There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
So why do Republicans hate Obamacare so much? It’s not because they have better ideas; as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, they’re coming up empty-handed on the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” It’s not, I’m sorry to say, because they are deeply committed to Americans’ right to buy the insurance policy of their choice.
No, mainly they hate Obamacare for two reasons: It demonstrates that the government can make people’s lives better, and it’s paid for in large part with taxes on the wealthy. Their overriding goal is to make those taxes go away. And if getting those taxes cut means that quite a few people end up dying, remember: freedom!
Rand Paul, Tuesday: I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.
Rand Paul, 2012: You need to have people within your own party that have the wherewithal to stand up to you. If a Republican does injustice, I’ll be up on the floor saying the same thing.
If the Republicans in the Senate were really as concerned about a renegade presidency as they claim to be on Twitter and in anonymous mumblings to various reporters, they’d join with Democrats to block [Mnuchin’s] nomination. It only takes three of them, and they all could cite Mnuchin’s dubious testimony to the committee as a very plausible reason for doing so.
There was absolutely no chance of that ever happening, however. Nobody—except Bernie Sanders, who said it all the time—wants to get up and state flat out that the business model of people like Stephen Mnuchin, the people who immiserated millions out of sheer animal greed, was plain vanilla bunco fraud. This was really the last chance to make that point before these gombeen yahoos do it all over again.
The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper’s harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying.
I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged. The billions of dollars we have spent as a nation on public education, only to have millions of kids trapped in schools that fail them and never really promote and protect their intelligence and prepare them for the world that they all deserve. They shouldn’t be restricted by the zip code where they live. They should be lifted up.
This has all been a colossus failure, and nobody wants to talk about that. They want to talk about it’s always zing. It’s always playing gotcha. There’s no question that when you look at the contributions made by the media, money contributions, they went to Hillary Clinton. We have all the headlines, people should be embarrassed. Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go. They are on panels every Sunday. They’re on cable news every day. Who’s the first editorial—the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names.
I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go? The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.
And yet we deal with him every single day. We turn the other cheek. If you are part of team Trump, you walk around with these gaping, seeping wounds every single day, and that’s fine. I believe in a full and fair press. I’m here every Sunday morning. I haven’t slept in a month. I believe in a full and fair press. But with the free press comes responsibility. And responsibility is to get the story right. Biased coverage is easy to detect. Incomplete coverage impossible to detect. That’s my major grievance, is the media are not—they’re not giving us complete coverage. President Trump has signed all these executive orders this week. He’s met with these heads of states. He’s done so many things to stimulate the economy, to boost wages, to create jobs. Where’s the coverage?
The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.
“On June 16, 2015, the United States Senate voted 78-21 to adopt an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 that reaffirmed the prohibition on torture by limiting interrogation techniques to those in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual does not include waterboarding or other forms of enhanced interrogation. The law requires the field manual to be updated to ensure it ‘complies with the legal obligations of the United States and reflects current, evidence-based, best practices for interrogation that are designed to elicit reliable and voluntary statements and do not involve the use or threat of force.’ Furthermore, the law requires any revisions to the field manual be made available to the public 30 days prior to the date the revisions take effect.
(R), Arizona and chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, doubles down on his "I'll see Trump in court" language. This is definitely where the rubber meets the road. Will McCain actually hold the line, or will he fall into line when they either a) resume torturing without regard to the law or b) just revise the Field Manual to include whatever forms of torture they prefer? I'm guessing there will be a thirty day public comment period for which the announcement of said comment period and the contents of the text to be commented on is classified or otherwise disallowed from release to the public. Later, when the practice of torture inevitably leaks in a politically damaging way, various members of Congress and media sources will reveal that, oh, yeah, we knew about and sat on that for months. Didn't seem important what with all those Hillary emails and the Twitter. And so the republic burns.It will not be my intention to do anything that will benefit any American.
What we are left with from all this is that a high level Russian official confirmed in early November that there had, in fact, been meetings between the Trump campaign and officials from his country. We also know that the Trump campaign lied about the involvement of Carter Page in the organization and that he took a leave of absence when allegations that he had met with high level Russian officials surfaced.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
About those meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials
I think we ought to get on with our lives. I think that computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on. We have speed, we have a lot of other things, but I’m not sure we have the kind the security that we need.
Lemkin 