Trump's Card

[ursus arctos]

He gave them their initial ask in return for nothing.

[Lang Spoon]

I dunno. Favour deferred then is how he'll see it, and if the Dems don't help him out a jam in return, he'll fuck the Dreamers or whoever up again, no matter his tweet pinkie promise.

[ursus arctos]

Nah

When the wingnuts control both houses and the presidency and you can get real help for the country at no political cost, you take it.

The fact that it drove Ryan, McConnell and much of the right wing media nuts is a bonus.

[San Bernardhinault]

Ursus is right. Schumer literally asked for a 3 month extension on the debt ceiling, and the Harvey relief package. And Trump agreed. I don't understand the logistics of this, because neither Trump nor Democrats control House and Senate, but somehow Trump agreeing to what Schumer asked for was enough, and made the Congressional Republicans vote for it too.

What I assumed could happen is Ryan could put his 24 month debt ceiling deal through Congress, and Trump and the Democrats would have to go with it, too.

Anyway, what this does is

(a) keeps government going (a win for Democrats, who were going to vote for this under any circumstances)
(b) get cash for Harvey and FEMA (a win for Democrats, who were going to vote for this under any circumstances)
(c) makes Republicans vote on the debt ceiling again in three months (which Democrats don't care about, because they're fine with raising the debt ceiling, but puts another vote on record for Republicans, except this time they don't get cover from the vote by voting on Harvey relief, so they hate it)

[Gerontophile]

Want to find out about the vote in 2016? Follow Mike Farb on Twitter. He's the guy who mentioned about exact percentage number wins in various districts.

That link shows a certain... disparity in Fresno County, CA, which just happens to be represented by Devin Nunes.

None of it is evidence of actual rigging, but altogether it shows that something was going on.

[Gerontophile]

I didn't want to put this in the Twitter thread.

https://twitter.com/KrangTNelson/sta...63916988575744

If that isn't made clear, Ted Cruz liked a porn post which has shown up on his Twitter feed.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Huckerby Sanders wasting as much as time as possible on whether somebody at ESPN should be sacked. She started by wasting time talking about an 11 year old who wrote to Trump.

[Tubby Isaacs]

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/gop...sia-1505509918

A U.S. congressman contacted the White House this week trying to broker a deal that would end WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s U.S. legal troubles in exchange for what he described as evidence that Russia wasn’t the source of hacked emails published by the antisecrecy website during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The proposal made by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.), in a phone call Wednesday with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, was apparently aimed at resolving the probe of WikiLeaks prompted by Mr. Assange’s publication of secret U.S. government documents in 2010 through a pardon or other act of clemency from President Donald Trump.

Pardoning Assange? How does that work?

[San Bernardhinault]

Ugh! The disastrously bad Graham-Cassidy shitty healthcare bill is now at risk of getting the votes it needs in the Senate.

For those who aren't following, the Senate needs to pass healthcare by September 30th if it wants to do it with 50 votes. That's because they're doing it as technically a reconcialiation on this year's budget. Next years budget will have reconciliation associated with tax reform, so fucking up healthcare has to happen in this year's budget which means it has to be done by September 30th.

We'd all thought we were in the clear, but Lindsay Graham and Bill Cassidy have created a bill that basically shovels a little bit of extra cash to small Republican states, block grants everything so we know that public healthcare funding will collapse, and removes pretty much any requirement on the states on what they actually have to spend their money on, so they might not bother providing public healthcare at all. Also, the block-grant ends in 2026, so after 2026 the states are paying for public healthcare entirely. It's a monstrous, and monstrously bad bill. But there's still the chance it will pass in the next two weeks.

Possibly even worse - nobody's going to get a chance to amend it, because it has to get voted through quickly, and then the House - if it passes it - can't send amendments back to the senate for a vote because that could be filibustered,

[Lang Spoon]

So McCain's genius feint was all for nothing.

[Lang Spoon]

Another world is possible. But that's past tense most likely now.

[San Bernardhinault]

We don't know yet.

McCain seems to be one of the ones who might not be voting for it. Along with Murkowski, Collins (because it defunds planned parenthood, and they'd lose their status as reasonable moderates) and Rand Paul (because he's a nutter who thinks it retains too much of Obamacare). McCain claims he wants everything done through the regular order and process of the senate, which this definitely hasn't been - so he might still vote against. On the other hand, it's a Lindsay Graham thing and I think only newlyweds like each other as much as Graham and McCain do, so he might vote for it just for his friend.

[San Bernardhinault]

There's a weird set of things coming out of Trumpland right now.

After the deal on the debt ceiling with the Democrats; and then the supposed proto-deal of DACA with Schumer and Pelosi; you begin to wonder if something's afoot.

Now there are rumours that perhaps the US is trying to find a way to stay in the Paris Accords while saving face and pretending it's renegotiating.

Also, it looks like Trump is going to actively stump for Luther Strange in Alabama's primary: this puts him directly against Steve Bannon and others on the nutter wing of the Republican party like Sarah Palin.

What I would guess is going on is that now some Republican insiders like Preibus, and nationalist outsiders like Bannon, have been ousted, that the generals in the Whitehouse are fully in charge. This is not actually a good thing, having a de facto military coup. But the generals will have certainly been immersed in the national security implications of climate change, and probably fairly heavily schooled in civic and constitutional norms, so what we're seeing would tie in with that theory.

It's miserable that the choices we now have are a military coup or an unbound Trump, but it's actually fairly nice to have a couple of weeks where things aren't going to shit as fast as they were.

The irony of all this, though, is that it should drive both the Trumpers and the Republicans insane. It can't be good for Trump in the long term.

[ursus arctos]

McCain slammed the health care nonsense today. There is no way he is voting for it,

We always need to be vigilant, but they look to be several votes short.

[ursus arctos]

Meanwhile, among the myriad White House counsel:

[Satchmo Distel]

Trump at the UN will be car crash, unwatchable or get the popcorn out, depending on your POV. Potentially hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

For example, how does Trump get consensus from an organization he's been trashing for years?

[Ginger Yellow]

For example, how does Trump get consensus from an organization he's been trashing for years?

To be fair, I'm not sure he'll be any worse on that front than when Bush appointed John Bolton as ambassador to the UN.

[Flynnie]

Haley managing to get unanaimous Security Council decisions on North Korea suggests she is doing some surprisingly effective work there.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Is Roy Moore's "9/11 punishment from God" going to hurt him in Alabama?

[ursus arctos]

You can be so jejeune

[Tubby Isaacs]

Won't it help Luther Strange?

[ursus arctos]

It is a Republican primary in Alabama, Tubbs.

[WOM]

Great supervillain handle on that guy.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Doesn't it slightly get Bin Laden off the hook if he's God's agent of vengeance?

[Ginger Yellow]

Bear in mind he got elected as chief justice of the Supreme Court in Alabama. Twice, once after being sacked.