Whatever is convenient to the needs of the Republican party

[gotsnowgotslush]

Whatever is convenient to the needs of the Republican party

It is convenient.

It is not convenient.

Simple.

The deaths at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was convenient for the Trump White House.
(They said it to Washington Post.)

Not very convenient for the Republican party. It is election time, again. The teens are carrying the bodies of the dead, and the injured students carry their bullet wounds and lost limbs. Soaked in innocents blood, is inconvenient when looking for votes.

It is convenient to have Donald Trump speak with both sides of his mouth. It is convenient to have many White House aides and operatives to put words in Donald Trump's mouth. It is convenient to have Extremist Right Wing activists to echo Donald Trump's words, and distort them.(The words emerge from Donald Trump's mouth in a distorted condition. After a year in office, we have expectations, that it will be an outright lie, a contradiction, a "joke," a misrepresentation, misinformation, misleading, and malice.)


The loss of their futures, and their lives. The deaths of classmates, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, the grief of parents, the loss of parents, the loss of teachers and coaches, the loss of their school is not convenient to those who are suffering. The school will be demolished, and the land will have a monument to the victims of Republican greed.

Rob Porter was inconvenient to the Republican party. It was convenient that the mass murder at a Florida high school interrupted the news coverage focusing on the White House. They admitted it-


"For everyone, it (the murder of teens and teachers at a school) was a distraction or a reprieve."

(The massacre was a convenient break, for the Presidents Day weekend.)

“For everyone, it was a distraction or a reprieve,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal conversations. “A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled."

The three-day Presidents’ Day weekend added to the hiatus, with Trump traveling to his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., with only a few aides and giving others on his beleaguered staff a chance to rest and recuperate.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...76b4fe57ff7_story.html?utm_term=.6f9e9e462f13




In the week leading up to the shooting in Parkland, Fla., the White House was engulfed in a scandal surrounding staff secretary Rob Porter, who was accused of domestic violence and emotional abuse by two of his ex-wives.



http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat...da-school-shooting-reprieve-article-1.3830638


The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida are inconvenient to the Republican party.

Alex Schachter

Alex, 14, was one of the 17 people killed in the mass shooting at the high school on Feb. 14 at the hands of a lone gunman.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article201000494.html



Alyssa Alhadeff, 14

Martin Duque, 14

Jaime Guttenberg, 14

Cara Loughran, 14


Alaina Petty, 14


Gina Montalto, 14

Luke Hoyer, 15

Peter Wang, 15


Carmen Schentrup, 16

Joaquin Oliver, 17

Nicholas Dworet, 17

Helena Ramsay, 17


Meadow Pollack, 18


Scott Beigel, 35 geography teacher

Aaron Feis, 37 football coach, protector of teens, hero


Chris Hixon, 49 athletic director

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/broward/article200220844.html

The picture of a mass murder committed by a young man using an AK assault rifle to massacre students in Broward county, Florida is inconvenient.

It was convenient for the Republican party to remove restrictions of AK ownership, aimed at mentally ill individuals.

Chelsea Clinton
@ChelseaClinton
·
16h
Jim - could you please return to attacking me (or really any grownup) instead of the courageous #Parkland students? Thank you

https://wonkette.com/630109/gateway...-agents-of-the-deep-state-he-is-just-libeling

Bring back the ban on the AK

Compared with the 10-year period before the ban, the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37 percent, and the number of people dying from gun massacres fell by 43 percent. But after the ban lapsed in 2004, the numbers shot up again — an astonishing 183 percent increase in massacres and a 239 percent increase in massacre deaths.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph..._term=.98b611326168&__twitter_impression=true


https://www.newyorker.com/news/news...-try-to-understand-the-shooting-they-survived




Then security guards yelled at them to go to the front and get down on the floor, between rows of seats. Someone was called to leave the room, and everyone got up; this time, the guards yelled louder, telling them to get down again. “We were very scared by this point,” Taylor said. “But still confused.”


https://www.newyorker.com/news/news...-try-to-understand-the-shooting-they-survived


This is America, where you do not get arrested until you do something wrong, if you are a White Supremacist. You will get molested, raped, beaten, killed, if you insist on your rights, if you are not on the exception list.

The teens insisting on their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness might get more injuries.

 

[curly1]

What does white supremacy have to do with this?

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Donald Trump proved to be on the exception list.

He is a scofflaw, with other people's money. That money bought Donald Trump a free pass.



"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.”

-Donald Trump

Republicans Dispatch Trump to Save a House Seat


January 17, 2018

“Republicans are scrambling to save a heavily conservative House seat in western Pennsylvania, dispatching President Trump to the district on Thursday while preparing a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to stave off another embarrassing special election defeat in a district that was gerrymandered to stay Republican,” the New York Times reports.

“Holding just a 24-seat majority, with retirements of veteran lawmakers piling up, House Republicans can scarcely allow Democrats to snatch a seat they have not even competed for in recent elections.”

“And Mr. Trump is loath to suffer another electoral humiliation, particularly in a district that he carried by 19 percentage points in 2016.”


https://politicalwire.com/2018/01/17/republicans-dispatch-trump-save-house-seat/

National Republicans say state and federal GOP officials plan to challenge Pennsylvania’s new congressional map in federal court as early as Wednesday.

“The suit will highlight the state Supreme Court’s rushed decision that created chaos, confusion, and unnecessary expense in the 2018 election cycle,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Matt Gorman said in a statement Tuesday morning. He said state and federal Republicans will sue in federal court “as soon as tomorrow to prevent the new partisan map from taking effect.”

The renewed vow of a court challenge came a day after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court imposed a new congressional map to replace one it had declared an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.If successful, the challenge would throw voters and candidates into limbo weeks before the first ballots are to be cast in the primary election in May.


http://www.post-gazette.com/news/po...reme-court-federal-court/stories/201802200117

 

[Hypoxia]

National Republicans say state and federal GOP officials plan to challenge Pennsylvania’s new congressional map in federal court as early as Wednesday.

What do you bet the federal court will say, "It's a state matter; not our jurisdiction," punting nicely?

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

February 15, 2018

Investigators from the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office spoke with at least two dozen Missouri lawmakers on Wednesday as part of a criminal investigation into Gov. Eric Greitens.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article200354564.html

Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe, Sen. Rob Schaaf, Rep. Nate Walker, Rep. Robert Cornejo, are faced with an inconvenient scandal.


Gov. Eric Greitens was indicted Thursday afternoon by a St. Louis grand jury on a felony charge of invasion of privacy. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), was seen being led down a hallway in the local courthouse by several St. Louis city deputies, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.


The allegations against Greitens surfaced shortly after he delivered his annual State of the State address last month. The ex-husband of the woman with whom Greitens had an affair gave St. Louis TV station KMOV an audio recording of her confessing the affair and accusing Greitens of threatening to blackmail her.


About 3:45 p.m., on the first floor of the Carnahan Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, a Post-Dispatch reporter saw Greitens being led down a hallway by several St. Louis city deputies.


The indictment apparently stems from allegations made in media reports last month that, during the course of an extramarital affair, he took a photograph of his bound and partially nude lover...


"...he took a photograph of his bound and partially nude lover and threatened to publicize it if she exposed the affair."


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_3599554f-fcc4-551e-a0ae-b83368208a30.html


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_3599554f-fcc4-551e-a0ae-b83368208a30.html



The woman said she complied and that when she arrived, Greitens asked her to follow him downstairs, where he initiated a consensual sexual encounter, allegedly taping her hands to exercise rings and blindfolding her. The woman claimed that, at that point, Greitens stepped back and took a photo of her as she stood naked.

“He stepped back, I saw a flash through the blindfold and he said, ‘You’re never going to mention my name, otherwise there will be pictures of me everywhere.'”

https://thinkprogress.org/greitens-affair-blackmail-8c11f96fbabd/

A handful of Republican lawmakers quickly called on Greitens to resign. And earlier this week, while debating a bill that would outlaw “revenge porn,” Republicans overwhelming supported amending the bill to make it a felony to threaten someone with releasing a sexually explicit photo.


. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner's office announced the indictment Thursday afternoon. About 3:45 p.m., on the first floor of the Carnahan Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, a Post-Dispatch reporter saw Greitens being led down a hallway by several St. Louis city deputies. Officials later confirmed Greitens had been taken into custody and then booked at the St. Louis Justice Center.


Gardner's statement said a grand jury found probable cause to believe Greitens violated a Missouri statute that makes it a felony if a person transmits the image contained in the photograph or film in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_3599554f-fcc4-551e-a0ae-b83368208a30.html



http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article201629499.html

Just this morning, before the indictment was made public, the Republican Governors Association lauded Greitens for proposing to cut taxes in Missouri, tweeting that through his tax reform package the governor is “focused on returning money to the pockets of taxpayers—not government.

https://www.motherjones.com/politic...ns-was-just-indicted-for-invasion-of-privacy/

What happened in 2015, that led him decide to abandon the Democratic party ?

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

With a reported five million members, the NRA spent $54 million pushing preferred candidates in 2016 elections, $31 million of which went toward the presidential race.

In 2017, an additional $10 million dollars went toward gun lobbying, a cause led by 48 full time lobbyists, the majority of which work directly for the NRA.

These lobbyists dedicate their time and energy to pushing their agenda to influence policymaking — in this case, the protection of the Second Amendment and, by extension, protecting guns. They befriend congressmen, donate to their campaigns, and wage costly smear campaigns against politicians who refuse support or remain neutral.


http://www.dw.com/en/guns-and-wall-street-a-match-made-in-heaven/a-42720365

 

[Hypoxia]

These lobbyists dedicate their time and energy to pushing their agenda to influence policymaking — in this case, the protection of the Second Amendment and, by extension, protecting guns. They befriend congressmen, donate to their campaigns, and wage costly smear campaigns against politicians who refuse support or remain neutral.

NRA fights to protect only the second half of the Second Amendment and ignores the beginning that justifies the rest. But it's not like intellectual dishonesty is new, hey? They're rather like anti-choice asswipes whose interest in life ends at birth. Fetus = sacred. Infant = blah. Kill off infant-and-mothers programs. Kill off the kids once they're born, too. Typical. Protect firearms but not the rationale; invent some bullshit excuses.

But I digress. Now we see that NRA is owned by Putin. Who cares?

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

I.C.E. has haunted Boston, and other MA towns, up and down the East Coast. They arrested activists, moms and dads, split up families. Took away good, honorable, respectable men and women that have been in the USA since they were children. No arrests, no police records. Just good community members and people that are welcome and wanted.


Want to see a picture of the head arsehole at ICE ?

At this link-

https://www.thestranger.com/feature...-the-guy-who-runs-the-seattle-office-fuck-him

/end gsgs comment


ICE is out of control," goes the headline at Slate. "Donald Trump's ICE is tearing families apart," goes the headline at the New Yorker.


"ICE wants to deport the caregiver of a 6-year-old paraplegic boy," goes the headline at Daily Kos. "ICE targets sanctuary cities, arrests 33 in Northwest," goes the headline at NPR.

Reading these stories, we learn that ICE just arrested a 55-year-old chemistry professor in Lawrence, Kansas, who's lived in this country for 31 years and has three children, all of whom are American citizens; according to the Washington Post, he was arrested on his front lawn in front of his children, and his wife was threatened with arrest if she tried to hug her husband goodbye.

We learn that after ICE moved to deport a married man in Arizona who now has five children, one of whom has leukemia, the father was forced to take refuge in a church with his ailing son. We learn that ICE denied an appeal from an Ohio man who is a specially trained caregiver for a 6-year-old paraplegic boy who depends on his care. We learn that ICE ordered an HIV-positive gay man in Miami deported to Venezuela, a country in a state of economic collapse; since the man won't be able to get the medications he needs to keep him alive, his deportation amounts to a death sentence.

ICE is headquartered in Washington, DC, it has more than 400 field offices across the country, and 24 of those field offices are Enforcement and Removal Operation (ERO) centers. One of ICE's ERO centers is located in Seattle. The acting head of the Seattle ERO office is not an unknown bureaucrat, but an actual human being with a name: Marc J. Moore.

And you know what? Fuck that guy. Fuck Marc J. Moore.


-Dan Savage


Moore will oversee the arrests and deportations of DREAMers in Seattle after DACA expires on March 5.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

2018/03/04

On Sunday's "Meet the Press" former Obama White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough gave a wee bit more light on one of the most puzzling single incidents in the government attempts to warn the public of a campaign of Russian propaganda and espionage efforts bent at altering the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. McDonough was asked by host Chuck Todd whether he "stood by" a claim by former Vice President Joe Biden that Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, in the summer before the election, obstructed a fuller bipartisan warning of Russia’s actions to the American public.



CHUCK TODD:

You brought up the lack of sort of bipartisan, bipartisan urgency at the time. I want to play something Former Vice President Biden said about Mitch McConnell.

CHUCK TODD:

Is -- Do you stand by what he said, that Mitch McConnell is the reason why everything was a lower grade, sort of everything that you did in '16, that you couldn't be as robust in a bipartisan sense because Mitch McConnell didn't sign on?

DENIS MCDONOUGH:

What I know is that the intelligence community approached the, the entire leadership of the Congress --

CHUCK TODD:

So called Gang of Eight

DENIS MCDONOUGH:

In the early August--

CHUCK TODD:

Yeah

DENIS MCDONOUGH:


Several members of that group did not take the briefing until early September, 2016. Indication number one of a lack of urgency. Number two, the president asked the four leaders in a bipartisan meeting in the Oval Office to join him in IN asking the states to work with us on this question. It took over three weeks to get that statement worked out. It was dramatically watered down. You can ask Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, even the speaker--

CHUCK TODD:

And it was watered down on the insistence of Mitch McConnell?

DENIS MCDONOUGH:

Yes.

CHUCK TODD:

And nobody else?

DENIS MCDONOUGH:

Yes.


https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meet-press-march-4-2018-n853041

In being puzzled by McConnell’s actions, McDonough finds himself in the company of, well, all the rest of us; that even he is unable to offer any insights into McConnell’s reasoning is not terribly comforting.

What we know of the incident he is describing remains limited. President Obama had specifically summoned the top House and Senate leaders in an effort to gain their endorsement for what the White House envisioned as a bipartisan government-issued public warning of the Russian hacking efforts; this was done after an alarmed CIA Director John Brennan had sought out the top lawmakers for individual classified briefings on the subject:



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/trump-russia-cia-john-brennan.html


Why was Sen. McConnell, in particular, skeptical of the intelligence community's conclusions? Why did he believe he was better situated to understand the scope of Russian hacking, and its dangers, and possible ties to members of the Trump campaign team, than was the national intelligence community—to the point of blocking the public warning that intelligence community and the administration wanted to make until it had been, in McDonough's words, "dramatically watered down?" Why did he warn Obama that, if the White House made public the original, non-watered-down versions, he would publicly call that effort partisan?

Like McDonough, we simply don't know. McConnell has never offered a substantive accounting for his obstructions and, as of yet, other national lawmakers have shown little interest in exploring them.

But Sen. Mitch McConnell was presumably given the precise same information, by the CIA director, that Democrats like Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and Harry Reid had received; McConnell was apparently alone in both his skepticism and his insistence that the matter not be elevated to the extent that the Brennan and others desired.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...e-watered-down-before-2016-election#read-more

gsgs comment- I have read enough articles, over the years, to witness Sen. Mitch McConnell exhibit no reluctance, when it came to throwing a bi-partisan effort over the edge of a cliff. If it does not benefit Sen. Mitch McConnell personally, it does not concern him very much.

Biden: McConnell stopped Obama from calling out Russians

01/23/2018


Biden said he and former President Barack Obama worried that without a united front of bipartisanship, speaking out before the election would undermine the legitimacy of the election and American institutions in a way that would play into the Russians’ larger ambitions.

“Can you imagine if the president called a press conference in October, with this fella, Bannon, and company, and said, ‘Tell you what: Russians are trying to interfere in our elections and we have to do something about it,’” Biden said. “What do you think would have happened? Would things have gotten better, or would it further look like we were trying to delegitimize the electoral process, because of our opponent?”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...e-watered-down-before-2016-election#read-more


“The Obama administration requested that the Congressional leaders send this letter and they all did. It’s publicly available on the Internet for all to see,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell.

But a former Obama White House official on Tuesday afternoon echoed Biden's frustration with the Senate majority leader, pointing to the way Obama's White House chief of staff Denis McDonough described the dispute in an op-ed last summer.

“Our administration's interest in making sure the response was bipartisan wasn't for the sake of being bipartisan. It was necessary because we needed the buy-in from state and local election administrators (many of whom were Republican partisans and/or skeptical of federal government),” the official argued in an email. “Unfortunately, as is well documented, Senator McConnell was unwilling to help — only making matters worse.


https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/mitch-mcconnell-russia-obama-joe-biden-359531

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Conservatives Try Flattery, Whining to Get Trump to Turn on Tariffs


Tariffs equal nationalism equal socialism


author -ROY EDROSO

MARCH 5, 2018


Some of the old workhorses of conservatism saddled up for Trump-wrangling duty. “In fact, tariff hikes are really tax hikes,” protested Reagan-era free market enthusiast Larry Kudlow, joined by Arthur B. Laffer and Stephen Moore, in a widely syndicated article. These Three Caballeros of Rapacious Capitalism bade The Leader pursue instead “tax, regulatory, energy, and other pro-America policy changes that bring jobs and capital back to the United States.”

Perhaps remembering near the end that they were addressing not a roundtable of right-wing Chamber of Commerce types but a callous egomaniac, Kudlow & Co. finally appealed to his vanity: “Trump has made America almost overnight the best and most reliable place in the world to invest,” they keened. They also added that Reagan regretted his own protectionist actions on steel (taken to protect American icon Harley-Davidson), on the off chance Trump remembered who Reagan was.

So why did Trump make his tariff announcement? Some pundits opine it was fallout from an intellectual struggle among his advisers — no one was dumb enough to suggest the intellectual struggle was Trump’s, or that the decision was made out of a sense of patriotic duty. A few outlets did notice, though, that Carl Icahn, the Wall Street raider who helped steer Trump’s campaign and was set to join his administration until he became a political liability, dumped millions in steel-dependent stocks a week before Trump lowered the boom.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/0...tery-whining-to-get-trump-to-turn-on-tariffs/

BEFORE PUSHING TARIFFS, WILBUR ROSS HAD A MESSY HISTORY WITH THE U.S. STEEL INDUSTRY

March 5 2018

What’s not mentioned in the report is that Ross, whose net worth is estimated at around $700 million, made a good chunk of that fortune selling U.S. steel companies to a foreign entity. In 2002, Ross and his investing partners began buying up steel companies that were either in or near bankruptcy, including LTV Corp., Weirton, and Bethlehem Steel. They consolidated them into the International Steel Group and, in 2004, sold that company to the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, making some $2 billion in cash on the deal.


the time of the ISG sale, the Washington Post noted that Ross was able to make a stunning 12-fold gain on his initial investment in part by not paying steel workers’ pensions and retiree health care costs. But there was another way that Ross maximized his profits: by not putting up millions of dollars to ensure that the environmental messes associated with the plants he bought would be cleaned up.


Trump has taken Ross’s warning about foreign steel companies to heart. His plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel will impact all foreign countries — and could, many fear, spark a trade war. The news dispelled earlier reports that the president had lost faith in Ross and was frustrated by the 80-year-old commerce secretary’s tendency to fall asleep in meetings.


https://theintercept.com/2017/11/08/wilbur-ross-paradise-papers-trump-russia/


On Wednesday night, the White House had announced that a dozen executives from the steel and aluminum industry would gather at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the following day, for a special, tariff-themed announcement from the president. But as the hour of that summit drew close, senior White House officials began telling reporters that no trade announcement would be forthcoming — and that Trump had merely summoned the executives for a “listening session.”

The president has been thirsting for tariffs from the moment he took office — and he almost imposed them last summer. But lobbying from multinational companies, the Pentagon, and their friends in the West Wing convinced Trump that, at the very least, it would be a mistake to take such a divisive action while Obamacare repeal and tax reform were still pending before Congress.


http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/trump-finally-declares-his-trade-war.html


All these missteps can be traced back to Trump’s fatal flaw as a negotiator: his narcissism. “Negotiators get themselves in trouble when they’re blind to the perspective of other parties,” says Don Moore, a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been writing about Trump’s negotiation style since the start of his campaign. “I see the Trump administration making huge errors in their engagement with our partners because they have no appreciation of the other side’s interests. They speak in ways that imply great ignorance about our partners on the global stage, and they’re deeply arrogant about the rectitude of their own positions. That alienates partners.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...04/donald_trump_is_a_terrible_negotiator.html