Stuck on Stupid – Republicans Think College Education is Bad

America has reached “peak stupid” with the “election” of Donald Trump”.

One of the reasons for this shift may well be the “r” word. White folks kids spent a lot of their college investment looking for business and financial degrees, which minorities, and immigrants increasingly shifted to  STEM. We have a situation now where native white Americans at the graduate level in some of the STEM fields are either a minority or rapidly becoming a minority. Asians have the highest level of STEM Field participation, while despite gain, held back by programs which intentionally disadvantage black and Hispanic Students, black and Hispanic students  make up only about 12% of those receiving STEM Degrees.

Which is why a growing number of colleges are dropping high-stakes testing as a make-or-break admission requirement. What this has caused is the number of black and Hispanics in the STEM fields to grow quickly.

So an American Education System which doesn’t support white supremacy is “bad” to Republicans.

 

 

Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions

Republicans increasingly say colleges have negative impact on U.S.

Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.

While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.

A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative.

About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%).

Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years…more…

 

Killing off the Witnesses – GOP Operative in Russia Scandal “Commits Suicide”

The coverup continues…Now the elimination of witnesses.

GOP operative who tried to get Hillary’s emails from Russian hackers committed suicide after talking to WSJ

 

The bizarre story of Peter W. Smith, the Republican donor who attempted to extract Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from Russian hackers profiled in the Wall Street J

ournal last month, just got even stranger.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Smith committed suicide in the days after speaking with the Journal about his quest for Clinton’s emails.

According to the report, Smith killed himself in a hotel room in Rochester, Minnesota on May 14, 2017 — 10 days after speaking to the Journal. He left a “carefully prepared file of documents” including his suicide note, which claimed he was in “ill health” and had an expiring life insurance policy. He was 81 at the time of his death.

The day after the story broke in late June, Shane Harris, the Journal reporter who broke the story, revealed nobody would tell him how Smith had died.

 

 

Asking the Right – Why Are Republicans Hiding the Evidence of Trump Treason

Been saying for a while that the Russian hacking and collusion treason went far beyond just the Chumph and his merry band of morons and nitwit children.

Here, Digby begins asking the right questions at least.

Russia scandal goes well beyond Trump: GOP leaders definitely knew about hacking — did they benefit too?

Leading Republicans knew about Russian hacking long before Trump’s nomination. They said nothing and did nothing

Despite Europe’s clear disdain for President Trump it seems as though he’s over there every other week. In fact he’s arriving in France on Thursday at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron to help celebrate Bastille Day and have dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Considering that Trump has implied repeatedly that Paris is nothing but a hellhole these days, it’s a testament to just how desperate he is to get out of Washington. The heat is on and he wants out of the kitchen.

You have certainly heard that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer to get some promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that was represented as being part of a Russian government program to help Trump get elected. Now we know their breathless protestations that they didn’t know nothin’ about no Russians were lies, and we also know that this particular tawdry scheme reached into the highest levels of the campaign. We’ll have to wait for the next shoe to drop. There is always another shoe.

There was one new story on Wednesday that added an interesting detail to the saga and points to a possible larger conspiracy. McClatchy reported that House and Senate investigators as well as the Justice Department are looking at the Trump campaign’s digital operation, one of Jared Kushner’s pet projects (financed by big-daddy benefactor Robert Mercer), to determine if it may have worked with Russia’s sophisticated micro-targeting and propaganda program during the 2016 campaign.

McClatchy also reported that the Justice Department is looking into “whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.” That’s an issue I’ve written about previously here on Salon, based on some post-election investigative reporting by the New York Times.

This raises once again the question of just what was going on in the Republican Party during this period. After all, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who benefited from Russian hacking. The GOP-dominated House majority was a major beneficiary as well.

Remember, the congressional leadership knew in 2015 that it was happening. Reuters has reported that the so-called Gang of Eight (Republican leaders in Congress) was told that Russian hackers were attacking the Democratic Party but that the information was so top secret they could not share it. As we know, hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and the personal email of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. But they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and information gleaned from that hack was put to use in some 2016 campaigns for Congress.

Also recall that one month before Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting with the Russian lawyer, House Majority Leader Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy was talking about Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin in a room full of Republicans:

A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. […]

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy.

This was the day after news had broken that the Russians had hacked the DNC and Ryan and McCarthy had just come from a meeting with the Ukrainian prime minister, who “had described a Kremlin tactic of financing populist politicians to undercut Eastern European democratic institutions.”

Republican leaders kept this from the public for a year, then lied repeatedly about it when confronted until someone produced an audiotape, at which point McCarthy, Ryan, et al., said it was just a joke. Maybe it was. But we know for sure that this idea about Trump being under Putin’s thumb was in the ether in GOP circles even as the party was getting ready to nominate him as its presidential candidate.

Fast forward to late August when the intelligence community was becoming frantic over the evidence of Russian interference and Director of National Intelligence John Brennan held private classified briefings with eight top congressional leaders, telling then that there was evidence the Russians were helping Donald Trump and that unnamed advisers to the Republican nominee might be working with them. In September, intelligence officials convened a big meeting with the Gang of 12, meaning the House and Senate leadership along with chairmen and ranking members of committees on intelligence and homeland security. It was assumed this would result in a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” to protest this threat to the integrity of the American democratic process.

That was an erroneous assumption. The Republicans refused to sign anything that implicated the Russian government, only agreeing to tell state elections officials to beware of “malefactors” attempting to hack election software. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly said he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly “an act of partisan politics.” That was that.

Since the election, when Republican officials aren’t actively helping the White House cover up and misdirect, as House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes did, with a few exceptions they still dismiss the scandal, even in the face of documentary evidence like the Donald Trump Jr. emails.

There’s a lot of punditry every day bemoaning the fact that President Trump refuses to admit that the Russian interference in the campaign happened, seeing it as a stubborn (and insulting) rejection of the U.S. intelligence community and a dangerous unwillingness to take needed action to prevent it happening again. But really, why is Trump the only one on the hook? The Republican leadership has turned a blind eye to what was happening since 2015. They knew. They may have even known more about it than Trump did, at least in the beginning. They did nothing about it then and have shown no signs that they plan to do anything in the future.

It’s not all on Donald Trump. He may been the principal beneficiary but the leaders of his party aided and abetted the crime. We may just learn that they benefited from it too. 

 

Repealing Obamacare…DOA

Seems that even the die-hards are recognizing the very large writing on the wall…Even the Chumph realizes his stupidity.

Now that even Republicans are beginning to realize that gutting healthcare “means you too, stupid” support is dropping like a rock.

Donald Trump, Republicans are ready to give up on Obamacare repeal

The reality that the GOP can’t overturn Obamacare is beginning to set in

Inside Congress and the White House, Republicans are beginning to admit that they’re not likely to be able to pass even a pared-down repeal of the Affordable Care Act, despite months of trying. The conclusion is one that many Republicans in Washington have long privately realized but not publicly discussed much.

As the prospects for the Senate GOP’s Better Care Reconciliation Act have continued to worsen, however, Republicans are openly discussing the idea that they may never be able to agree on a repeal of Obamcare. And it’s an idea that even President Donald Trump is considering.

Trump seemed to play good cop in a Monday morning tweet urging the congressional GOP to do something — anything, really — about health care.

Trump’s statement comes after Congressional leaders had all but given up on the idea that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed and replaced — or even just repealed.

“Clearly, the draft plan is dead,”Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Is the serious rewrite plan dead? I don’t know.” He added, “we don’t know what the plan is” in terms of what comes next for the Senate Republicans.

Cassidy’s morbid terminology was echoed by Arizona Sen. John McCain as he pronounced the bill’s prospects terminal during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“I think my view is it’s probably going to be dead,” McCain said.

The Trump White House also appears to be coming to this realization as well. During a Sunday interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin explicitly stated that the administration is getting ready to focus attention on something else.

“If we don’t get this passed then the president as he said will go to the next plan,” he told host George Stephanopoulos.

Mnuchin even appeared to endorse a proposed modification to the bill sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that would allow insurance companies to offer plans for sale that are not compliant with Affordable Care Act regulations, provided they also offer at least one plan that is.

“I’m very hopeful that his plan and his changes will get supported. And I think we’d like to get health care done,” Mnuchin said.

Cruz’s idea has come under criticism from more moderate Republicans because they believe it will lead to many companies pricing out older and sicker customers.

Should Republicans decide to punt on health care or work with Democrats (as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been repeatedly threatening his caucus), it may not matter much with their core base of voters.

In a poll released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, just 8 percent of self-identified Republicans said that repealing Obamacare should be elected officials’ top priority. Support for the GOP health care bill had fallen to just 55 percent among Republicans in the survey.

 

Question of the Hour…GOP Congressmen Targeted?

Before the white-right screamers come up with the usual hysteria – whether this shooting was connected to anything political, or is nothing more than some domestic dispute.

We can expect the usual outpouring of fake outrage, fake sorrow, and bemoaning of violence.

Bullshit.

Republicans been cruising for this for years.

Hope this gets some attention from the Rethugs about their support of a traitor in the Whites Only House, firing up and enablement of racist and white supremacists, destruction of the healthcare plan in opposition to 66% of the voting public, and complete disregard for anything except Party ideology…

When that ideology over the needs of the country starts coming at a righteous price.

And while I certainly don’t support assassination, I really can’t help hoping in the “evil desires” file in the back of my mind – the next whacked out crazy from the left…Spends a bit more range time to improve his accuracy.

 

GOP baseball practice shooter identified as 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson

The man who shot at Republicans at their early morning baseball practice Wednesday has been identified as 66-year-old  James T. Hodgkinson.

The Washington Post reports that Hodgkinson is a resident of Belleville, Illinois and is the owner of a home inspection business. Records in St. Clair County, Illinois show that Hodgkinson in  April 2006 was charged with battery and aiding damage to a motor vehicle.

Per Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, Hodgkinson’s wife told ABC News that Hodgkinson had moved to Alexandria, Virginia two months ago. Hodgkinson’s home inspection license expired at the end of 2016 and had not been renewed.

His Twitter profile shows that Hodgkinson is a left-wing supporter of Bernie Sanders who has also posted several memes on his Facebook page critical of President Donald Trump. He also called Georgia Republican congressional candidate Karen Handel a “b*tch” for saying she didn’t support a living wage during a debate with Democratic rival Jon Ossoff.

Charles Orear, a 50-year-old restaurant manager from St. Louis, tells the Washington Post that he and Hodgkinson met while campaigning for Sanders in Iowa in 2016.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Orear told the Post. “I met him on the Bernie trail in Iowa, worked with him in the Quad Cities area.”

 

 

Conservative Pounds “clickservatives, Trump fellators, fanboys, grunting MAGA mouthbreathers)

At its moment of its greatest success, the Chump is set to bring down the Republican Party…

Not that the lamebrains in Congress and their fuckery on Obama/Chump – care won’t do it first.

Why don’t you tell us how you really feel, Rick?

Rick Wilson pens scathing tweetstorm against ‘Trump fellators, fanboys, grunting MAGA mouthbreathers’

Conservative Daily Beast columnist Rick Wilson went on a scathing rant about the news that President Donald Trump has pondered firing special counsel Robert Mueller.

Like many who have come before him, Wilson tried to explain to Trump and his followers why that would be an unbelievable mistake.

“It’s time for the final divorce between the conservatives and any pretense they believe in the rule of law,” Wilson wrote of the armchair activists. “Let’s just get the f*ck on and this shabby pretense that we still live in a nation of laws. So, clickservatives, Trump fellators, fanboys, grunting MAGA mouthbreathers, sing out now [sic]. I really want to know. Is there anything he can do that strikes your conscience? Is there any sin, any excess, any affront? No? Good. That makes it easy for all of us.”

He went on to encourage them to go all the way and get a “Trump” tramp stamp. But he believes the only reason that people really love the president is that all they really love is “that he pisses off people [they] hate.”

“You’re already filled with atavistic lust for the purge, the long knives, the broken glass, the whiff of grapeshot,” he wrote. “You excuse everything because duh-liberal media or whatever bullsh*t fantasy you believe he fulfills [sic].”

Wilson continued, saying he thinks “clickservatives” should go all the way and act out Trump’s actual fantasies, regardless of consequences.

“Embrace his utter f*cking degeneracy and third-world generalissimo act. It’s the new you! Ride with it!” he exclaimed.

 

Sessions Roast – “Americans Are Sick of Stonewalling!”

At least one Senator is sick of the neutron dance around the subject…