For the Record: Working the Ruffs

Republican reaction to the January 6 committee hearings continue to develop along not unpredictable lines, like this scumbag's bragging about how he hasn't read any of the indictments:

It didn't. Their move was planned well before. The Trump speech was intended to incite the more-or-less innocent mob of deplorables to follow the Proud Boyz as the latter broke into the building, providing the insurrection with cannon fodder, and it worked extremely well.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 11, 2022

Mulvaney has no suspicion, I guess, that Trump forces could plan anything without his help, like the way he set up Trump's extortion call to President Zelenskyy with the long months of denying Ukraine the congressionally mandated funding for the Javelins. He expected them to be paralyzed without him.

Then there's the. straight-out McCarthyism from our pal Senator Rubio:

Racket

Drawing by Alfredo Martirena.

At the risk of being boring, because I spent a bunch of time on it, I'd like to work back through the timeline of Ukraine Quid Pro Quo no. 1, about which I think we know quite a bit more than we did a few weeks ago. In fact the story as we first imagined it, as a kind of prequel to Quid Pro Quo no. 2, in which Trump gives Ukraine the missiles in return for Ukraine dropping their cooperation with the Mueller investigation, falls apart entirely, but there are some jewels we can pick out of the rubble.

This comes in the first place from the testimony of Catherine Croft, the NSC veteran who served as Kurt Volker's deputy in the special envoy to Ukraine department, to the House Intelligence Committee. Her main function was to talk about the crazy vendetta against Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (led by lobbyist Bob "I'm Not a Lobbyist" Livingston, formerly the seniormost congressman who was an implacable supporter of the Clinton impeachment and almost became Speaker before his own fervent adulterousness was revealed by Larry Flynt, ha ha ha, and who now may be facing criminal charges for his pains), but Democratic counsel Dan Goldman asked her about the military aid, with particular attention to the long months in 2017 when Trump was unwilling to yield to the pressure from McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson to let Ukraine have the $47 million worth of military aid, including 210 Javelin antitank missiles and 37 launchers as well as nonlethal communications equipment, armored vehicles, and radar that are actually much more important than the missiles to the Ukrainian soldiers in their day-to-day tasks.

Not for the boring reasons the Obama administration had chosen—that giving them the weapons might lead Russia to escalate the conflict in Russia—but at least officially because he just doesn't like foreign aid:

April Fool: I'm glad with that

Big Donald did an excellent April Fool funny, that unfortunately not too many people noticed:

Unless, you know, Donald still hasn't found out what Obamacare is or what Republican senators are up to and isn't joking at all, which is a possibility, I guess. Senator Rick Scott (FL-Death Eaters) had showed up on NPR in the morning to provide some of the evidence:

Designed to Lose

Ten-minute drawing by Bonnie-Hop/DrawCeption, November 2016.

Piggybacking on Steve's post yesterday on the new Trump Justice Department policy on the Affordable Care Act—and the ongoing appeal process over the December ruling by federal judge Reed O'Connor of Fort Worth in a suit brought by 18 Republican state attorneys general announcing that the whole law, including mandatory coverage for pre-existing conditions, coverage of children up to age 26 on their parents' policies, regulations requiring insurers to give some kind of value for money, and health insurance for some 17 million people through the Marketplace and expanded Medicaid programs, is invalid—

That was OK with President Chucklehead, of course, who thinks consequences are for little people—

President Donald Trump was quick to take a victory lap, and pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and the presumed incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to fix the problem. The president tweeted Friday night: "As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!"

—but the DOJ announced it would be defending part of the law, though not the pre-existing conditions part, presumably under the advice of lobbyists for insurers anxious to get around the Obama regulations against junk insurance that doesn't cover much of anything.

Now they've changed their minds and decided not to defend any of it at all, which seems like a pretty weird move from the political standpoint; healthcare is the most important issue on voters' minds, and they like what the ACA provides, though most of us really wish there was more of it. They showed it pretty clearly in the November elections, too, as seemed instantly clear the day after the elections:

Trump Gets CLAP From Maduro Regime

CLAP packages. Via Venezuelanalysis.

My UK tweep Paul Canning, an expert observer of, among other things, Venezuela, noticed something familiar in the Trump budget proposal to turn half of the SNAP program into church basement–style distribution of beans and rice, to stop the poor from indulging in their well-known habit of blowing all their food stamps on crab legs and pomegranate juice:

Shocking anti-hunger advocates, the Trump admin is proposing to replace half of food stamp money with a box of government-selected food they’d deliver monthly. They’d call it a “Harvest Box” even though it wouldn’t include anything fresh. https://t.co/jjc9Edgp0S

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 13, 2018

Poo Apron. https://t.co/GYCCW9smAF

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) February 13, 2018

After decades, even centuries of claiming there was no need for government welfare programs because churches could take care of it, now they're saying government needs to run its own church food pantries. https://t.co/hbpSBTQbFV

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 13, 2018

This is what the Maduro regime does, it supplies (or rather often doesn't) a food box called CLAP (Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción). It's a scam that profits regime insiders https://t.co/G53t7cjwcR Maybe American opponents of this proposal could use that? https://t.co/QnWjmffVe0

— Paul Canning (@pauloCanning) February 13, 2018

I like my headline, but Republicans might prefer "Trump Picks Up On Bolivarian Socialism".

Nunes Declares War

I really couldn't pass up gentleman farmer Devin Nunes taking time out from his busy schedule fabricating plots by the FBI, the Democratic Party, the retired journalists of the Wall Street Journal and the retired spies of MI6, and I believe the Order of the Templars, to spy on the totally innocent businessman Carter Page in the hope that this would somehow stop Donald Trump from getting elected sometime after he got elected (good cooking takes time!)...

... using his appearance on Fox News to invoke the specter of class war:

.@DevinNunes: "There's been a war on people who actually build things, grow things, work with their hands. They think that if your'e in the D.C. Beltway or NYC... or SF and LA, that this is somehow the people who make this country work. And the fact is: they don't have a clue." pic.twitter.com/pL1fGYGc8F

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 12, 2018

Really. I didn't expect to agree with Devin Nunes about anything, but he's got a point, when you think about it. I think about Speaker Paul Ryan and his famous account of who he thinks are the people who make this country work: