Trump-Russia Ties Confirmed.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta.

FBI Director James Comey opened Monday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing with a big reveal: The FBI is, in fact, investigating Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election, including links between the Trump campaign and Russian government and any coordination between the two.

Naturally, this led to the appearance of a rabid Mr. Tweet again. The multiple tweets can be seen at Think Progress and Raw Story. A certain sense of weariness sets in when I once again glance at the manic ravings of Mr. Tweet, but I can’t help but notice just how stuck the Tiny Tyrant is, like a skipping needle on a glaring scratch. Without fail, he always regresses back to the election, the one moment where he felt competent. He continues to bring up Ms. Clinton, like a superannuated revivalist preacher, terrified of letting go of one thing he knows will whip up a froth among his faithful. In the same manner, he drags back the old bone of the electoral college, desperately trying to remind people of his big “win”.

Then, of course, there’s the old “Fake! Fake I say!”, this time over a CNN poll, which points to plummeting approval ratings. Mr. Tweet scorns CNN, while patting the head of FOX, seeming to be blissfully unaware of a FOX poll which also showed a tremendously decreasing amount of confidence and approval in the Tiny Tyrant. Oops. The Tiny Tyrant demonstrates his own lack of relevance, by continually parroting the recent past, unable to move on, and unwilling to face the realities of being a despot who does something other than tweet and continually take 3 million dollar weekends.

This directly contradicts statements made both by President Trump himself as well as his administration. Monday morning — likely in anticipation of Comey’s hearing — Trump tweeted that any insinuation of collusion between him and Russia is “FAKE NEWS” and that Democrats simply invented the scandal. He nevertheless insisted that the leakers responsible for that information getting out should be investigated.

Oh yes, that too. What is becoming yet another old, old song, “Leaker!” Perhaps, given the rumours about the Tiny Tyrant’s obsession with having people leak on the beds of his enemies, he should attempt to find a different word. Unfortunately for him, people will talk, that’s one of those things people do.

In the wake of Comey’s confirmation of the investigation, it remains to be seen if the congressional Republicans defending Trump will continue to insist that the FBI should be investigating the leaks of the classified information that raise these concerns, but not the concerns themselves.

Think Progress has the full story. For a quick rundown:

 

The Poisonous Glee of Paul Ryan.

Another one heads to President Trump’s desk. This legislation allows states to have drug testing to receive federal unemployment benefits.

Another one heads to President Trump’s desk. This legislation allows states to have drug testing to receive federal unemployment benefits.

Last year, President Obama’s Department of Labor issued a regulation restricting the number of unemployment insurance beneficiaries that would be subject to drug testing. The move infuriated Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who had made such a program a centerpiece of his agenda.

Despite their vows to eliminate wasteful government spending, the Congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump are now poised to overturn that rule — despite significant evidence that similar drug testing regimes cost a lot more than they save.

In February, the House of Representatives passed House Joint Resolution 42  — nearly along party lines — disapproving the regulation. Because such rules are not subject to filibuster, the Senate approved the same last week on Friday 51–48, strictly along party lines. The Trump administration has indicated it “strongly supports” the effort, making it very likely the bill will be signed very soon.

A smiling Ryan could barely contain his glee, tweeting out a picture of himself signing the House version of the resolution, alongside its author, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX).

That crushing sensation? Oh, that’s the federal thumb of the regime over your head, about to come down. All that constant talk about getting “government” out of peoples’ lives. Hmmm, what happened to that not so brave sentiment? It seems to be limited to removing healthcare. Unfortunately, people are still refusing to see and understand what is happening to them, and amazingly enough, there’s still a great deal of blind trust in the Tiny Tyrant, “oh, he wouldn’t do anything bad!” Even people who do understand simply sigh and have another beer. (That’s explained in the AJC link.)

Many states — including Ryan and Walker’s home state of Wisconsin —  have adopted rules in recent years to require beneficiaries of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to be screened for drug use. ThinkProgress published examinations of the 2014 and 2015 data provided by each state with those rules and found that the states paid millions of dollars to implement the testing and combined to find only hundreds of positive tests.

[…]

TANF is a federal welfare program through which the states provide aid to their poorest citizens. Unemployment is an insurance program; employers are required to pay-in to it for their employees during the time they are employed. Now, in Wisconsin and other states that followed its lead, people will have to endure drug screening just to get access to their own insurance benefits.

Emphasis mine. Right. A massive waste of money, to no point at all, outside of punishing people for not being wealthy. Now, there’s going to be an even bigger waste of money! But it’s not some kind of commie socialist plot, like healthcare, so I guess it’s all okay. Yep, everything is grand behind the Gold Curtain.

Via Think Progress.

A Congress of Tantrums: No, Vote First!

paul-ryan

There’s the face of Republican empathy, folks. Are you impressed? Didn’t think so. Ryan is emulating the Tiny Tyrant, and going with the Tantrum Method. This is one of those days I could just slam my head into a wall, yelling loudly “this is not how a fucking government is supposed to fucking work, noooo!” As that wouldn’t do much good, I’ll refrain and just cuss my head off here. The Fuck You Care Plan (FYCP) is meeting resistance from both sides of the aisle, and now Ryan is insisting that a vote is taken before the changes made to it can be scrutinized. Remind you of recalcitrant 3 year old? “No! Swallow it without looking first!” I don’t think so, Paulie. You’re a tad too toxic for that kind of nonsense.

Speaker Paul Ryan announced Sunday he would be willing to make major changes to the Republican health care bill this week, but not push back the scheduled vote Thursday. He’s considering those changes in response to division among party members over the bill in its current form: conservatives say they won’t vote for it because it’s “Obamacare-lite,” while moderates are spooked by the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment that 24 million Americans stand to lose coverage if it passes, among other warning signs.

He told Chris Wallace Sunday that unspecified changes would “help bring market freedom and regulatory relief to the insurance markets to dramatically lower the price of the plan for the 50- and 60-year-olds.” Other changes under discussion would impose work requirements for people receiving Medicaid benefits and increase tax credits for older Americans.

Oh, there’s a poison pill. Ryan has been trying to kill medicare for years. As for the regulatory blather, don’t be falling for that crap, either. Every single person in uStates is about to get royally screwed by all the deregulation, oh, pardon, not everyone. The billionaires will be okay. The rest of us, we’ll be screwed over, and we will be living on poisoned land, rivers which will once again burn, choking on pollution, dealing with food scarcity, no healthcare, all while trying to figure out how not to get screwed over financially by every single company we have to deal with in daily life. Oh, right, FYCP. Okay, here’s the little poster boy for sociopathy:

But Ryan wants members of Congress to vote on the updated bill before they know what its impact on constituents will be. The House will still vote on Thursday, before the CBO has a chance to make another assessment.

Emphasis mine. This is not how a government runs. It is how a regime runs, even if those in it are still trying to deny the switchover.

Still, Ryan says he is confident it will pass, despite his own admission that major components are still under construction. “The reason I feel so good about this is because the president has become a great closer. He’s the one who has helped negotiate changes to this bill with members from all over our caucus.”

This is not a godsdamned corporate raiding thing, you fucking dimwitted monstrous asshole. It’s supposed to be a fucking government. Wait, what am I saying? Yeah, it’s a corporate raider thing these days. Sorry, I’ve been accustomed to a government most of my life.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote Ryan last week and demanded he give the CBO an opportunity to analyze the changes health care bill before any floor vote.

“Republicans are terrified the American people will see the reality of their disastrous TrumpCare bill. If the GOP are afraid of the public having the facts about their bill, they shouldn’t be voting on it,” Pelosi said in a statement released Sunday after Republicans announced they will not wait for the CBO.

Yeah, that’s the truth, but what good is it going to do? FYCP it’s gonna be, praised to the skies by the filthy rich here behind the Gold Curtain.

Via Think Progress.

People Will Die, What’s New?

A man delivers heating oil to a house in Maine in 2015. CREDIT: AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty.

A man delivers heating oil to a house in Maine in 2015. CREDIT: AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty.

That’s a familiar scene. Living rural, I’m on propane for heating and cooking. Propane is expensive, very expensive. Most people who live rural have large tanks, which when full, might be able to see them through a winter. Depending on how harsh the winter might be, sometimes a tank will last, sometimes it won’t. We have two tanks, totally 1,500 gallons. We rarely have the full amount. Naturally, it’s cheaper to fill your tanks in the dead of Summer, but that won’t keep you all the way through to winter, especially in places like Maine, or nDakota. We’re still in Winter here. There have been times when there’s been no power; there have been times when there’s been a heating failure, and it’s not easy to cope when you don’t have heat. When you don’t have heat, you’re prone to doing unsafe things, like opening the oven, and cranking it up, stringing electric heaters everywhere, lighting candles, firing up kerosene heaters and so on. And in such cases, people often die. People also die of hypothermia, because yes, it gets that damn cold. Out here in rural land, USA, we’re a tad short on mansions. Houses tend to be old, and not terribly energy efficient, and subject to drafts. A lot of older people simply close off most of their house and live in one or two rooms come winter, as do a lot of people without a ton of money. Most of us rural types don’t have handy get aways in Florida, either.

The Tiny Tyrant is so unhinged from reality, it never crosses that atrophied pea brain of his that most people in this country are not wealthy, they don’t have mansions, they don’t have the wherewithal to con people in order to stuff their pockets, and get very concerned when faced with the choice of either starving to death or freezing to death. The same people who, while faced with such dire choices, are having their pockets picked clean by the fucking Tiny Tyrant, so he can hide out in his Florida Fucking Mansion near to every weekend. Over $3 Million every effing trip. This weekend marks the 5th weekend, and the 7th weekend spent flaking off to huge sums of money. The Monstrous Narcissist Evil which is Trump is happily planning to kill off the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which uses very little money in comparsion to say, the military budget, but is crucial in keeping people alive in not only brutal winters, but brutal summers as well. As Global Warming gets worse, also hastened by the The Monstrous Narcissist Evil Trump, both of these extremes will worsen, and without aid, even more people will die. Not that the thought of people dying ruffles Trump’s tiny, smooth brain.

“You’ve got a population that’s got very little money, not able to work because of their age or their health, and this is the way we keep them in their apartments and keep them safe,” said Wolfe.

“If you withdraw that, some of them will die. But that doesn’t seem too important to them at the moment,” he said.

“He doesn’t know anybody like that. They don’t belong to Trump’s club.”

And that last line sums it up. In the Tiny Tyrant’s world, people without money aren’t even on the radar. As far as Trump is concerned, they barely exist, and they certainly don’t matter. Not that it would make much difference if he was more aware, it still wouldn’t register. There isn’t any empathy in The Monstrous Narcissist Evil which is Trump. There is plenty of hypocrisy, though! There’s a mine full of it. If only hypocrisy were food, then everyone would have enough. The Tiny Tyrant is intent on killing off any and all programs which so much as hint of helping people, and won’t shut up about “slashing” the budget (while massively increasing the military money), while the money being spent out of taxpapyer’s pockets by the fucking evil asshole is overwhelming:

President Trump doesn’t want to spend federal dollars on after-school programs, meals for poor people, or heating assistance that helps keep folks alive.

But he has no problem wasting more than $3 million a pop to spend weekends at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Trump has already made four trips there since becoming president on January 20, and on Friday he confirmed he’s headed there this weekend for the fifth time.

[…]

Despite vowing during his campaign that he “would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done” and “would not be a president who took vacations” because “you don’t have time to take time off,” Trump has visited Trump-branded properties each of the past six weekends. That streak will hit seven when Trump lands at Mar-a-Lago later Friday.

In fact, Trump has spent time at Trump-branded property every weekend of his presidency other than the very first, when he created chaos throughout the country by signing a Muslim ban executive order that was later stayed by a federal court.

[…]

As Quartz reported on Friday, after this weekend, Trump will have already spent about $16.5 million on trips to Mar-a-Lago. For that amount, Meals on Wheels could feed 5,967 seniors for a year and after school programs could feed 114,583 children for a year.

Remember though, that starving seniors and children don’t matter! Nope.

On Thursday, Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney defended the draconian cuts included in the Trump administration’s proposed budget by arguing that the federal government can’t ask “a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for” programs like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But one wonders whether those struggling Americans would rather have public radio or dole out their share of the $3.3 million a self-proclaimed billionaire is spending each weekend to mingle with his ludicrously wealthy club members down in Florida.

Oh yes, of course, why a coal miner or a single mom are just your general dumbfucks who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in quality educational TV, or good quality radio broadcasts, oh no. Why, they are just stupid peons, they don’t think, or feel, or care about anything at all, no. Certainly, they’d have no interest in their children having access to good education and information, no sir. They are, however, supremely happy to have the food taken out of their mouths in order to support the Tiny Tyrant when he wanders off to play golf and collect those $200,000 dues from his “friends” at the club.

Via Think Progress: Ending home heating subsidies is a choice to let people die. Trump to spend 7th consecutive weekend at Trump-branded property, at enormous cost to taxpayers.

Mr. Tweet, Coward at Large.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks on as President Donald Trump accuses a German reporter of engaging in 'fake news.' (Screen cap).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks on as President Donald Trump accuses a German reporter of engaging in ‘fake news.’ (Screen cap).

Take a moment, and look at that screen cap, again. Most people have seen it, the look of “unfuckingbelievable” on Ms. Merkel’s face when Trump pulls his fake news clown act on a German reporter. I cherish that expression, because it’s a clear divider between adult / child. Unfortunately for us in uStates, we’re stuck with the terrible infant.

Naturally, having to limit his childish outbursts during the press conference, as soon as possible, unpresident Jekyll found a dark corner, and let the craven Mr. Tweet loose, to spew forth all the shit he knows he can’t get away with saying in person. He’s doing all this, by the way, from his hidey mansion in Florida, y’know, the place he swore up and down he wasn’t going to go. This makes his 5th weekend there, at a cost of over $3 million a trip, so all us taxpayers are on the hook for more than 16.5 million dollars for Jekyll & Tweet to play, all while his sputtering temper adds more instability to the world.

As is his custom on Saturday mornings when he is vacationing at his Mar-a-Lago resort, President Donald Trump jumped on Twitter to complain about something — this time taking shots at both the media and Germany.

Following a meeting and press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel — where Trump refused to shake hands with the German leader and she gave him a dismissive glance when he brought up surveillance of both of them — Trump felt the need to set the record straight in typical Trump fashion on Twitter.

“Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Trump began in his first tweet before getting to his latest complaint.

“Nevertheless, Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” he continued.

Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nevertheless, Germany owes…

…vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!

:Drops head gently onto desk: No. Just No. It’s the weekend, I slept in, and I was feeling kind of good, and then … No. I’ll content myself with a “Hey, Donnie! Go Fuck Yourself!”

Via Raw Story.

“RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!”

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

This week, the White House began sending out an official email newsletter, “Your 1600 Daily,” to promote video clips of the president, pertinent news articles or endorsements, and other items of note happening that day.

On Friday, there was an odd inclusion at the bottom, where normally one can find friendly headlines from Fox News, Breitbart, or other conservative outlets that have become media safe harbors for the administration. One of the two featured articles was a parody piece titled “Trump’s budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why,” written by Alexandra Petri, who writes satirical pieces for the Washington Post’s lighthearted ComPost blog.

[…]

ThinkProgress asked the White House press office if they were aware the article was a parody, and if so, why they selected it, but received no response by press time.

If this was a simple mistake, then the staff member who chose and approved the article’s inclusion on official White House communications did not read beyond the first paragraph, which makes abundantly clear that the headline is deeply sarcastic:

Some people are complaining that the budget proffered by the Trump administration, despite its wonderful macho-sounding name, is too vague and makes all sorts of cuts to needed programs in favor of increasing military spending by leaps and bounds. These people are wimps. Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney has called it a “hard power budget” which is, I think, the name of an exercise program where you eat only what you can catch, pump up your guns and then punch the impoverished in the face. This, conveniently, is also what the budget does.

The article concluded, “RAW POWER! HARD RAW POWER GRRRRRR HISSS POW!”

[…]

Other sections of the newsletter are anodyne White House agenda items that urge supporters to “get involved” or share important tweets “from President Trump,” promote “Oval Office highlights,” link to press room briefings, and detail Trump’s schedule.

Sometimes these links, always titled “News Reports,” are op-eds or letters to the editor by friendly voices or administration officials, or a straight news piece about a positive economic development or administration announcement. None of the other days of the “News Reports” section featured anything like Petri’s parody.

The links included in Tuesday’s newsletter, for example, are representative of Trump allies’ favorite outlets:

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

CREDIT: 1600 Daily email.

Wednesday was the second day in a row the newsletter linked to a Breitbart article about Obamacare. Other featured items include stories from Fox News, Townhall, Washington Post, Washington Examiner, Yahoo, and an endorsement of AHCA by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. On Thursday many mainstream outlets were cited, as well as the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s news site, called The Daily Signal.

Oh my. It seems this is amusement Friday, with some kind entity somewhere answering Voltaire’s Prayer. Full story at Think Progress.

The Gulliver Prophecy.

bobjones.org

bobjones.org

Here’s one I had never heard of, and it dates back to 2005. It’s being revived. This uh, prophecy is detailed at “The Prophetic Ministry & Resources of Bob & Bonnie Jones with Lyn Kost.” It’s actually yet another fevered dream, which is more akin to an acid trip than prophecy.

During last week’s POTUS Shield conference in Ohio, speakers made repeated references to a prophecy that Ohio would be the spark for the next Great Awakening, with some citing a “Gulliver” prophecy to explain the selection of cities for upcoming POTUS Shield events.

I’ve been getting the idea that the Potus Shield people are getting increasingly desperate, as the anticipated waves of glory washing over their chosen Trump hasn’t happened. Well, let’s take a trip with Gulliver.

The Gulliver prophecy explains why many believe that “God has set Ohio aside as a hub for His glory to go out from.” Here’s how it is described:

While in a conference in Cincinnati, Ohio Bob had a vision of a great man, who in the past had fallen asleep.  He was lying on his back, half-covered in dirt, and his name was Gulliver.  Little people from a place of little input had completely tied him down, and he was waking up from being asleep for the past 38 years.  We can also call him (Gulliver) the Body of Christ.  Bob saw that the head of this very large man was in Cleveland, Ohio, in a place called “Jacob’s field.”

The next thing Bob saw was a large, center pole of a tent coming up out of Columbus, Ohio. This was His heart. Powerful signs and wonders will come up out of Columbus, greater than we’ve ever seen before, that will look like a canopy over the region. Explosions of miracles and healings will be the hallmark of this city.

Cincinnati was the place where the reproduction organs were. Reproducing of the Kingdom will be evidenced here in priestly and kingly anointing.

The left hand of this large man was in Philadelphia, which had teaching and great love in it. The right hand extended west and came to rest in Indianapolis, Indiana. It began to flex, and the cords that were around it to keep it tied down, were beginning to snap off like rubber bands.

The left foot was in Charlotte, North Carolina, and there was a great television with it, so they televised the gospel all around the world. The right foot was in Nashville, Tennessee, where great faith is beginning to raise up.

This great man finally began to get up, breaking off all restraints and planting both of his feet in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bob said, “God means to take Ohio, then move over to Indianapolis and up into Illinois, crossing over into the east and finally standing completely upright in Atlanta.” The Lord told Bob that to take Atlanta would mean capturing the whole south.

What is it with these zealots and their very strange interpretations of literature? We recently had a mangling of Tolkien, and now this, uh, stew of weirdness. I can’t help but note that the giant penis and scrotum are mentioned – one thing Christians can never seem to do is pull their noses out of one crotch or another. In terms of poetic mangling, I think the explosions of miracles should have been placed in Cincinnati.

When you actually read the bible, whichever version, you never get the impression that Jehovah is terribly big on being knowledgeable, rather like those men who made up the stories, so I figure it wasn’t much a one for reading books. Oh, but perhaps movies are Jehovah’s bag, and this is why they so frequently end up being mangled into prophecy. Or perhaps it’s just a bunch of bullshit. I’ll opt for the latter.

This is not the Bob Jones who founded the famously racist fundamentalist university, but a guy who supposedly met the archangel Gabriel when he was seven years old and was given a mantle as a “Seer Prophet.”

Jones was removed from a Kansas City ministry in 1991 after admitting that he had used his “gifts” to manipulate women and engage in sexual misconduct, but that didn’t end his prophetic career.

No, of course it didn’t, what with that convenient get out of jail free card built into Christianity. I expect there weren’t any actual consequences at all. :Reads article: Nope, no actual consequence.

The prophets of POTUS Shield have clearly decided that the Gulliver prophecy was a divine revelation. There are plans for upcoming POTUS Shield events in Charlotte, which will be hosted by Joyner, as well as Nashville and Indianapolis. POTUS Shield will be partnering with Lou Engle to bring versions of his prayer rallies—branded as “The Call”—to Cleveland this summer and to Philadelphia on Labor Day weekend in 2018, which POTUS Shield leader Frank Amedia noted would be right before the mid-term elections.

Divine revelation. Someone makes up some very weird shit about Gulliver’s Travels, of all things, a work that Swift himself said was set to vex the world, not divert it. Obviously, the satire went completely over their heads, if someone actually read it, which is doubtful. Jones probably saw the Disney version, drank some suspect kool-aid, then had his ‘divine revelation.’ While it’s easy enough to dismiss this nonsense, the efforts of the Religious Reich to bring about a theocracy should not be dismissed. For all the silliness, we do need to pay attention.

RWW has the full story.

Aaaaand, We Are Back to Reefer Madness.

The famous ending

The famous ending

Oh, the regressive idiocy never ends. The manufactured war on drugs has caused an untold amount of misery, primarily in the form of people being tossed into a prison without a glance, or worse, shot to death by those oh so valiant drug hunting cops. (Deep sarcasm, in case you’re hard of sarcasm.) Jeff Sessions, bigot extraordinaire, and asshole ignoramus has decided we need to go straight back to the days of Tell Your Children. Yes, lies, oh lies are wonderful! And just when we, as a society, were finally making some progress on the whole weed front. A nice smoke now and then goes a long way with my pain issues, but as I’m a pain patient, I’m under the federal thumb, and am routinely drug tested as a requirement to receiving scrips for mild pain meds. There may have been a shot at medical weed, but not any more. Fuck Sessions, and fuck the so-called war on drugs. Mano Singham has an excellent post up which tangentially addresses that manufactured mess. In that post, he quotes a bit from John Ehrlichman:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And that’s the truth, right there. This shit has been going on all my life, and all it has done is fuel the prison complex, enable murderous cops, and cost taxpayers an obscene amount of money. There is no “war on drugs”. You’ll note that it’s never one, or even two specific drugs that remain a constant in this war, because that doesn’t keep the money pouring in to militarize cops even more. No, there’s always a new, terrifying “epidemic”, oh my yes! When I was a sophomore in high school, it moved from weed to speed. I still remember the stupid anti-drug comics which were handed out. They had as much value as a Chick tract. It’s just fucking propaganda, the same old propaganda. This is what they looked like:

14-15

Freedom Road. Full comic here.

Actually, it’s this specific image I remember, the rest not so much:

02

Anyroad, as most people will have noticed, it’s always a “new” drug “crisis”, weed, heroin, speed, coke, crack, meth, and on and on. Right now, we’re doing the prescription opiates “crisis”. You’ll also have noted, I’m sure, that none of these so-called crises are ever actually dealt with before moving on to the next exciting drug to titillate the masses and incite fear. And here we go the fuck again, back to weed.

Marijuana users and heroin addicts are basically the same, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia.

“I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana — so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful,” said Sessions. He went on to call for a revival of hardline ’80s- and ‘90s-style “educating people and telling them the terrible truth about drugs.”

“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs will destroy your life,” Sessions said.

For someone on a bar stool arguing with his friends, this would be a stupid but harmless “hot take.” But for the top law enforcement official in a nation of 320 million people, it’s a malicious string of lies intended to justify dangerous policies.

Sessions’ mockery of the idea that marijuana could help people struggling with opiate addiction is especially frustrating to Steve Miller, who retired as a sergeant after 18 years on a suburban Detroit police force and now works as a private investigator at a lawfirm specializing in medical marijuana cases.

“He’s out of reality in that statement. Marijuana has proven to be very beneficial medically for people. And there are studies coming out now showing it is helping people get off their opiate and heroin addictions, and showing it helps kick alcohol addiction as well,” Miller, one of many law enforcement professionals who advocates to end marijuana prohibition, told ThinkProgress. “I don’t know where his medical training comes from that he makes these statements.”

Oh well, that one’s easy, Sessions doesn’t have any medical training. He doesn’t have as much training as your average dog. Sessions is dragging out one of the oldest, most incorrect of all drug propagandism: “it’s just as bad as heroin!!111!!!” There is no reason for this bullshit to be waved about again, especially not by a suspect attorney general. As pointed out in Mano Singham’s post, this is to largely fuel the prison industrial complex. How else can you legally enslave people and get your labor done for free? This is absolutely intolerable, and people should not put up with it for one second. Unfortunately, I’ve had many years in which to watch people fall for this utter bullshit time and time again. It’s time to wake up.

Think Progress has the full story.

“Palace Intrigue.” “Loyalists.”

MW-FA026_trump__20161111070915_ZH

MarketWatch photo illustration/Shutterstock.

Palace intrigue. Loyalists. What country is this again? From the sound of it, we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque or something. Politico has in-depth look at the paranoia-infused administration regime, where people admit to being paranoid, while paranoia is also dismissed. The whole thing is a dismantled mess, more resembling Bedlam of yore than any type of government. Splintered, running on mistrust, paranoia, and lies, all on a wobbly base of fake news fueled insanity.  And of course, the gold-plated unpresident, who can’t seem to find time for anything, um, presidential, but once again resorts to Mr. Tweet, going after Snoop Dogg, who does not seem to have bothered noticing the gold menace.

A culture of paranoia is consuming the Trump administration, with staffers increasingly preoccupied with perceived enemies — inside their own government.

In interviews, nearly a dozen White House aides and federal agency staffers described a litany of suspicions: that rival factions in the administration are trying to embarrass them, that civil servants opposed to President Donald Trump are trying to undermine him, and even that a “deep state” of career military and intelligence officials is out to destroy them.

Aides are going to great lengths to protect themselves. They’re turning off work-issued smartphones and putting them in drawers when they arrive home from work out of fear that they could be used to eavesdrop. They’re staying mum in meetings out of concern that their comments could be leaked to the press by foes.

Many are using encrypted apps that automatically delete messages once they’ve been read, or are leaving their personal cellphones at home in case their bosses initiate phone checks of the sort that press secretary Sean Spicer deployed last month to try to identify leakers on his team.

It’s an environment of fear that has hamstrung the routine functioning of the executive branch. Senior advisers are spending much of their time trying to protect turf, key positions have remained vacant due to a reluctance to hire people deemed insufficiently loyal, and Trump’s ambitious agenda has been eclipsed by headlines surrounding his unproven claim that former President Barack Obama tapped his phone lines at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.

One senior administration aide, who like most others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the degree of suspicion had created a toxicity that is unsustainable.

“People are scared,” he said, adding that the Trump White House had become “a pretty hostile environment to work in.”

[…]

One senior aide said staffers have become almost obsessed by daily news accounts of palace intrigue and spend hours in the office dissecting them in hopes of deciphering who is dishing — and who is trying to hurt whom.

Another Republican who is close to the White House said junior-level staffers are simply “mimicking what they’re seeing at the top … Everyone at the top is so suspicious that it trickles down the org chart, so everyone has become paranoid and suspicious.”

The distrust, some contend, isn’t unfounded.

“I wouldn’t call it paranoia under the circumstances,” said a Republican who communicates with many administration aides through encrypted apps. “It’s not paranoia if people really are out to get you, and everybody actually is out to get everyone else.”

Many staffers say they don’t like the idea that supervisors — or anyone else — could have access to their emails. Some have taken to using secure messengers like Confide and Signal in order to communicate on their personal phones. One program gaining popularity within the administration is Wickr, which allows users to set an expiration time on how long an unread message can remain in a recipient’s inbox before it self-destructs.

The encryption programs can’t be accessed from White House-issued phones, which prevent users from downloading most apps. There are no restrictions on employees using encrypted apps on their personal phones, the White House official said, as long as they’re not being used to conduct official business.

The most stress, however, may be outside the West Wing, in executive branch agencies, where staffers worry about career bureaucrats who are hostile to Trump.

The whole article is excellent, and quite disturbing. Recommended reading.

In keeping with all the palace paranoia, there’s been a showdown between Mattis and the palace:

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly told the White House he would resign unless a Trump campaign loyalist was removed from her job.

DefenseNews reported on Wednesday that supporters of Mattis were expecting the White House to reassign Mira Ricardel from her job at the Office of Presidential Personnel.

According to the report, Ricardel is a former member of Trump’s campaign who is seen as “a loyal soldier who is looking out for the interests of the President.”

Sources told DefenseNews that Ricardel was “a roadblock for nominees,” making it difficult for Mattis to fill top-level positions at the Pentagon.

Ricardel has allegedly imposed an ideological purity test that blocked many potential nominees. Sources said that the White House has blacklisted all candidates who signed “never Trump” letters during the election.

A source within the administration said that Ricardel’s opposition to “politically unacceptable” candidates was seen as a “badge of honor” in the White House.

“Mattis told the White House either Mira goes, or he walks,” one Pentagon source explained to Defense News. “They blinked.”

That full story is here. I have no doubt there will be more intrigue oozing out of Bedlam, and no doubt, Mr. Tweet will be back once again.

The What Healthcare? Roundup.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a health care news conference to oppose Republicans’ effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a health care news conference to oppose Republicans’ effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Okay, ready for all the bad? Here’s the current reading list:

Trumpcare could cost 24 million people their insurance, government analysis finds.

The Congressional Budget Office released its long awaited analysis of Trumpcare on Monday afternoon, and its findings were grim.

The CBO found that 14 million fewer Americans would be insured by 2018 under the House GOP’s health care plan. By 2026, a full 24 million people would have gone uninsured relative to the number of people expected to be insured under the Affordable Care Act. The increase stems mostly from Trumpcare’s repeal of the individual mandate and changes to Medicaid.

White House analysis finds Trumpcare is even worse than the CBO estimated.

An internal White House analysis concluded that House Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill, called the American Health Care Act, will cause up to 26 million people to lose their insurance coverage over the next decade, according to a copy of the analysis obtained by Politico.

Here’s how many people could die if Trumpcare becomes law.

Approximately 17,000 people could die in 2018 who otherwise would have lived if a House Republican health proposal endorsed by the Trump administration becomes law. By 2026, the number of people killed by Trumpcare could grow to approximately 29,000 in that year alone.

Determining the exact number of deaths that could occur each year due to a lack of access to insurance is not an exact science. But ThinkProgress calculated these estimates by examining two sources.

Premiums under Trumpcare would be lower for all the wrong reasons.

Despite the fact that a CBO report projected that 24 million more people would be uninsured under Trumpcare, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R) is bragging about its lower premiums. But premiums would be lower because people would buy less generous plans and fewer older people would be able to buy coverage. […] But the premiums are lower because insurance would be so expensive for older people that they would exit the market and become uninsured. Under the House GOP plan, insurance companies would be allowed to charge five times more for older enrollees. Under the ACA, they could only charge three times more for older enrollees than younger people. This means there would be a larger share of younger people in the nongroup market and a smaller share of older people.

Trump signals his willingness to put even deeper cuts into Trumpcare.

Trumpcare is bleeding out.

Democrats oppose the bill en masse. Members of the Tea Party Caucus are deriding it as “Obamacare Lite.” And the more centrist wing of the Republican Party feels queasy at the prospect of voting for a bill that, according to Congressional Budget Office projections, would cause 24 million people to go without insurance over the next decade.

Virtually no one likes the proposed Obamacare replacement, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and President Donald Trump aside. And so Trump, the dealmaker in chief, is reportedly looking to modify the legislation in order to win over a handful of new allies.

Specifically, he’s looking to his right.

Just hours after the CBO released its projections, Politico reported that the White House wants Trumpcare amended so that it will appeal to the House Republicans’ Tea Party wing. Among other things, that would mean phasing in the bill’s Medicaid cuts next year, rather than putting them off until 2020 as the legislation currently does.

The Political Email Entanglement: Wayne Tracker.

email

Oh, politicians and their email. If one is guilty of committing an email no-no, they all are. Honestly, it’s when politicians try to be smart that they plumb the depths of stupid. Emailitis is doing the rounds of many new appointees. We’ll start with Wayne Tracker, also known as Rex Tillerson. What a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.

Another alias email account — that of “Wayne Tracker”— is poised to cause problems for a high-level official, this time former Exxon CEO and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Tillerson used an alias email account from at least 2008 to 2015 to discuss climate change, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said in a court filing Monday.

Schneiderman, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are currently investigating whether Exxon defrauded the public by engaging in a campaign to discredit climate science, propping up the value of its oil and gas reserves. The Wayne Tracker email account — Tillerson’s middle name is Wayne — was discovered in the course of the investigation, known as the Exxon Knew case.

“This is a significant development in Schneiderman’s investigation into what Exxon knew about climate change, when it knew it, and what the company did to conceal it,” Naomi Ages, Greenpeace’s lead on the climate liability project, said in a statement. “Was Rex Tillerson that worried about climate risks for Exxon? Or was he more worried about the risk of revealing them to his shareholders and to the public? Or was it both?”

Documents uncovered in 2015 suggest that as far back as the 1970s, Exxon scientists knew that burning fossil fuels were the primary contributor to climate change.

Environmentalists have long been saying that to prevent catastrophic climate change, humanity needs to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. But Exxon — as well as the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests — have worked against that effort, funding attempts to discredit the theory of global warming.

It is illegal for a company to withhold liability risks from its shareholders.

[…]

It has come to light that, as governor of Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence conducted official business via an AOL account that was subsequently hacked.

[…]

EPA head Scott Pruitt’s emails are also under scrutiny. His former office, the Oklahoma Attorney General, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit to force the release of emails between Pruitt, his deputies, and oil and gas interests. Pruitt also used a private email account to conduct official business, a fact he denied during his Senate confirmation hearing.

For all the people screaming over Hillary Clinton using a private, secured server for emails, to the point of wanting her locked up, where’s all the yelling over Pruitt, Pence, and Tillerson? Why is it their particular fuck-ups and deliberate obfuscation and lying is okay? It’s not even making minor scandal points among the Trumpholes, which goes to show, I suppose, they never actually gave one tiny shit about Ms. Clinton’s emails, they simply used it as an excuse, and unfortunately, it’s one that worked, as we now find ourselves neck deep in a corrupt regime.

Think Progress has the full story.

McCrory: Sweet Schadenfreude.

Pat McCrory

Pat McCrory.

There are times schadenfreude is ever so sweet, and this is one of them. Pat McCrory, that eternal bigot, is now whining that his bigotry is interfering with him finding a job. It turns out that a lot of people aren’t terribly interested in hiring an attention-pandering bigot. Who knew?

In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, McCrory complained that his decision to champion HB2 — the infamous “bathroom bill” that banned transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice — was hurting his career prospects.

“People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot,’” McCrory explained to the newspaper. “Which is the last thing I am.”

Unfuckingbelievable. He still clings to this insistence that he’s not a bigot, oh no, why he’s a champion superhero, protecting peeing people!

McCrory said that while he’s been considered for part-time teaching positions at some universities, campuses have been reluctant to hire him over fears that he might spark a backlash among students, who would then respond with disruptive protests.

“That’s not the way our American system should operate – having people purged due to political thought,” he complained.

Oh no, don’t be dishonest, Pat. This isn’t a case of thought crime. You did much more than have an unpopular, stupid, bigoted political thought. You drove the bigoted HB2 at any and all cost, even when your own constituents stood against it, and you were costing your state millions upon millions of dollars. That’s different from having a political thought. Our ‘American’ system should not be stuffed to the rafters with incompetent bigots, either, but it is, and people have the right to oppose them, which they did. You lost your job through your own actions, and you have not taken one step back on your draconian views.

McCrory’s complaints echo similar comments he made recently during a podcast interview in which he claimed that “if you disagree with the politically correct thought police on this new definition of gender, you’re a bigot, you’re the worst of evil.”

Oh For Fuck’s Sake! You godsdamned piece of shit masquerading as a human being! Such a fucking liar. This has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness, nor thought police, nor a ‘new’ definition of gender, and you are a fucking bigot, a terrible, toxic, venomous one, and yes, you are on the side of evil. Someone should have, at some point, taught you there are consequences to both speech and actions. There are *four* pages on Affinity, all posts about McCrory’s evil legislation, and yet all he can manage to do is whine about what a victim he is. And here I thought it was only us SJW snowflakes who did that. Tsk.

Via Raw Story.

Imprecatory Mutterings Against Nazgul Judges.

Lou Engle speaking at POTUS Shield Heartbeat Ohio conference, March 10, 2017.

Lou Engle speaking at POTUS Shield Heartbeat Ohio conference, March 10, 2017.

A whole lot of Christians, and much of Christianity is ineffably daft, you only need to read the bible to confirm it, or listen to people like Lou Engle, who seems to have a bit of trouble differentiating between the book of myths and the Lord of the Rings series by Tolkien. Ah well, they’re close enough, right? If you don’t know, imprecatory prayer is a specific type of prayer – basically, it’s asking ol’ Jehovah to go full court psycho on someone you don’t like, or view as an enemy. Psalms is stuffed full of ugly, gruesome imprecatory prayers, like so:

Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth … let them be as cut in pieces. … The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. Psalm 58:6-10

Okay, onto the ineffable batshit daftness of Engle, who has set his sights on federal judges.

Dominionist Lou Engle, taking part in multi-day Ohio gathering of the Religious Right group POTUS Shield called on Friday for God to “sweep away” Supreme Court justices and federal judges who would uphold Roe v. Wade, suggesting that God could do so by converting them or killing them.

POTUS Shield is an operation launched by self-proclaimed apostles and prophets, many affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation, to pray for the Trump administration. The group is holding a multi-day prayer rally at Frank Amedia’s Touch Heaven Ministries Church in Canfield, Ohio, this week. Amedia was a prominentsupporter of Donald Trump, who campaigned at a worship event alongside Amedia, and for a time served as the Trump campaign’s volunteer “liaison of Christian policy.” On Friday morning, Lou Engle took the microphone and began to talk about abortion and the federal courts.

Engle said that during a recent five-day fast, he had a dream about women gathering to hear the book of Esther taught. Someone in the dream said that there are two words in the book of Esther that mean “Nazgul,” which Engle stated is the name of “the Witch King” of the ringwraiths in the Lord of the Rings, the “most powerful being of darkness and death” who could be killed by no man, but who is defeated by the King’s daughter as she proclaimed, “I am no man.” Engle said the dream means that God is raising up an Esther movement of conservative women. “We decree it,” shouted Engle. “The voice of Esther is coming to take out the Nazgul, the principalities of witchcraft and death that demand bloodshed for the fueling of the agenda of darkness.”

My first thought is that perhaps a five day fast is a day or two too much for Mr. Engle. Not that I altogether believe he did one in the first place. A number of christians have interesting rules when it comes to fasting, rules which allow drinks other than water, and certain foodstuffs. That said, telling your congregants you did a five day fast lends some sort of holy credence to your declarations, no matter how utterly batshit they may be, and there’s a load of guano in that, uh, dream. It’s interesting how often references to Tolkien come up in christian batshittery, it’s easy to get the idea they’d love to co-opt it into the bible somehow. Okay, so, conservative anti-choice women are going to…what, start murdering judges, or medical personnel, or women who might be coming out of a clinic? Hard to tell exactly who they think is responsible for the ‘bloodshed’ (abortion) fueling the agenda of darkness.

It’s always an agenda to these people, everyone has an agenda except them.

“God sweep away the judges,” Engle prayed. “Sweep away the Nazgul, the Haman spirit of death. We decree, God, the sweeping of the Supreme Court.”

Oh. Judges it is, then! Odd, calling imprecation down on the Supreme Court, as most of the justices are conservatives asses. I guess it doesn’t matter, Jehovah had better curse someone, so why not them? Will Jehovah understand the desired target? I don’t recall there being a godly message wherein Jehovah talked about reading Tolkien. Oh, the Haman business? Haman is the antagonist in the Esther story.

As we noted earlier this week, Engle called for a three-day Esther Fast to protect Trump from witchcraft; he said women around the world are praying for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and asking God, “pull down these Hamans, remove ‘em, either—” and there he stopped mid-sentence to make a point to those who might be squeamish about his rhetoric:

There’s video at the main link.

I tell you, the church can’t be humanistic right now. I feel this in my spirit. We’re so concerned about these Hamans that we’re not concerned about the millions of babies! I say that we believe that Donald Trump, President Trump, is a Jehu as well as a Cyrus. And I’ve been praying, ‘remove the house of Ahab.’ “We need to begin to pray to sweep away the House of Ahab,” Engle said.

Jehovah commanded Jehu to perform a series of mass murders, killing all of Ahab’s relatives who had ever pissed against a wall.  2 Kings 9:6-8 / 2 Kings 10:30 / 2 Chronicles 22:7 – but, Jehovah also condemned the genocide: Hosea 1:4.

“We declare that you are the God of the reversal of Haman’s decrees,” he said. “We declare the reversal of the decree of ’73, Roe v Wade … We declare the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The powers of Nazgul, witchcraft and death are being reversed now over this nation.”

At this point, there’s a whole lot about Engle going on about how Jehovah destroyed the Politburo. After that, Engle and Amedia get back on track, talking in particular about Justice Sotomayer, who they seem to find particularly problematic:

It turns out that both Amedia and Engle have been praying specifically for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to have “an encounter with the living God” so “that she would see things from the mind of Christ, no longer from darkness, but from light, and that she would judge from light.” Engle, who said (wrongly) that Sotomayor’s name means “greater salvation,” prayed that God would “invade her with a dream” and return her to her Catholic roots. “Give us that soul, Lord,” he prayed.

At one point Engle said, “no one wants anybody to die” and that he prays that they get converted, but that when God starts to work he raises up kings and brings them down. Said Amedia, “He can haunt them in the middle of the night.” Amedia talked about his own dream, in which a broom went up one side of the Supreme Court and down the other, but this was not just a house-cleaning broom, but a broom “that brings destruction.”

“The Lord showed me the entire federal court system was getting shook and cleaned,” said Amedia, praising legislation designed to break up the 9th circuit–which he called a “fruitcake court”—and create a new circuit court whose judges Trump would get to appoint.

Amedia said there are 110 federal court vacancies on the federal courts, enough, Engle said, to create “the possibility of shifting the justice system for years.”

Right, they don’t want anyone to die, they are just praying that Jehovah kills them. There’s more blather, then the ending:

It’s not just judges who Engle thinks are asking for God’s judgment. Engle had a warning for “those who are funding anarchy.” God is slow to anger, Engle said, but when His time comes, He will “seize the initiative.”

So, not just judges. Everyone, be sure to listen for Jehovah knockin’ at your door. Sure it will happen right away. Or it might be a Ringwraith, who knows?

Via RWW.