...Trump ran and won promising to cover everyone, avoid Medicaid cuts, and boost funding for opioid abuse treatment...

...The centerpiece of the Trump-endorsed American Health Care Act, by contrast, is a $600 billion tax cut. Families with incomes below $208,500 per year will see their taxes fall by an average of $0 per year, receiving none of that money. But members of the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution — households with an annual income of more than $3.75 million — will see their taxes fall by an average of $165,090 per year...

...But Trump probably didn’t run around the country promising people lower deductibles, universal coverage, and no cuts to Medicaid for no reason at all. He said that stuff because it’s popular.

He broke with the Republican establishment on a key issue, soundly beat their candidates in the primary, and then won a general election boosted by considerable outsider credibility but an unusually low level of institutional party support. And now, in his first major legislative act, he’s betraying that promise.

President Trump has a new outlook on the legitimacy of the government’s monthly jobs reports, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Friday.

Asked about Trump's past dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs numbers in the past in light of Friday's strong economic report, Spicer quoted the president:

“I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly: 'They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.'"

Spicer and reporters present laughed, though it wasn't immediately clear whether Trump was joking.

Shorter Paul Ryan: “I-I-I-I’m not concerned about the rich cracking the heads of the poor open and feasting on the goo inside. We said we were gonna have cannibalism. The other point is, this dramatically helps our plans to enslave the rest of the poor population.”

..you can surveil someone through their phones, through their, ah certainly through their television sets, ah any number of different ways. Um microwaves that turn into cameras, etc. So we know that is just a fact of modern life.

...I’m not in the job of having evidence.

The Congressional Budget Office report on Trumpcare is out, and it’s devastating: 14 million people losing insurance in the first year, 24 million over time, with premiums soaring for older, lower-income Americans — in many cases, the very people who went strongly for President Trump. The C.B.O. thinks it would reduce the deficit, but only marginally, around $30 billion a year in a $19 trillion economy.

...Trumpcare is a slapdash, incompetent piece of legislation; but even a much more competent set of people couldn’t have done better given the constraints of Republican Party ideology.

The impulse to bandy about the threat of secession is not rooted in concern for the vulnerable. It is a tantrum by rich people who are angry that their political power temporarily does not match their economic power. Think about how shallow a self-proclaimed liberal’s commitment to social justice has to be for them to say that the proper response to the ascent of a quasi-fascist amoral strongman is to cede him the majority of the nation’s territory and stop helping to support social programs for everyone not lucky enough to live in a coastal state. Ah, what brave commitment to justice for all! If 51% of your state voted for the bad man, we will condemn the other 49% to misery. That’s what good liberals are all about! We all remember how Abraham Lincoln became an American hero by telling the Confederacy: If you are uneducated enough to think that slavery is good, go be your own country. With time your slaves will certainly come to realize that blue states are preferable!

Trump’s design aesthetic is fascinatingly out of line with America’s past and present. If you doubt it, note that the interiors of the apartments his company actually sells bear no resemblance to the one he lives in. But that doesn’t mean his taste comes from nowhere. At one level, it’s aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of. But it also has important parallels—not with Italian Renaissance or French baroque, where its flourishes come from, but with something more recent. The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style.

In addition to the obvious, every reporter who determined that Hillary Clinton’s email server management was the issue voters most needed to know about in 2016 should be deeply ashamed of themselves right now.

The Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of Republicans’ plan to replace Obamacare is a description of one of the largest, most significant income redistribution programs the US government has ever considered — from the poor to the wealthy rather than the other way around.

The plan, the CBO concludes, would take more than $1 trillion away from programs targeting poor and middle-class families, to fund an $883 billion tax cut targeted at the wealthy. It is upward income redistribution of a truly massive scale.

DETECTIVE FLETCHER: Damn. The victim has multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, and the murder weapon was left next to her body. We’ve gotta catch this lunatic.

DETECTIVE JASON CHAFFETZ [shrugging]: I don’t see a crime here.

DET. FLETCHER: Really? It seems like a murder. A stabbing murder.

DET. PAUL RYAN: I don’t see anything either. Anyone wanna grab a taquito?

DET. FLETCHER: This woman was stabbed in the chest 17 times!

DET. TREY GOWDY: Maybe she was doing pushups and didn’t realize a knife was under her.

Republicans are becoming more and more comfortable with admitting the GOP is the party of white supremacy. However, King’s little paean makes me wonder when they’ll start saying another quiet part out loud: The ability to wring as many babies as possible out of the bodies of white women and girls is an essential part of their plan to maintain and increase racial inequality.

Sure, it all stems from the hatred of, and desire to subjugate, women. But the concept of patriotic parturition would cut the need for po-facery about Life and Babies and the Ladies who are too stupid to know that they really do want to have a baby but at the same time can be trusted to care for an infant.

Patriotic parturition would also eliminate the hassle of arguing about birth control and skip straight to asserting that a white woman who fails to have babies is un-American. In fact, once they openly admit that white women are needed outbreed inner-city thugs, terrorists of color and cantaloupe-calved drug mules, a woman who fails to get pregnant is endangering the country. (And God help her if she has a baby with one of Them.)

As an added bonus, it will allow the bellicose chickenshits who infest the right wing to believe they’re fighting the war on terrorism every time they get a boner.

"It says our health insurance is being replaced
by a series of tweets calling us losers.”

This week, the Congressional Budget Office weighed in on the American Health Care Act, the House GOP’s proposed replacement for Obamacare. What the CBO described is quite simply a humanitarian catastrophe: 24 million people without health insurance, all to pay for massive, mostly upper-class tax cuts. If it or anything like it is enacted, it would be one of the worst statutes ever passed by the United States Congress. It’s tempting to blame the voters who put Republicans in power for this perilous situation. But their confusion about health care stems from many sources, including President Donald Trump, but also his fellow Republicans, Democrats, and the mainstream media.

You certainly can’t call the AHCA a pander to the Republican base. As Brian Beutler observes, the older white rural voters who were crucial to Trump’s Electoral College majority will be absolutely brutalized if the AHCA passes. The savage proposed cuts to Medicaid would affect a lot of Trump voters in purple states that accepted an expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. The AHCA’s less generous and less egalitarian subsidies would also essentially lock out non-affluent voters who are close to retirement, but too young to qualify for Medicare, from the individual insurance market. If House Speaker Paul Ryan gets his way, a lot of Trump voters who trusted Republicans to protect or improve their health care will suffer physical and/or financial ruin and in some cases avoidable death.

Given that marginal Trump voters in key states will be hit hard unless the AHCA can be stopped, these voters have been the subject of scorn. And, yes, voters have agency and have to take responsibility for their choices. But before we rush to criticize ordinary voters who were conned, we should consider the massive failure of American elites to inform them during the 2016 campaign.

This should start at the top. Trump’s approach to health care policy during the campaign was one he has applied to all fields: that is, to lie constantly. Trump explicitly promised that there would be “no cuts” to Medicaid, which TrumpCare would in fact cut big league. He also promised “insurance for everybody” and repeatedly asserted that this insurance would be better than Obamacare. Needless to say, under TrumpCare many fewer people would have insurance and the quality of insurance people could afford would more likely be worse than better.

...

The fact that a lot of Trump voters will suffer if the AHCA passes is not an occasion for schadenfreude. It’s horrifying. And before you rush to blame them, blame the elite public officials, candidates, and institutions that completely failed to present them with an informed choice during the 2016 campaign.

The worst part is that the “leak” so obviously came from a Trump surrogate or Trump himself. It’s the perfect little nugget of good news for him–“See, he’s RICH! See, he pays taxes–A LOT OF THEM!” And the precious admonition that they were illegally obtained and the sniffing about the low rate he payed was–honestly–a pretty good touch! And, no, it doesn’t portend more “leaks.” So put that out of your head now.

How will this play in Peoria? It will play like this: He’s a super-rich guy who payed a shitload of money in taxes. Fantastic.

Two months into the Trump administration, the top jobs at the U.S. Department of Defense remain largely empty.

But supporters of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis are quietly expressing hope that a top Trump aide whom they see as a roadblock for nominees will soon move on to a new role, which could speed up the nominee process nearly two months after Mattis took office...

...Since President Donald Trump took office, there have been reports that Mattis has clashed with the White House team over appointees. Those who back Mattis, the only Senate-confirmed appointee at DoD, have put the blame squarely on the White House, saying the Trump team is blocking qualified nominees out of a political ideological test.

Those inside the White House, meanwhile, point out that the president has the right to pick people who share his worldview in top spots of his administration — and see no reason why they should give jobs to individuals who slammed the president over the course of the long 2016 election.

In what is easily the most important survey finding of the early days of the Trump administration, the left-leaning Public Policy Polling finds that Americans are generally united in their disdain for ketchup on steak. Over half (56 percent) say they disapprove of the practice. Only 27 percent are okay with it. And another 17 percent don't seem to care either way.

Even more surprising, disapproval for putting ketchup on steak cuts across lines of race, gender, age and politics -- with even a slim majority of ardent Trump fans declining to back their champion on this one.

It's almost as though Republicans are tired of having President Trump's evidence-free allegations laid at their feet. Almost.

Late Monday, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threatened to subpoena the Trump administration to produce evidence of Trump's claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The White House has declined to produce this evidence publicly, offering various excuses, including the Constitution's separation of powers and — most recently on Monday — arguing that Trump wasn't speaking literally when he made the claim.

The Justice Department missed Nunes's deadline to provide evidence Monday, which drew Nunes's subpoena threat.

The wicked is overthrown through his evildoing...

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be eaten by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

The article entitled "Trump's budget makes perfect sense and will fix America, and I will tell you why" comes from a columnist Alexandra Petri, who writes humor columns for the Post. But, come on, that headline seems like it was written by our president, so you can see why he wanted everyone to see it and, presumably, print it out and hang it on their fridge.

The extraordinary public rebuke by the United States’ closest surveillance partner has revealed an emerging characteristic of Donald Trump’s White House: a willingness to antagonize even its allies instead of admitting error.

GCHQ, the UK surveillance mammoth intimately linked to the National Security Agency (NSA), has taken public exception to an allegation repeated from the White House podium that, if true, would probably shatter the Five Eyes intelligence alliance so dear to both Washington and London.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, credulously repeated on Thursday an account by a Fox News pundit, Andrew Napolitano, that GCHQ laundered surveillance on Trump at the behest of Barack Obama. Napolitano, who is in no position to actually know, made the allegation apparently to explain away the emerging consensus, even from senior Republicans on the intelligence committees, that there is no basis to Trump’s claim that Obama ordered that surveillance.

Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s deputy advisor on national security affairs, has emerged as an extremely “visible defender of the administration” on television and radio, especially on counterterrorism policy. Apart from his full-throated defense of policies such as the immigration and travel ban, Gorka likes to boast of his credentials and denigrate his predecessors, as when he told Fox News that “I think the message is deadly clear to our enemies and our adversaries. We don’t have a national security team made out of 28-year-old grad school students who have degrees in fictional writing.” Gorka maintains that the West is locked in an existential ideological struggle with Islam — a view that plays well in the Trump administration.

But Gorka’s own credentials have already come under scrutiny. Before his appointment, he was not a well-known figure among terrorism experts. A report in Politico noted that “several experts … puzzled over the gap between the numerous military academic credentials listed by Gorka — a political science Ph.D. who unfailingly uses the title ‘Dr.’ — and their unfamiliarity with his work and views.” This dovetails with a number of reports that raise doubts about his knowledge of Islam and terrorism, as well as about his ties to Hungarian far-right groups — including one, Vitezi Rend, whose members “‘are presumed to be inadmissible’ to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act” — and his claim to have access to confidential information within the White House, despite no confirmation that he has security clearance. The biggest concern: Despite casting himself as an expert on radical jihadi ideology, Gorka does not speak Arabic and has spent no time in the Middle East.

...

It is precisely attention to the significance of inconvenient facts that distinguishes good scholars and true experts from pretenders. Pretenders present themselves as scholars and experts. They adopt the language, get the credentials, and perform as they — or, at least, their audience — imagine scholars and experts sound. Rather than speak truth to power, they peddle what their ideological compatriots want to hear, wrapped up in the trappings of intellectual authority.

The more that political movements, politicians, and leaders move into a universe of alternative facts, the more they render themselves vulnerable to these intellectual grifters. And the more these fake experts influence actual policy, the more damage that they can do. I do not believe that a doctorate, let alone an academic background, is a prerequisite for good policymaking. But the president of the United States is best served by advisors who place facts before ideology, who care about the substance more than the credential, and who would never make sweeping judgments about millions of people grounded on essentially no evidence at all. This is particularly the case for a new president who has repeatedly demonstrated that when ideology — or even vanity — runs into inconvenient facts, he expects the facts to bend. In this sense, Gorka seems a perfect fit for the worst impulses of this administration.

During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Trump said he would turn down any salary as President. Then, in his first big interview as President-elect in November, he again insisted, “No, I’m not gonna take the salary. I’m not taking it.” Instead of accepting the $400,000 presidents get paid each year, Trump would take just $1 a year.

Well, it’s been almost two months and President Trump has received at least one paycheck#8202;—#8202;and he kept it.

...

Trump thus has a reputation of pledging lots of money to charities, but actually giving very little. Whether his promises regarding his presidential salary and the foreign dignitary profits from his hotels will turn out any different remains to be seen.

During his address to Congress, Donald Trump cited a study by the National Academy of Sciences that allegedly showed that illegal immigration cost us billions of dollars a year. Francine Blau, lead author of that study, and Gretchen Donehower, a consultant on the study, says he lied about its conclusions.

President Donald Trump's proposed 2018 budget eliminates funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund nearly 1,500 locally owned public radio and television stations.
The administration defended the move Thursday, calling funding for the corporation a "hard sell."

But in 2014, Vice President Mike Pence, then Indiana's governor also known for frugal budgets, made a passionate defense for the role of public television.

"I believe the state has the primary responsibility for educating our children and I will say from my heart through all of my life, one thing has been clear: Public television plays a vital role in educating all of the public, but most especially, our children," he said during an acceptance speech at that year's Public Media Summit.

But that's not how Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney sees it.

"It's a simple message by the way: I put myself in the shoes of that steelworker in Ohio, the coal-mining family in West Virginia, the mother of two in Detroit, and I'm saying, 'OK, I have to go ask these folks for money, and I have to tell them where I'm going to spend it,' " he said during Thursday's White House press briefing.

"Can I really go to those folks, look them in the eye and say, 'Look, I want to take money from you, and I want to give it to the Corporation (for) Public Broadcasting.' That is a really hard sell, and in fact, it's something we don't think we can defend anymore."