? If their experience is a black box to us, how can our experience be a transparent box to them? Do they have magic powers?
Sorry, but none of this adds up. It’s true that we can’t know what anyone else’s experience is like from the inside, but that applies every bit as much to trans people as it does to everyone else. All we can do is talk and describe, and we’re all on the same footing that way. I think it’s probably true that my experience of pretending to be a lot of boy characters (as well as a lot of girl characters) as a kid, and of hating skirts and dresses, was not miserable enough to qualify as gender dysphoria, but I’m not at all sure about it, because it’s not clear exactly what gender dysphoria is. It’s a Feeling in the Head and there’s nothing more precise about it than that.
We’re not lying and we don’t need to check ourselves.
Terry Glavin on Trump’s Putin-based explanation of the Russian role in Afghanistan:
We’re now at the half-way mark of Donald Trump’s term in the White House, and the relentless hum of his casual imbecilities, obscenities, banalities and outright fabrications has become so routine to the world’s daily dread that it is now just background noise in the ever-louder bedlam of America’s dystopian, freak-show political culture.
And yet, now and again, just when you think the president has scraped his fingers raw in the muck at the bottom of stupidity’s deep barrel, the man somehow manages to out-beclown himself. Such was the case this week, in a ramble of fatuous illiteracy that should drive home the point, to all of us, that the Office of the President of the United States of America is currently occupied by a genuinely dangerous maniac.
It does.
But then Trump went right off the deep end with a disquisition on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his remarks betrayed a perilous, gawping ignorance of the very reason why Afghanistan became such a lawless hellhole in the first place—which is how it came to pass that al-Qaeda found sanctuary there with the deranged Pakistani subsidiary that came to be called the Taliban, which is how al-Qaeda managed to plan and organize the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—which is the very reason the American troops that Trump keeps saying he wants to bring home are still there at all.
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan,” Trump began. “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.”
They were right to be there.
You can almost see Putin’s hand making his lips move.
You’ll want to let that sink in for a moment: on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2019, Donald Trump endorsed a revisionist lunacy that is currently being championed by a bunch of cranks at the outermost neo-Stalinist fringe of Vladimir Putin’s ruling circle of oligarchs. They’ve already managed to cobble together a resolution in Russia’s Potemkin parliament that is to be voted on next month. It’s jointly sponsored by lawmakers from Putin’s United Russia and the still-existing Communist Party.
The resolution would overturn a declaration adopted by the Congress of People’s Deputies at the time of Soviet communism’s unravelling in 1989, 10 years after the Soviets’ catastrophic dismembering of Afghanistan. The 1989 resolution frankly declared that the Soviet invasion and the nine-year war the Soviets prosecuted in Afghanistan deserved “moral and political condemnation.” The 1989 resolution was signed by Mikhail Gorbachev himself, who at the time was chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
Well now who are you gonna believe, Gorbachev or Donnie Twoscoops?
The resolution slammed the former Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko and Dimitri Ustinov for turning Afghanistan into an apocalyptic wasteland of more than a million corpses and forcing a third of the Afghan population to flee the country as refugees, costing as well the lives of 15,000 Soviet soldiers, for good measure.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And now, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is saying Gorbachev was wrong, and Brezhnev, Andropov, Gromyko and Ustinov were right, and so are Vladimir Putin’s creepy neo-Stalinist revisionists.
He belongs to Putin.
Okay now I just don’t know what to believe.
Adrian Harrop tells a woman what her experience is.
https://twitter.com/DrAdrianHarrop/status/1081360068879241222
But we are always told it’s Forbidden to deny anyone’s Lived Experience. That’s a big no-no. Subjective experience trumps mere physical facts, we are told over and over and over. So why do the rules suddenly change when it’s someone who doesn’t claim to be trans or to be literally the other sex?
Also, what in fact is the difference? How can we tell when the difference is present when all it seems to be is “but more so”? Gender nonconformity is totally different from gender dysphoria because gender dysphoria is like gender nonconformity but waaaaaay more so. Oh? So, how do we measure it? How can we tell? How do we know?
Harrop seems very confident that it’s because of “the agreed and specific definition” but he’s just blowing smoke in the Trumpian fashion.
All these fiery little radicals, but they’ve apparently never heard a thing about the way medical categories have changed over time, have been shaped by existing prejudices, have been oh so conveniently adapted to fit the needs of the rulers. Remember “drapetomania”?
Drapetomania was a conjectural mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. It has since been debunked as pseudoscience and part of the edifice of scientific racism.
Harrop is peering confusedly out of a window in the edifice of scientific sexism.
You can see him say it.
(Why does he jerk his head back and forth every time he says something? It looks weird.)
Trump has deluded himself into believing that Democrats give a damn whether he builds his fake wall with steel or concrete.
He then claims that "some" of the previous presidents have told him that they should've built walls. pic.twitter.com/TRmFclYTeL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 4, 2019
President Donald Trump claimed without evidence on Friday that past presidents have privately confided to him that they regret not building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
But at least three of the four living U.S. presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — did no such thing.
I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say that Jimmy Carter didn’t do it either.
Asked if Clinton told Trump that he should have built a border wall, Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña said, “He did not. In fact, they’ve not talked since the inauguration.”
Bush spokesman Freddy Ford also said the two men had not discussed the matter. And Obama, for his part, has not spoken with Trump since his inauguration, except for a brief exchange at George H.W. Bush’s funeral in Washington, D.C.
Obama has consistently blasted Trump’s pledge to build a border wall. “Suggesting that we can build an endless wall along our borders, and blame our challenges on immigrants — that doesn’t just run counter to our history as the world’s melting pot, it contradicts the evidence that our growth and our innovation and our dynamism has always been spurred by our ability to attract strivers from every corner of the globe,” he said in 2016.
They said it to him in a dream. Really. They were all there, at a Pizza Hut where Jared Kushner was the pepperoni chef, and they all said it.
The White House did not respond to a request for an explanation of Trump’s remarks, which came during a lengthy appearance in the Rose Garden in which he insisted he won’t reopen the government until Democrats relent and approve more than $5 billion for the wall.
“This should have been done by all of the presidents that preceded me and they all know it,” Trump said. “Some of them have told me that we should have done it.”
Some of them – so that means at least two. That makes half of them. It could mean as many as three. Two of them, or three of them, told him that, according to him. “Some” is a nice relaxed number to use when you’re lying, but it can trip you up if you’re dealing with a very small number. “Some” of four is a little awkward.
“I think it’s well-known that the incumbent president is very careless with the truth,” former president Carter said last year in an interview with CBS News.
“I think I went through my campaign and my presidency without ever lying to the people or making a deliberately false statement, and I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to reinsert into politics these days,” he added.
Sir, sir, any thoughts on the wall while you’re at it?
I read the opening of a piece by Elizabeth Goitein at the Atlantic on Trump and emergency powers the other day, and found it so alarming I stopped reading. Now it appears we’re being dragged over that threshold…which could be game over. It was for Germany, and it could be for us.
Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of “Lock her up.” He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism and antidemocratic sentiment are on vivid display among segments of the American populace, Trump’s evident hostility to key elements of liberal democracy cannot be dismissed as mere bluster.
It would be nice to think he couldn’t, but guess what, he can.
Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency”—a decision that is entirely within his discretion—more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts. Other powers are available even without a declaration of emergency, including laws that allow the president to deploy troops inside the country to subdue domestic unrest.
You see the problem.
The airport pat-down patrol has been calling in sick.
Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown, have called out from work this week from at least four major airports, according to two senior agency officials and three TSA employee union officials.
Did you miss it? I’ll repeat.
Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown
Who are required to work for no pay. That’s what we call “slavery,” and it’s not allowed.
“This problem of call outs is really going to explode over the next week or two when employees miss their first paycheck,” a union official at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport told CNN. “TSA officers are telling the union they will find another way to make money. That means calling out to work other jobs.”
You know, this isn’t a job that rich people do. Let’s look up what the pay is.
Airport security jobs typically begin at the D pay band, which is $25,518 to $38,277. The promotion potential is the E pay band, which is $29,302 to $44,007. In addition to the base salary for TSA airport jobs, individuals may receive a locality pay, depending on where the job is located.
Not that much. If you have a couple of kids (or more), maybe parents you have to help, have to drive to get there, have high rent or a big mortgage…the pay is not that much. They likely live paycheck to paycheck. They can’t work without pay – yet apparently our government “requires” them to. Illegally.
Two of the sources, who are federal officials, described the sick outs as protests of the paycheck delay. One called it the “blue flu,” a reference to the blue shirts worn by transportation security officers who screen passengers and baggage at airport security checkpoints.
A union official, however, said that while some employees are upset about the pay, officers have said they are calling in sick for more practical reasons. Single parents can no longer afford child care or they are finding cash-paying jobs outside of government work to pay their rent and other bills, for example.
Ya think?
Yeah.
Genius reporter reminds Trump he can declare emergency powers for himself. “Have you considered?” asks bright spark. Trump answers before he finishes the question.
Yes I have. And I can do it if I want.
That is true, unfortunately.
A few hours [after the fire], on February 28, Hindenburg invoked Article 48 and the cabinet drew up the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State.” The act abolished freedom of speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalized phone tapping and interception of correspondence; and suspended the autonomy of federated states, like Bavaria. That night around 4,000 people were arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the SA. Although the Communist party had won 17 percent of the Reichstag elections in November 1932, and the German people elected 81 Communist deputies in the March 5 elections, many were detained indefinitely after the fire. Their empty seats left the Nazis largely free to do as they wished.
Don’t think he wouldn’t do it. Bush and Reagan look like reasonable, professional administrators compared to Trump. Trump would do it.
Trump threw a press conference after meeting with legislators.
Trump “said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time — months or even years,” according to Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who spoke to reporters in the White House driveway.
“Absolutely I said that,” Trump affirmed from the Rose Garden shortly afterward. “I don’t think it will, but I’m prepared.”
Sure, he’s prepared, because he won’t lose his house or car or credit record or anything else; the fact that hundreds of thousands of government workers will doesn’t matter to him, because he is Trump and they are not.
Trump said he designated a group of aides, including Vice President Mike Pence, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, to participate in the discussions, which he described as meant to “determine what we’re going to do about the border.”
It’s so insulting to make grown up legislators share their discussions with Jared Kushner. “Talk to my son-in-law, he’ll fix it.”
CNN reports Trump has said he might declare a national emergency to get the wall. That would be baaaad, because a national emergency gives him all kinds of powers we do not want him to have – it makes him basically a dictator.
Speaking of girls and princesses – do children need drag queens?
An event at which a drag artist will read stories to children has sparked outrage on social media.
Alyssa Van Delle has been invited to Taunton Library in February as part of LGBTQ+ History Month.
The performer will read from children’s books that cover LGBT themes or challenge traditional fairy tales.
But what are “LGBT themes”? They’re a grab-bag, aren’t they, and drag queens don’t exactly represent all such themes. They don’t speak much to the L part, for instance, and by some lights they just plain insult it. Lesbians and gay men share some interests but not all; lesbians are women and gay men are men and there is that familiar hierarchy, that doesn’t just vanish because it’s LGBTQ+.
The tour is also working with Islington Council to introduce a range of books for primary schools covering issues such as gender and sexual identity.
The aim is help youngsters increase their understanding and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.
Same problem. The putative LGBTQ+ community covers a lot of issues (“such as gender and sexual identity”), and many of them are highly contested within said community. It’s not clear that drag queens are the ideal ambassadors or educators on this jumble of issues.
The new Minister of Women, the Family and Human Rights, pastor Damares Alves, created more controversy by saying that “a new era has started in Brazil” and that “boys wear blue and girls wear pink.” The remarks were caught on a video that also shows her chanting the sentence and being applauded.
On Wednesday (2nd), she was sworn in, among cries from the audience of “Hallelujah” and “Praise the Lord,” she made an emotional speech saying there there will be no more “ideological indoctrination” of children and teenagers, and that “girls will be princesses and boys will be princes,” and criticized unnamed media outlets.
Meaning, boys will be dominant and girls will be submissive. Yay?
Alves, known for her religious fervor, extolled her faith more than once during her swearing-in. “The State is secular, but this minister is extremely Christian, and because of that, she believes in God’s design,” she said.
Yes, and that’s the problem: believing in “God’s design” means making your own prejudices and worship of conservative tradition something designed by your friend Mister God, and that makes everything you do sacred and unchallengeable.
H/t soogeeoh at Miscellany Room
Yesterday some spiteful anonymous fool on Twitter tried to discredit Ocasio-Cortez. The Times reports:
“Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” read the tweet from AnonymousQ1776, which incorrectly described it as a video from her high school days. The account has since been deleted.
Only, nobody saw the clueless nitwit part, probably because it’s not there.
If the video showing her dancing and twirling barefoot on a rooftop was meant to be an embarrassing leak, it backfired badly.
The dance video — a mash-up of 1980s dance moves from the movie “The Breakfast Club” and the music of “Lisztomania,” by the French band Phoenix — proved to be too endearing to many social media users. Some also saw a right-wing effort to undermine Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a liberal Democrat known as “AOC” among her fans.
There’s nothing embarrassing about it.
Since Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Puerto Rican “girl from the Bronx,” was elected in New York in November, she has been a target of conservatives and far-right groups. She won political notice after jolting the Democratic establishment by defeating an incumbent congressman to win the primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District in a virtual landslide in June.
But her origin story, which saw her go from being a bartender to a lawmaker, has been dismissed by some on the right. Her clothes have come in for particular scrutiny, with a conservative journalist criticizing a fitted coat and jacket she wore as “too nice for a girl who struggles.”
Has it all, doesn’t it – the focus on clothes, the dismissal as “a girl,” the expectation that people who struggle should be in rags or go home, the pointless mean aggression.
When Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, dressed in white in homage to suffragists and pioneering women in politics, was sworn in on Thursday, Republicans booed her.
For what? Is that normal behavior – booing a colleague when she’s sworn in?
We’re all wallowing in the mud that flows from Trump’s pigsty.
That's it, Alexandria you're in the club! ❤️❤️ @allysheedy1 #AlexandriaOcasioCortez #DemsTakeTheHouse
— Molly Ringwald (@MollyRingwald) January 4, 2019
Trump wants the government shutdown to go on for years. That should be grounds for impeachment all by itself.
Emerging from what they called a “sometimes contentious” meeting at the White House, Democratic leaders said Mr. Trump remained adamant that he would not sign spending bills to reopen the shuttered offices unless Congress approved money for his wall on the southern border.
“We told the president we needed the government open,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters outside the White House. “He resisted. In fact, he said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time, months or even years.”
In other words he’s doing a dictator.
On Friday, the president sent a letter to Congress that was an unsubtle rebuff to Democratic leaders with whom he had met on Wednesday. According to a person in the meeting, Ms. Pelosi cut off the Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she was reeling off statistics about the border. In his letter, Mr. Trump said that “some of those present did not want to hear the presentation at the time, and so I have instead decided to make the presentation available to all Members of Congress.”
Says the guy who shouted down Pelosi every single time she started to speak in that on-camera meeting a few weeks ago.
The shutdown, which enters its third week on Saturday, has left about 800,000 workers without pay, limited the functions of federal agencies and slowed the court system. There are also concerns that if the shutdown continues for several more weeks, it will harm the overall economy.
All that will please Trump. He likes chaos and destruction, as long as they don’t cause him any discomfort.
The White House has the whole transcript of Trump blathering for an hour and a half yesterday. I’m afraid I will have to say more about it, because I just have to.
But the southern border is a very, very high — highly used placed by people that do human trafficking. How can it get worse than that?
There’s a reason why politicians and wealthy people build walls around their houses and their compounds. President Obama recently built a wall around his compound. There’s a reason for it. And I don’t blame him.
The reasons politicians do it can be different from the reasons rich people do it. One reason Obama needs a lot of security is Donald Trump himself. The birther shit. That crooked puffed-up moron put a bigger target on Obama with the birther shit. So there’s that.
Of course, Obama didn’t build a wall around his house (and he doesn’t have a “compound”).
We’re in a shutdown because Democrats refuse to fund the border security. They try and make it like it’s just about the wall, and it is about the wall. I said, over the weekend, to a number of people that, you know, the wheel, the wall — there are some things that never get old.
No comment necessary.
You know, frankly, if this administration didn’t take place, if another administration came in instead of this administration — namely Mike and myself, and the group around this table — you’d be at war right now. You’d be having a nice, big, fat war in Asia. And it wouldn’t be pleasant. And instead of that, we’re getting along fine. I’m not in any rush. I don’t have to rush. All I know is there’s no rockets; there’s no testing.
If Clinton had won we would now be at war with North Korea? I’m not seeing it.
So, you know, I think my relationship, I will tell you, with the leaders of Europe is very good. A lot of them don’t even understand how they got away with it for so many years. I’ll say to Angela, and I’ll say to many of the other leaders — I’m friends with all of them — I’ll say, “How did this ever happen?” And they sort of go like, “I can’t believe it either.” They can’t believe it. You know why? Because they had presidents and other people within administrations in the past that allowed them to get away. Like some of them would say, “Well, no one ever asked us to pay.”
Yes, that happened, I’m so sure.
But at least he knows what to do about health care.
So, I’m a great flexible guy. We were part of that lawsuit, as you know. And a great judge, highly respected from Texas, said the individual mandate is out. That means that we should win at the Supreme Court, where this case will go.
Now, when we do, we will sit down with the Democrats and we will come up with great healthcare. Far better. Far better. We’ll have everything included. We’ll have everything included. Far better. Because Obamacare is too expensive, the premiums are way too high, and the deductibles don’t exist. I mean, the deductibles, you can’t even use it. The deductible is so high. Unless you get hit by a tractor, you can’t even use it. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. The deductibles are so high.
Obamacare is a tremendous failure. But now that we won the individual mandate, and that’s — which, by the way, was by far the most unpopular. It was by far the most unpopular thing in Obamacare.
So there will be much better health insurance, with everything included. He said that twice. Everything included. The premiums will be much lower, and the deductibles will be much lower too. It will be fantastic.
The only question is how it’s going to be funded. He forgot to explain that part. No individual mandate, and of course no Medicare for all or single payer or any socialist thing like that there, so the question is…what? What, then? But he forgot to say. I think he always does forget to say. He thinks he can bring the premiums down and bring the deductibles down and cover everything and ditch the individual mandate and not do anything about the funding. That’s why he always has to forget to explain how that will work.
And then he tells a spectacular lie.
I have great popularity in Utah. I love the people of Utah. I did something for them that nobody else would’ve done that has to do with their parks, as you know. That was a big day — a big thing. And we did that for a very special person, who is now going to be retiring after 42 years. You know who I’m talking about. Our great friend, our great senator, who is really a spectacular man. And also for Mike Lee, who really pressed it very hard. So Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee.
And the people of Utah really appreciate what I did for hundreds and hundreds of miles of park that they’ll be able to now use, as opposed to not.
No. Developers will be able to “use” the hundreds and hundreds of miles of park, while everyone else will not.
I’ll save his explanation of recent Russian history for later.
This particular two minute segment is quite startlingly idiotic and hence frightening.
There seems to be a frozen silence in the room while he blurts out all this uncomprehending shit.
Following a bizarre rant about the Soviet Union, Trump says this about Afghanistan: "Why isn't Russia there? Why isn't India there? Why isn't Pakistan there? Why are we there? We're 6,000 miles away? But I don't mind… I think I would have been a good general." pic.twitter.com/bQ36x1RSZH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2019
Wait, Trump did what now?
Bringing active federal law enforcement agents to the WH podium like this for a political press conference is a gross abuse of power and does immeasurable harm to the agencies they represent.
— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 3, 2019
opens Google news
Oy.
It was after 4 in the afternoon and the briefing room was half empty.
Minutes after 4:00 p.m., a voice came on the overhead speaker announcing that press secretary Sarah Sanders would hold a briefing in “five minutes.”
The scramble was on.
For a White House that has held increasingly rare briefings, the short notice was unusual yet not surprising. And as the press appearances have shrunk, the importance of each opportunity to ask questions has increased.
Surprises. No briefings, punctuated with “Surprise! Briefing in 5 minutes!” As if it were reality tv as opposed to the government of a heavily armed country.
And when Sanders took the podium, instead of taking questions she introduced a “very special guest” — the President of the United States.
“Hello, everybody, beautiful place, I haven’t seen it,” President Donald Trump said as he walked in, wishing the press assembled a happy new year.
Thursday marked Trump’s first official appearance at the briefing room podium nearly two years into his administration. But despite being billed as a press briefing, and taking place in the briefing room, Trump did not deliver a briefing (he took no questions) and instead gave a statement pressing for his border wall.
Because Twitter isn’t enough.
On the first day of divided government during his administration, Trump cited infrastructure as one area where the White House could work with the Democratic-controlled House. Then, Trump made a push for his border wall, introducing some members of the National Border Patrol Council and National ICE Council.
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The President said he had been sitting in the Oval Office with the border patrol agents in a previously scheduled meeting and decided he wanted to “see the press” so the agents could “tell them about the importance of the wall.”
“First time I’ve ever done this. The first time I’ve done it, and I’ve done it for you (the National Border Patrol Council members). And I’m very proud of it,” he said.
Trump refused to take questions about the government shutdown, walking out of the briefing room along with the border patrol agents, Sanders, communications director Bill Shine and social media director Dan Scavino, a mere eight minutes after entering.
So that was the bringing active law enforcement agents to the podium for a marketing opportunity.
