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Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.
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https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/915401577871106048
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/915402848111865861
Y’all need and deserve a treat tonight, Waimanalo Blues:
And the best version I can find on Youtube with vocals. Great lyrics…
https://twitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/915343272935030785
Wells Fargo….
https://twitter.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/915267781553254401
“Eric Holder group to sue Georgia over redistricting”
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/353584-eric-holder-group-to-sue-georgia-over-redistricting
Excerpt:
Queen Sugar, season 2 resumes tonight!
25 Photos of the Obamas on their 25th Anniversary
http://www.politico.com/gallery/2017/10/03/barack-michelle-obama-anniversary-photos-002709?slide=0
He’s trying to straddle that he’s a ‘ reasonable Republican.’
HE HAS GOT TO GO!!!
Republicans rage at Rauner
By signing a controversial abortion bill, the embattled Illinois governor has gone to war with his own party.
By NATASHA KORECKI 10/02/2017 07:20 PM EDT
Until recently, the biggest question looming over Illinois politics has been whether Republican Bruce Rauner, the most vulnerable incumbent governor in the country, can win re-election next year.
Now the question is whether Rauner can make it through a Republican primary.
After the first-term governor signed a highly controversial bill last week expanding taxpayer-funded abortion in the state — becoming the first governor in decades to on his own authorize Medicaid payments for the procedure — Rauner’s political universe began collapsing on itself.
He found himself uninvited to GOP events, including a pro-life event that for weeks had boasted him as a headline guest. One-time GOP allies began searching for funding — and candidates — to challenge him. Chicago’s Cardinal Blasé Cupich declared that Rauner had betrayed him.
The Chicago Sun-Times summed up the reaction on the right with this screaming tabloid cover page: “Benedict Rauner.”
NRA goes dark after Vegas massacre
The gun rights group follows its familiar public relations playbook, staying quiet as Democrats blame it for another horrific mass shooting.
By JOSH MEYER 10/02/2017 10:11 PM EDT Updated 10/03/2017 01:21 AM EDT
Democrats lashed out at the National Rifle Association after the worst mass shooting in American history on Monday, but rather than fight back, the gun rights group retreated to a familiar posture: silence.
The NRA’s website, Twitter feed and Facebook page — all of which are typically updated frequently throughout the day —went dark on Monday, posting no new content, and the group did not respond to several calls and emails seeking comment.
But that doesn’t mean the powerful Washington lobbying organization isn’t extremely busy behind the scenes.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/02/las-vegas-shootings-nra-guns-243394
Ryan asked White House to reconsider ousting Price
The speaker touted his longtime friend’s experience in Congress during a phone call with chief of staff John Kelly.
By JOSH DAWSEY and RACHAEL BADE 10/03/2017 01:22 PM EDT Updated 10/03/2017 02:41 PM EDT
Speaker Paul Ryan last week urged the White House to reconsider ousting Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, his longtime friend who had come under fire for often using a taxpayer-funded private jet for travel, according to two people with knowledge of the call.
John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, called the Wisconsin Republican minutes before the departure was announced Friday afternoon. It was a heads-up call, one White House official said.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/03/tom-price-ouster-paul-ryan-243413
He’s so got damn stupid…..
If a black man stated this ignorant ISH the GOP would impeach him for incompetence in 3-2-1.
#Thisishowwhitenessworks
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/915273318336483328
Matthew YglesiasVerified account @ mattyglesias 10m10 minutes ago
“I hate to tell your, Puerto Rico. But you’ve thrown our budget a little out of wack.”
— Donald Trump, President of the United States
Nothing that man says shocks me anymore. Expect the worst and he will deliver it.
Polls point to a competitive Senate race in Alabama
10/03/17 11:20 AM—UPDATED 10/03/17 11:30 AM
By Steve Benen
Roy Moore, the Republican Party’s U.S. Senate nominee in Alabama, has argued that pre-school is a Nazi-like institution for brainwashing children into being liberal. Hearing that, one might be tempted to think such a person would struggle to win a Senate campaign in this country.
And with that in mind, consider the latest polling from the Yellowhammer State. BuzzFeed noted late last week:
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/915200669958762498
SG2
Thanks for this heads-up about this important gerrymandering case before the Supreme Court, SG2. I have a busy time ahead, but will try to read here to keep up.
Mueller Tasks an Adviser With Getting Ahead of Pre-Emptive Pardons
By Greg Farrell
October 3, 2017, 4:02 AM CDT
U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a distinctly modern problem. The president, judging by his tweets, could try to pardon people in his circle even before prosecutors charge anyone with a crime.
Mueller’s all-star team of prosecutors, with expertise in money laundering and foreign bribery, has an answer to that. He’s Michael Dreeben, a bookish career government lawyer with more than 100 Supreme Court appearances under his belt.
Acting as Mueller’s top legal counsel, Dreeben has been researching past pardons and determining what, if any, limits exist, according to a person familiar with the matter. Dreeben’s broader brief is to make sure the special counsel’s prosecutorial moves are legally airtight. That could include anything from strategizing on novel interpretations of criminal law to making sure the recent search warrant on ex-campaign adviser Paul Manafort’s home would stand up to an appeal.
“He’s seen every criminal case of any consequence in the last 20 years,” said Kathryn Ruemmler of Latham & Watkins LLP, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. “If you wanted to do a no-knock warrant, he’d be a great guy to consult with to determine if you were exposing yourself.”
Because if Las Vegas, Columbine, Sandy Hook etc were all classified as acts of domestic terrorism, NRA and gun industry would be finished. https://t.co/5xxh6YbXNS
— Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) October 2, 2017
Millions more impacted by Equifax breach than originally thought https://t.co/sfJkSoLJQu pic.twitter.com/OLREEZnjHE
— The Hill (@thehill) October 2, 2017
GOP leaders are confronting a stark reality: They have lost all control and comprehension of their base. My story: https://t.co/odSRnfaAfv
— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) October 2, 2017
They fueled the paranoid fears and tribal hatreds of their base to obtain power–and then lost control. https://t.co/hk5pomNQLM
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) October 2, 2017
The Obamas May be Moving to NYC! Couple Spotted Eyeing Apts. On the Upper East Side https://t.co/hJPyHwDEm0
— Brezzydee (@Brezzydee) October 2, 2017
Donald Trump Jr leads campaign to overturn restrictions on gun silencers despite mass shooting fears https://t.co/g5EL7KC6Sh
— meta (@metaquest) October 1, 2017
America’s gun problem, explained in 18 charts: pic.twitter.com/d4oWetLplV
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 2, 2017
Former Obama staffers talk about Trump’s impact on how America is viewed https://t.co/UJl8Q5uoh5 pic.twitter.com/lN482W7gEQ
— Med Amine Ferjani (@AmineFerjani) October 2, 2017
Controversy over Team Trump’s private email accounts intensifies
10/03/17 10:07 AM
By Steve Benen
Officials in Donald Trump’s White House were told they couldn’t use private email accounts to conduct official business. The National Security Agency also warned White House officials that use of private email accounts created a security threat. What’s more, Trump’s entire political operation had just spent two years telling the public that Hillary Clinton should be incarcerated for having used a private email account.
And yet, there’s now ample evidence that top members of the president’s West Wing team conducted official business through private emails, and as Politico reported last night, the problem continues to grow, particularly as it relates to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Politico’s report added that messages, which included work-related “data,” were sent on a daily basis, which points not only to a potentially widespread problem in the White House, but also “concerns about the security of potentially sensitive government documents, which have been forwarded to private accounts.”
Congressional Republicans still back looser gun restrictions
10/03/17 08:00 AM
By Steve Benen
In the wake of the devastating mass shooting in Las Vegas, several Democratic policymakers are renewing their push for measures intended to reduce gun violence. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), for example, said yesterday he’s moving forward with a proposal to strengthen background checks – an idea that’s long enjoyed broad national support.
Also yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reached out to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), requesting that Congress create a bipartisan select committee on gun violence to examine which policies are most effective in saving lives.
In all likelihood, Republicans will ignore these requests. In fact, as the Washington Post reported, GOP lawmakers are eyeing new proposals to weaken gun restrictions, not strengthen them.
How Mitch McConnell Paved the Way For Trump
By abandoning any agenda during the Obama years, the GOP’s only remaining appeal was to the nativist insurgents.
by Nancy LeTourneau
October 3, 2017
Back in early 2016, Jon Favreau wrote that “Every election is a competition between two stories about America.” That struck me as fundamentally true. He went on to accurately articulate the story about American that Donald Trump was telling, which hasn’t really changed since back then.
…………………………….
In that answer, Brooks hits on a lot of the Republicans themes I’ve been identifying over the last few years. First of all, the Republican story was decimated during the George W. Bush presidency. Both his implementation of their economic and foreign policy were a disaster.
In response, the GOP didn’t re-think their story. Instead, under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, they abandoned any attempt to do so in favor of obstructing whatever the Democrats tried to do. The “party of no” ensured that government wouldn’t work. In order to make that fly, they stoked the fear-mongering of the racist wing of their party against this country’s first African American president. Donald Trump simply played along with his birther lies, while their 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, welcomed his endorsement.
When Trump came along to ride that wave to the presidency, he simply appropriated the fear-mongering story and turned it against them, leaving them with nothing. When Brooks says that Steve Bannon is telling a nationalist story, that is what he is referring to. It is what has been called the politics of resentment, the appeal to nostalgia voters and the confederate insurgency. As Favreau articulated above, that is the story Trump ran on and, while he chose the wrong side in the Alabama run-off by endorsing Strange, it was Bannon and Moore who took over the story.
Why The 1 Percent Needs Google and Facebook
Oligarchy is hard to pull off, but manipulative social media makes the job a whole lot easier.
by Jonathan Taplin
October 3, 2017
When Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute in 1974, his mission (in words from Cato’s journal) was “protecting capitalism from government.” That meant the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as cutting taxes on the rich and government regulations on business. It was a tall order—but now, for the first time in 44 years, Koch and his billionaire libertarian friends like Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel are within sight of their goal of building a true oligarchy (Aristotle’s “rule by the rich”). The current Trump tax cut will deliver billions of dollars into the pockets of the Koch’s, the Mercer’s, the Trump’s, and their heirs. Creating a political economy in which the wealthy minority rule over the middle and lower class majority is a hard task. It requires mechanisms that suppress voting and mechanisms for propaganda that convince middle class voters that cultural divisions are more important than economic equality. In both these tasks, Google and Facebook have been a key to the success of the 1 percent.
The role of the internet in propaganda and voter suppression is a two-pronged attack. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World foresaw our current dilemma—Huxley’s assertion was that technology would lead to passivity. The ease with which we could consume mind-numbing entertainment and distractions would ultimately rot our democracy. And this is exactly what may be happening. In the 2016 presidential election, 94 million citizens who were eligible to vote declined to exercise that privilege (compared to the 136 million who voted), according to the United States Election Project. And a much larger percentage of millennials are nonvoters. As Kevin Drum reported in Mother Jones, “In 1967 there was very little difference between the youngest and oldest voters. By 1987 a gap had opened up, and by 2014 that gap had become a chasm.” Beyond the extreme apathy, Republican legislatures in many states have instituted far more restrictive voter ID laws, which have also contributed to lower voting rates. But Steve Bannon wasn’t content to leave voter suppression to chance. One of his brilliant moves was to circulate memes on Facebook targeting only African American voters with the text: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” By all accounts it was a successful voter suppression strategy.
I agree. It’s the only Senate race this year. And, if Dems can’t stand up for a guy who put the Klan in jail……
sometimes, you really do have to things on principle.
Please Contest the Alabama Senate Race
by Martin Longman
October 2, 2017
On a day like today, I don’t much want to write about electoral politics or anything else. So this will be brief.
In Alabama, we have on the one side a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Doug Jones, who is best known for locking up the Klansmen who had escaped accountability for more than a quarter century after having bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
On the other side, we have a Republican candidate, Roy Moore, who in 2004 opposed Amendment 2 to the state constitution. Amendment 2 would have removed language in Alabama’s constitution that requires separate schools for “white and colored children.” It also would have stricken references to poll taxes, a form of black disenfranchisement used in the state during the Jim Crow era. These remnants of the pre-Civil Rights period have no legal meaning anymore since they’ve been superseded by federal law. But they remain on the books as a kind of lasting stain. Moore didn’t want the language taken out because it “would have allowed federal judges to force the state to fund public school improvements with increased taxes.”
Right now, in Washington, there are Democratic leaders and strategists who are trying to decide how much if anything to invest to help Doug Jones beat Roy Moore. They’re afraid of their own shadows, fearing that their support will convince Alabamans to vote against the candidate who locks up Klansmen instead of the candidate who appears to be a Klansman.
Pruitt Meets Almost Exclusively with Industry Executives
By ERIC LIPTON and LISA FRIEDMAN
OCT. 3, 2017
WASHINGTON — For lunch on April 26, Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, dined with top executives from Southern Company, one of the nation’s largest coal-burning electric utilities, at Equinox, a white-tablecloth favorite of Washington power brokers.
That evening, it was on to BLT Prime, a steakhouse inside the Trump International Hotel in Washington, for a meal with the board of directors of Alliance Resource Partners, a coal-mining giant whose chief executive donated nearly $2 million to help elect President Trump.
Before those two agenda items, Mr. Pruitt met privately with top executives and lobbyists from General Motors to talk about their request to block an Obama administration move to curb emissions that contribute to climate change.
It was just a typical day for Mr. Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general. Since taking office in February, Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. chief has held back-to-back meetings, briefing sessions and speaking engagements almost daily with top corporate executives and lobbyists from all the major economic sectors that he regulates — and almost no meetings with environmental groups or consumer or public health advocates, according to a 320-page accounting of his daily schedule from February through May,
Happy 25th Anniversary to 44 and Forever FLOTUS 😍😍😘💑💞
Good Morning, Everyone 😐😐😐
Good Morning, Everyone.