Summations Only

We're at the point where the Russian Foreign Minister is much more believable than our President.

Judge stymies Trump's border wall by invoking GOP law targeting Obama

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President Donald Trump’s border wall is facing a surprising new legal hurdle down in Texas: an obscure legislative provision crafted by House Republicans in 2014 when the GOP was targeting then-President Barack Obama’s budget powers.

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The amendment, carried forward into current law, has resurfaced with a vengeance in El Paso, Texas. U.S District Court Judge David Briones has been quoting back its words in a series of rulings against Trump’s decision to take $3.6 billion from military construction projects to expedite his wall.

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As first adopted, the Republican language specifically prohibited Obama from taking any step to eliminate or reduce funding for any program, project, or activity as proposed in the President’s budget request until it's cleared with Congress.

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The triggering event was a relatively narrow dispute in 2013 over funding for space exploration. But when they were enacted in Jan. 2014, the restrictions applied government-wide. And a year later, under full Republican control, Congress added the word increase alongside eliminate or reduce funding.

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What goes around, in other words, comes around

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Trumpworld’s Wild Hunt to Find Out Who ‘Liked’ a Chelsea Clinton Tweet

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That week in July, Trump drew criticism for his decision to let his daughter Ivanka fill his seat at the G20 meeting of top economic powers in Hamburg, Germany. After days of the pile on, Trump took to Twitter the morning of July 10 to claim his decision to have Ivanka represent the U.S. at the G20 was very standard and that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany agreed. Not more than 15 minutes later, he switched his tenor and began attacking Clinton and the press. If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother, as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!, Trump said.

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Clinton shot back: It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not.

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That tweet garnered more than half a million likes, including by the account for the U.S. mission to the European Union. That kickstarted a weeks-long investigation, prompted by the secretary’s office, into who exactly at the Brussels mission had access to the Twitter account and hit like on Clinton’s tweet, according to two former U.S. officials. (Full disclosure: Clinton sits on the board of IAC, The Daily Beast’s parent company.) Nearly 10 people were interviewed about whether they, as administrators of the account, had mistakenly or deliberately pressed the like button. All of them denied any wrongdoing, those sources said. One individual familiar with the exchanges said the Secretary of State’s top managers in Washington wanted blood and called Brussels numerous times demanding the name of the culprit.

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GOP Sen. Mike Lee furious after an 'insulting' Senate briefing on Trump's Iran strike: 'The worst briefing ... on a military issue I've seen in 9 years'

• Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah was furious on Wednesday after a Senate briefing on President Donald Trump's decision to order an airstrike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
• Lee called it "probably the worst briefing, at least on a military issue, I've seen in nine years I've been here."
• He said he "walked into that briefing undecided" on whether to support a war-powers resolution being pushed by Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. The resolution would limit the Trump administration's ability to take further military action against Iran without congressional authorization.
• "That briefing is what changed my mind," Lee said. "I'm now going to support it."
• Other lawmakers both Republican and Democratic also ripped the Trump administration after being briefed on the strike, saying they saw little evidence to support such drastic measures against Iran.

The administration's story isn't selling well.A more complete quote from Lee:

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I had hoped and expected to see more information outlining the moral and legal justification. The briefing lasted only 75 minutes whereupon our briefers left. This is not the biggest problem I had with the briefing, which I might add is the worst briefing I've seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I've served on the United States Senate. What I found so distressing about the briefing is one of the messages we received from the briefers was "do not discuss, do not debate the issue of appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran and if so, you'll be emboldening Iran." The idea we would be less safe by having a debate or discussion about the appropriateness of further military involvement.

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So already any questions or dissent are un-American

NYC Bar Association gives Bill Barr a stunning rebuke and asks Congress to investigate him for bias

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The New York City Bar Association has taken the extraordinary step of asking Congress to investigate Attorney General Bill Barr for being too politically biased to faithfully execute his duties as America’s top law enforcement official.

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Bloomberg reports that the Bar Association is claiming that Barr’s recent statements and actions indicate that he may be enabling and encouraging political partisans willing to use the levers of government to empower certain groups over others.

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The association also accuses Barr of disregarding fundamental obligations in several public statements during the past few months, including his duty to act impartially, to avoid even the appearance of partiality and impropriety, and to avoid manifesting bias, prejudice or partisanship in the exercise of official responsibilities.

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Worker threw exception | www.rawstory.com | Cloudflare

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In one episode from the book, Trump agreed early in his presidency to take part in an HBO documentary featuring judges, lawmakers and all the living presidents reading aloud from the Constitution.

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But Trump struggles and stumbles over the words, according to the book, and blames others in the room for his bungling.

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It’s like a foreign language, he complained, according to the book.

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The guy couldn't hack it in fourth grade.

WTF Do The Parnas Texts Show, And Can We Splain Them You? YES! - Wonkette (trigger: extreme liberal snark) has a good explanation of the current fustercluck.There's evidence that Lutsenko* explicitly linked him making up incriminating claims about Hunter Biden to ousting Ambassador Yovanovitch. Another important element in the web of this Ukraine scandal.And there's evidence that Trump was in on it all. Not quite a smoking gun, but requires investigation. Lev Parnas: Trump ‘knew exactly what was going on’ in Ukraine - POLITICO.Of course McConnell has Trump’s back. There's literally no level of criminality would affect the Faiths and Marc9000, and McConnell and Trump don't care what anyone else thinks. So Trump won't be convicted. That could affect quite a few voter's opinions.*Ukrainian prosecutor, corrupt but less corrupt than his predecessor whom Joe Biden and everybody else attacked as corrupted.

WTF Do The Parnas Texts Show, And Can We Splain Them You? YES! - Wonkette (trigger: extreme liberal snark) has a good explanation of the current fustercluck.There's evidence that Lutsenko* explicitly linked him making up incriminating claims about Hunter Biden to ousting Ambassador Yovanovitch. A different quid pro quo and another important element in the web of this Ukraine scandal.And there's evidence that Trump was in on it all. Not quite a smoking gun, but requires investigation. Lev Parnas: Trump ‘knew exactly what was going on’ in Ukraine - POLITICO.Of course McConnell has Trump’s back. There's literally no level of criminality that would affect the Faiths and Marc9000s, and McConnell and Trump don't care what anyone else thinks. So Trump won't be convicted. That could affect quite a few voter's opinions.*Ukrainian prosecutor, corrupt but less corrupt than his predecessor whom Joe Biden and everybody else attacked as corrupted. Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

Trump confuses Kurds of Syria and Iraq in a meeting with Barzani

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U.S. President Donald Trump confused the Kurds of Syria and Iraq in a meeting with Nechirvan Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, on Jan. 22. As you know, we left Syria from the standpoint of the border. And that’s worked out great with Turkey. They have the so-called safe zone and I appreciate everything you’ve done to keep it as safe as possible, Trump told Barzani.

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Gee, ya think someone tried to brief him and he ignored it?

Worker threw exception | www.rawstory.com | Cloudflare

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Though the full plan has not been released, the deal reportedly delivers nearly all of Israel’s demands in exchange for the possibility of maybe, someday recognizing a Palestinian state.

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Peace has nothing to do with it, said Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon

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Every day in every way they become stupider and stupider.

Trump Has Sabotaged America's Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

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The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in Chinaincluding placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipmentare indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?

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For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it isnot just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark. […]

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Bureaucracy matters. Without it, there’s nothing to coherently manage an alphabet soup of agencies housed in departments ranging from Defense to Commerce, Homeland Security to Health and Human Services (HHS).

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But that’s all gone now.

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In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

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In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced. […]

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In the absence of a formal structure, the government has resorted to improvisation. In practical terms, the U.S. government’s public health effort is led by Daniel Jernigan, the incident commander for the Wuhan coronavirus response at the CDC. Jernigan is responsible for convening meetings of the nation’s state health commissioners and briefing CDC Director Robert Redfield and his boss, Azar. Meanwhile, state-level health leaders told me that they have been sharing information with one another and deciding how best to prepare their medical and public health workers without waiting for instructions from federal leadership. The most important federal program for local medical worker and hospital epidemic training, however, will run out of money in May, as Congress has failed to vote on its funding. The HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is the bulwark between hospitals and health departments versus pandemic threats; last year HHS requested $2.58 billion, but Congress did not act.

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Cut non-essential services, smaller government …