“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN)
is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
Donald Trump, February 17, 2017
A discussion of the most interesting, useful and entertaining recent articles and observations on Trump, the Republicans, and politics generally from the enemies of the American People:
Why did Republicans fail to repeal Obamacare? There are many reasons, but I firmly agree with Jonathan Bernstein’s historical explanation in “A Republican Fiasco Years in the Making”:
Really, however, this is only the latest climax of a long cycle of Republican dysfunction which dates back to George H.W. Bush's administration, when House radicals upended Bush's budget deal with Democrats in a dramatic floor vote.
Those radicals, led by Newt Gingrich, eventually took over the Republican conference in 1995, and promptly shut down the government twice. They stripped the House of the resources it needed to legislate, and committees of their institutional memory by term-limiting their chairs. They capped it off with an irresponsible impeachment of a popular president. After that, Gingrich was gone, but the Republican House just got worse, with a decade marked by repeated mismanagement and corruption.
When Republicans regained their House majority in the 2010 election, they had a chance to change their ways, but they showed they were no different, even shutting down the government again.
Yes. Despite gaining unprecedented power, the Republicans remain a breathtakingly dysfunctional and incompetent political force — devoid of governing ability, enamored with dangerous, harebrained policies, riven by internal contradictions, consumed with finding enemies, driven by fear and contempt, divorced from reality and expertise, and enthralled by light-weight, cartoonish demagogues for leaders. They remain a combustible mix and a growing threat, dating back decades.
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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes must be investigated himself. Devin Nunes’s almost slapstick, but deadly serious, misconduct this week in rushing before the cameras, and to Trump in the White House, with supposedly exonerating intelligence intercepts (that were no such thing) re Trump’s false wiretapping claims, requires that Nunes himself be the subject for investigation into leaking classified information and obstruction of justice. The WashPo editorial board agrees:
We’ve said before that it was doubtful that an investigation headed by Mr. Nunes into Russia’s interference in the election could be adequate or credible. The chairman’s contradictory and clownish grandstanding makes that a certainty. His committee’s investigation should be halted immediately — and Mr. Nunes deserves to be subject to the same leaking probe he demanded for the previous disclosures.
Indeed, like so much else that Republicans touch, Nunes’s behavior threatens irreparable harm to one of the few remaining, functional pillars of government:
The leadership of the Hill’s two intelligence committees – one senior Democrat and one senior Republican from the House, and the same arrangement in the Senate – is one of last remaining pillars of cooperation on Capitol Hill. The relationship is close, happens almost entirely behind closed doors, and involves cooperative access and oversight of some of the country’s most secret covert programs.
Nunes has put a fracture in that long-held tradition that may not be patchable.
In addition, Nunes's misconduct is not stopping. On Friday Nunes unilaterally cancelled a hearing scheduled for Monday that would have featured three former Obama administration officials: DNI head James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and Sally Yates (whom Trump fired as acting attorney general).
Let’s stop indulging this low-rent nonsense. Prosecute this lackey, and send a needed message to the entire Republican party. (Prior thoughts here.)
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A Star is Born. Even Republican columnist Jennifer Rubin recognizes the House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) as the “breakout star” following the congressional hearing on the Trump-Russia connections: “It’s [Schiff’s] sort of precise, factual case — one that summons us to use common sense and reason — that will be necessary to cut through Trump’s fog of distraction and lies. Trump won’t be undone by dramatic rhetoric or showy performances. He can be revealed as a huckster and fraud only when facts and reason triumph over irrationality. If that comes to pass, a good amount of the credit should go to Schiff.”
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Nominee Gorsuch came across as the accomplice that he is. Gorsuch’s efforts to consummate the Republican theft of a Supreme Court seat appear to have worked. The hearing itself generated no spark, in no small part because Grouch behaved like an amiable prisoner-of-war who refused to answer any question but “name, rank and serial number?” Dahlia Lithwick pithily summed up the early goings:
If you’re keeping score after Day 1: Senate Democrats have now defrosted a trucker, name-checked Merrick Garland, and been lectured that Senate Republicans have no choice but to be mean because Democrats have no judicial theory, no coherent strategy, and no intellectual right to fill “Scalia’s seat.” On the other side of the aisle, the GOP has nothing but bottomless umbrage.
Sarah Posner similarly found Gorsuch’s refusal to answer many questions — including on the emoluments clause — to be frustrating. The collective effect was such that USA Today’s headline concluded: “Neil Gorsuch sails through Supreme Court confirmation hearing.”
Bottom line: Gorsuch is credentialed, smart, political and ambitious. He is the sort that has been grooming himself for a Supreme Court seat. While this would greatly surprise Gorsuch, he also has not yet demonstrated any particular talent or exceptional ability. What he has been is a loyal hack, a political striver, an obedient foot soldier and a safe, cautious careerist. If anything, he has succeeded by dint of having a few extra IQ points in a Republican party where that is a scarce commodity. By Supreme Court standards, he is relatively young — and he will do a good deal of damage in his early years. What is unknowable is whether he eventually will grow into a better Justice. For good or ill, he is about to embark on a 40 year or so career.
Christopher Kang at HuffPost has a good background piece on the dark money forces that have driven Gorsuch’s career and eventual Supreme Court nomination.
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Quotables.
- The town hall protestors won: “This is not to say the fight is over – because it’s not. The American Health Care Act, a.k.a. “Trumpcare,” has apparently died, but it’s unrealistic to think Republicans will simply give up on this issue and accept the Affordable Care Act as the law of the land. Health care proponents and their allies should remain vigilant, knowing that there are additional rounds to come.
But in the meantime, progressive activists and their allies can take a bow. They helped derail a dreadful and dangerous piece of legislation.” — Steve Bennen
- Speaker in name only. “Ryan will remain speaker because no one else wants the job, but in a sense he does not “lead” the House Republicans, let alone the House. He is continuously caught in the crossfire between the moderates and the far right, just as his predecessor was. He will have his hands full keeping the House together in the future on controversial, “hard” votes. The lesson members learned was to look after their own interests. Calling Ryan and Trump’s bluff worked well for them.” — Jennifer Rubin
- An uncertain coup? “Donald Trump took the oath of office two months ago, but is not yet running a real presidency. His administration, thus far, largely is playing like a junta that surprised the royal guards and seized the palace ― while still remaining unable to pacify the capital city, let alone inspire the countryside.” — Howard Fineman
- That didn't go well: “Not since a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield told the Watergate committee in 1973 that President Richard Nixon had bugged his own Oval Office has an investigative hearing made it so clear that a presidency was in serious legal jeopardy.” — Howard Fineman (for the rare double-quotable)
- We already know enough: “As I told someone yesterday, sometimes it's helpful to clear away any suggestion of geopolitical or intelligence shenanigans from the Trump story and see what's left. What's left is a guy who almost lost everything and then clawed his way back with a lot of pretty unsavory money. Look at Trump, any of his business partnerships and really anything else and you keep finding Russians with tons of money and frequent attention from the FBI. The idea that Trump associates may have connived with a Russian intelligence operation against the US electoral process is such a shocking and singular possibility that it tends to obscure this pretty shocking set of facts that are pretty much in plain view.” — Josh Marshall
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Trump-Putin-Russia.
With new developments emerging semi-daily, it is difficult to comment on this story in a week-in-review format without being stale. That is a good thing (in terms of press coverage). I’d only recommend Paul Waldman’s ”Here’s why the latest Trump-Russia revelations are so important” for a good, top level status review, including, in particular, his common sense observation that all interested eyes should be focused on Paul Manafort.
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No Sympathy for the Hillbilly. That’s the title of Frank Rich’s latest column, in which he argues that “Democrats need to stop trying to feel everyone’s pain, and hold on to their own anger”:
In a presidential election, a revamped economic program and a new generation of un-Clinton leaders may well win back the genuine swing voters who voted for Trump, whether Democratic defectors in the Rust Belt or upscale suburbanites who just couldn’t abide Hillary. But that’s a small minority of Trump’s electorate. Otherwise, the Trump vote is overwhelmingly synonymous with the Republican Party as a whole.
That makes it all the more a fool’s errand for Democrats to fudge or abandon their own values to cater to the white-identity politics of the hard-core, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day. They will stick with him even though the numbers say that they will take a bigger financial hit than Clinton voters under the Republican health-care plan. As Trump himself has said, in a rare instance of accuracy, they won’t waver even if he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody. While you can’t blame our new president for loving “the poorly educated” who gave him that blank check, the rest of us are entitled to abstain. If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.
Amen, and Rich’s point is all the more correct because he does not excuse the tired, aging and complicit Democratic leadership:
This is a separate matter from the substantive question of whether the [Democratic] party is overdue in addressing the needs of the 21st-century middle class, or what remains of it. The answer to that is yes, as a matter of morality, policy, and politics. Americans below the top of the heap, with or without college degrees and regardless of race, have been ill served by the axis of Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and the Davos-class donor base that during Bill Clinton’s presidency helped grease the skids for the 2008 economic collapse and allowed the culprits to escape from the wreckage unscathed during Barack Obama’s. That Hillary Clinton pocketed $21.6 million by speaking to banks and other corporate groups after leaving the State Department is just one hideous illustration of how the Democrats opened the door for Trump to posture as an anti-Establishment champion of “the forgotten men and women.” In the bargain, she gave unenthused Democrats a reason to turn to a third-party candidate or stay home.
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Holy Disconnect! We are officially two countries now: “[I]n Nashville on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump spoke to a rapturous crowd of almost 10,000 people and his embattled spokesman, Sean Spicer, was greeted as a star by awe-struck supporters, who spent several minutes crowding around him to take pictures and pat him on the back.”
For those who forgot how Mr. Spicer earned his current job, here he is during the Republican Convention blaming Melania’s later admitted plagiarism of Ms. Obama’s speech on Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony:
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All the President’s Lies. David Leonhardt is fed up:
The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar.
. . . . [T]he current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.
Also, Michelle Ye Hee and Glen Kessler debunk Trump’s numerous lies from just last week. Thankfully, the most recent Quinnipiac poll finds that 60% of Americans believe that Trump is not honest, although a Harvard-Harris Poll survey of registered voters finds that 59 percent of Republicans continue to believe Trump’s wiretapping claims. In the end, Steve Benen correctly nails it in “When a president simply lies too much”:
Taken together, the political system is passing the tipping point. There’s an expectation that politicians are often less than truthful, but Donald J. Trump is stretching the boundaries – not only of what a president can reasonably expect to get away with, but with what is safe and sustainable in a political system that expects to function in a reasonably healthy way.
And, weirdly, Trump sat down for an interview with Time with the subject expressly limited to his lies.
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Divine Justice? The Supreme Court’s most unbalanced member, Justice Samuel Alito, gave some troubling remarks in a speech at an event sponsored by a Catholic lawyers' organization, arguing that the recent gay marriage ruling, and the backlash against the Hobby Lobby contraceptive case, supposedly demonstrate that the nation’s commitment to religious liberty is at risk and the rights of religious believers are threatened:
Alito used his own words from his dissent in the Supreme Court's landmark same-sex marriage case, telling the gathering he had predicted opposition to the decision would be used to "vilify those who disagree, and treat them as bigots."
. . . . “A wind is picking up that is hostile to those with traditional moral beliefs," Alito said.
Alito said reactions to Supreme Court decisions such as the Hobby Lobby case, in which a company balked at being required to cover certain forms of contraception in its employee health plan, should spur action.
. . . . "We are likely to see pitched battles in courts and Congress, state legislatures and town halls," he said. "But the most important fight is for the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans. It is up to all of us to evangelize our fellow Americans about the issue of religious freedom."
Of course, in both cases, Justice Alito was not protecting anyone’s religious freedom, but instead he sought to deny civil marriage to two homosexual adults based on the religious objections of strangers, and denied a woman’s legal right to contraceptive insurance coverage if it offends (perversely) the alleged religious beliefs of the soulless corporation that employs her. Plus, I don’t think it is appropriate for a sitting Supreme Court Justice to be imploring religious audiences to “evangelize” on behalf of his — disputed — views of religious liberty cases . . . and certainly not with appeals to “pitched battles” and “hearts and minds” rather than to the law. I also know, from Alito’s dissent in the gay marriage case, that his sense of personal persecution and danger is plain-old nutty:
“I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
In fairness, I think that came straight from the “Question Presented” portion of the Supreme Court briefs in this case: “Should straight, White male Christians be allowed to express their views above a whisper and outside the recesses of their homes?” Apparently, the majority answered “No.” (I know: Alito wants to be able to voice any opinion and not “risk being labeled a bigot.” The Constitution offers no such protection, which this nitwit should know.) But there is another very important point here. While Alito tries to wrap himself in the Constitution and the First Amendment, what he is really pushing is a statutory crusade to turn the traditional notion of religious freedom on its head, morphing it from a “shield” against government interference into a “sword” where religious followers can impose their beliefs on others. (See Religious Freedom Restoration Act generally.) Michelangelo Signorile has an interesting further read on this in Huffington.
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Trump’s Evangelical White Supremacist Base. In “Amazing Disgrace,” Sarah Posner at the New Republic answers the question: “How did Donald Trump—a thrice-married, biblically illiterate sexual predator—hijack the religious right?” Hint:
In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.
By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy. Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute and the alt-right’s most visible spokesman, argued during the campaign that GOP voters aren’t really motivated by Christian values, as they profess, but rather by deep racial anxieties. “Trump has shown the hand of the GOP,” Spencer told me in September. “The GOP is a white person’s populist party.”
Yes, and wait. I’m trying to remember . . . oh right! Justice Alito (post above) was a member of a reactionary group of “wealthy Princeton graduates (founded in 1972), which became notorious for its opposition to women and minorities on campus, its vicious bigotry against homosexuals, and its defense of the interests of affluent white male alumni and their sons.”
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Trump’s threat to the international order. Harvard law professor and former Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith penned a comprehensive look into “The Trump Onslaught on International Law and Institutions”:
Two months into the Trump administration, we are witnessing the beginnings of the greatest presidential onslaught on international law and international institutions in American history. The onslaught appears to be driven by a combination of economic nationalism, anti-cosmopolitanism, anti-elitism, a belief that international law does not reflect American values but threatens American institutions, and a related belief that “American peace, prestige, and prosperity were not being served by our foreign policy.”
In related news, “U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plans to skip a meeting with NATO foreign ministers next month in order to stay home for a visit by China's president and will go to Russia later in April, U.S. officials said on Monday, disclosing an itinerary that allies may see as giving Moscow priority over them.” Daniel Drezner further notes that SOS Tillerson’s wholly unprecedented decision to avoid talking to the press is probably a good idea because “he’s really, really bad at it”:
The scary part of that passage is not that Tillerson’s wife talked him into being secretary of state. The scary part is that Tillerson said he had never met Trump before being asked to be secretary of state. The history of modern foreign policy principals who agreed to serve in an administration after just meeting the president is short but undistinguished. . . .
No doubt, there are diplomatic initiatives that fall under the category of, “let’s keep this quiet until almost everything has been worked out.” But if Tillerson thinks that is all the secretary of state does, then he’s rejecting more than half of his job description. Reassuring allies requires some public signaling. Credible commitments require even more public signaling. Promoting ideas like human rights or religious freedom through publicizing annual reports is a really super-inexpensive way of sending a message.
None of this is rocket science to anyone who has spent some time in public policy. Tillerson, of course, is completely new to this, being the first secretary of state without any government or military experience.
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Paul Ryan is evil. I asked last week: “What American politician would want to take away health insurance from 24 million or more Americans? What kind of person harbors such contempt and malice for tens of millions of his fellow citizens? In a discussion with National Review’s Rich Lowry, Paul Ryan answered that he has been dreaming about doing precisely that since college: “We’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around — since you and I were drinking at a keg. . . . I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time. We’re on the cusp of doing something we’ve long believed in.” Think Progress explains what would happen if Ryan’s college keg party dreams ever came true:
An estimated 17,000 will die who otherwise would have lived in the first year Ryan’s health bill is in effect, should it become law. By 2026, that number will grow to 29,000 deaths in just one year alone.
Sick fuck. Ryan Grim takes a deeper dive here. And Margot Sanger-Katz highlights the incredibly damning fact that at least one million more people would have lost insurance coverage under Ryan’s House bill than would lose coverage with a simple repeal of Obamacare (with no replacement).
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Quotables (part II)
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Poor judgment: "The courts are not helping us, I have to be honest with you. It's ridiculous. Somebody said I should not criticize judges. OK, I'll criticize judges …." — President Trump
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Sanity-check: “Let's roll the tape. Trump is vain. He's peculiarly unwilling to learn anything new. He feels endlessly persecuted. His attention span can be measured in minutes. He's paranoid over the slightest sign of disloyalty. He is vengeful. He demands constant attention. He makes up preposterous fictions to sustain his worldview and shield his ego from the slings and arrows of reality. He desperately wants to be liked by everyone. He's domineering. His personal relationships are almost entirely transactional. He never laughs. He can't stand people poking fun at him. He's often unable to control his emotional outbursts. And he likes his steaks really well done.
Does that mean he's unhinged? I dunno. No single one of these things is debilitating, but what happens when you put them all together?” — Kevin Drum
- It’s bipartisan — Trump is dumb: "There is a bigger issue here I think the anxiety of the American people are wrestling with. Which is, whether or not this president is intellectually qualified to be president of the United States. There is a credibility issue, yes. He is never, part of his ego, going to apologize for false claims. He is going to make more false claims. The question is, are we dealing with a president who is . . . electorally qualified of course . . . but intellectually qualified?" — David Jolly (R -Fla.) (hat tip: our own Egberto Willies)
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Update: Ivanka. After noting last week that Ivanka Trump was a relative no-show in the Trump WH, I see this week Ivanka got a promotion to include a prime West Wing office and other perks of power. As Steve Benen marvels: “Even by Trump standards, it's hard to know what to make of a story like this. Ivanka Trump won't get a paycheck, but she will get classified information. She won't have a White House position, but she will have an office in the West Wing. As is often the case with this administration, there's no real precedent for this.”
But Jimmy Kimmel is on top of this Ivanka move (and some drunken Trump ramblings as well):
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My favorite Trump anecdote. Trump’s NYC Trump Tower is listed as 68 floors high — that is what the elevator buttons say. But the building is only 58 stories high. Trump characteristically lied and simply added 10 floors:
Though the tower was built with 58 floors, Mr. Trump later explained to The New York Times that because there was a soaring pink marble atrium and 19 commercial floors at the bottom, he could see no good reason not to list the first residential floor as the 30th floor. The pinnacle became the 68th — the height that appears in marketing materials, online search results and news articles to this day.
Get it? After an atrium and some other floors, just begin counting your residential floors at “30” even though it is the 20th floor. Plus, higher floors get higher rents in Manhattan. It is not ambiguous: the country elected a con man as President, who paid $25 million to settle an internet fraud case during his transition.
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Still a must-read. Even though the House “replacement” bill rightfully went down in flames, Brian Beutler’s “The Media’s Failure to Correct Republicans’ Obscene Trumpcare Lies” is still a must-read because (i) I doubt Republicans are done on this subject and (ii) we all need to know what they would do if they could. Plus, I’m always struck by how perniciously creative Republicans can be in their deception.
Beutler’s first example is terrific in this respect. Republicans repeatedly crowed that their plan would have lowered premiums. Maybe . . . but what Republicans didn't explain is that this was because so many would have been priced out of the insurance market under their proposal and, in particular, the older, higher risk, higher premium consumers would have gone uncovered. Get that? Republicans are not kicking millions off coverage; they are reducing average premiums for those who could actually afford any coverage:
[L]owering premiums suggests reducing the amount of money insurers charge on average per available plan. As much as Ryan and nearly every other Republican is pretending otherwise, that’s not what CBO is saying will happen. CBO says average premiums will fall in large part because, “the mix of people enrolled in coverage obtained in the nongroup market is anticipated to be younger, on average, than the mix under current law.” They’re looking at the average price of plans sold.
What Trumpcare does is increase premiums for elderly people so much that many of them will not buy plans at all, lowering the average price of policies purchased on the market.
Gabrielle Gurley at the American Prospect notes further how the Republicans’ invocation of the word “flexibility” is a thin disguise for disabling cuts to Medicaid. But I was separately struck by this passage:
Medicaid is the largest health insurance program in the United States, covering some 20 percent of Americans—more than are covered by Medicare . . . . According to 2015 data, most nonelderly Medicaid recipients are white (42 percent); the rest are Hispanic (31 percent), black (19 percent), or of another race (8 percent).
. . . . In December 2016 [following the ACA], nearly 74 million Americans received Medicaid coverage, with roughly 16.2 million new adults and children having enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP (health coverage for children in poverty) since late 2013 when the program became effective. “That was a pretty significant change in 2010,” says Colleen Grogan, a University of Chicago health-care policy professor. “It was a health-care program for the poor, but it never actually covered all poor people who really needed care.”
No one’s first choice is Medicaid. The astounding numbers above don't merely reflect a failed health insurance scheme; They evidence a manifest failure of our current economic model. 74 million Americans?!? This is the consequence of a growing, immoral assault on the poor, working-class and (formerly) middle class — and the disappearance of fair wages, benefits and stability. Yes, I want the ACA, Medicaid expansion, single-payer, etc., but let’s not also turn a blind eye to the larger problem - there is so much more systemic reform to be done.
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At last, a genuine case of voter fraud! Oh . . . this is awkward: “Former Colorado GOP Chairman Charged With Voter Fraud.” And Mr. GOP has a past money-quote: “It seems to be, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but virtually every case of voter fraud I can remember in my lifetime was committed by Democrats.”
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Ha, ha, ha! Rejected Labor Secretary Andrew Puzder has been fired as the CEO of CKE Restaurants (Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast food chains). He had been its CEO since 2000.
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Trump’s budget proposal explained. Courtesy of John Oliver:
An open invitation for the comment section. In addition to the regular comments, please let me know if there are any writers, columnists, bloggers, reporters or outlets that you think I should regularly follow for inclusion in Dispatches — including any Republican writers, columnists, etc. that are noteworthy either because they are reasonable or are consistently infuriating.
See you next Saturday. For those who missed it, last week’s Dispatches can be found here.