Gonna try something a little different today. Usually I go to Bing to get all my good news Articles, today, I’m gonna get most (if not all) my good news from Daily Kos articles recommended to me in the daily email they send me. Take it away Daily Kos email!
Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas needed a favor: Before retiring, he wanted to anoint a local activist as his successor. Mr. Hensarling, a veteran conservative, reached out to President Trump for help, but the White House hesitated to intervene, according to a person familiar with the overture.
Instead, Mr. Hensarling found a willing ally at Mr. Trump’s right hand: Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Pence backed the congressman’s favorite, Bunni Pounds, last month in a tweet that blindsided key White House aides.
The eager assistance Mr. Pence provided a senior lawmaker reflected the outsize political portfolio that the vice president and his aides have seized for themselves as the 2018 elections approach. While Mr. Trump remains an overpowering personality in Republican politics, he is mostly uninterested in the mechanics of managing a political party. His team of advisers is riven with personal divisions, and the White House has not yet crafted a strategy for the midterms. So Mr. Trump’s supremely disciplined running mate has stepped into the void.
Republican officials now see Mr. Pence as seeking to exercise expansive control over a political party ostensibly helmed by Mr. Trump, tending to his own allies and interests even when the president’s instincts lean in another direction. Even as he laces his public remarks with praise for the president, Mr. Pence and his influential chief of staff, Nick Ayers, are unsettling a group of Mr. Trump’s fierce loyalists who fear they are forging a separate power base.
Looks like Pence is trying to get used to being President early for when Trump eventually gets thrown out like the dirty diaper he is. unfortunately I don’t think Trump is gonna like it. This could be a major slap fight in the making, which is good for us.
Speaking of Republican infighting…
Well, I guess we're about to find out just how "lame" of a duck Paul Ryan is as Speaker of the House pretty quickly. The rift between moderate GOP House members and the Tea Party caucus cost John Boehner his job, and it may well cost the GOP more than that very shortly.
"Moderate" conservative House GOP members have had-it-up-to-here with the Tea Party. They're sick and tired of their majority being held hostage by about 40 powdered wig morons, and they're fighting back. And this pie fight just might be the beginning of the final Armageddon in the GOP over what it will look like going forward.
Turns out, the GOP moderates in the House are sick of Paul Ryan's shit too. They know that they're going to get hammered over DACA and immigration in the fall, and they want it off of the table. But Ryan is steadfastly refusing to even consider bringing any kind of immigration reform or DACA fix to the floor. So, they're going behind his back.
Last week, the House moderates invoked a rather arcane, and seldom used House rule, and filed a "motion to discharge" petition. This is a way for a party, normally the minority party, to haul a bill, kicking and screaming, out of committee, and force it to the floor for debate and a straight up or down vote. The petition is aimed at freeing up a bill that has been stalled in committee for more than 30 days, this time by freeing up a "special rule" that has been in the rules committee for more than 7 days to free up the bill. Don't worry, it all makes sense somehow.
They say a house divided among itself can’t stand, and the GOP is as divided a house as you can get. I know I’m feeling really good about our chances in November.
People who have worked as prosecutors and investigators tend to agree: Everyone has a breaking point. That’s what former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace Wednesday. In his experience, even when he was investigating organized crime figures or drug cartel leaders, "Eventually they have a breaking point.”
In Figliuzzi’s estimation, Cohen is no different and he’s currently on that very path given the staggering amount of trouble he’s in.
I believe that Michael Cohen will eventually break—when it's laid out for him the federal sentencing guidelines, all the exposure he has, the ramifications on his family. He will eventually break.
Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, has advanced that notion ever since he arrived on our TV screens a couple months ago. And now, with Cohen's damning pay-to-play scheme at least partially exposed, we are starting to get a taste of just how deep he's in.
Imagine Cohen watching this unfold in real time, largely isolated, as Trump and his hatchet man Rudy Giuliani repeatedly undercut Cohen’s entire defense. Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox has a window into what that was like for Cohen as the weekend news shows hashed out the millions of dollars that flowed through his shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, for zero work. Cohen was in Philadelphia last weekend to watch his daughter's college graduation.
Come on Mueller, flip Cohen, flip him like a flap jack and then serve him to Trump with some syrup and little blueberries and…. this metaphor fell apart I’m sorry. Point is Cohen is gonna flip.
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made it clear today to an audience of young, military graduates what he thinks of the man who he had to pretend to respect for the last year and a half:
"If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom."
There was no doubt Tillerson was speaking about Trump, whose delusional pathology Tillerson obviously now views as a threat to the country:
"A responsibility of every American citizen to each other is to preserve and protect our freedom by recognizing what truth is and is not, what a fact is and is not and begin by holding ourselves accountable to truthfulness and demand our pursuit of America's future be fact-based -- not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are, and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges."
Yeah, former secretary of state and professional sleepy boy Rex Tillerson is telling it on the mountain. Always sad when divorced parents fight (except this this is great).
And finally, as you all know, I love to end on a softball story, so here’s one for you.
This is what you want to see when a big tough guy racist pig acts out his ignorance in public. Watch in the video below as the angry idiot is owned by a Muslim woman, cursed out by another patron and then refused service for “disrupting a public place and being very racist”. The best part is the strong young lady, half the mans size, standing proudly as she calls him a racist to his face.
Always does my heart good to see racist scumbags get put in their place.
Anyways, that’s all for this week. Thanks to all the Daily Kos writers who I picked over for articles this week, and thanks to Daily Kos for sending me that email. Have a good Monday all.