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Secret Service won't get $60 million more to protect the Trumps

U.S. Secret Service spending to provide security for the lavish and far-flung travel of President Trump and his family – including Trump’s now almost weekly trips to his Florida resort for presidential consultations and golf – has gotten so out of hand that the agency recently requested a $60 million increase in its budget for the coming year.

Whether they manage to gut Obamacare remains to be seen. On this there are huge electoral consequences because is no longer abstract - there are real life consequences for MANY in the base.

Justin Green‏Verified account
@JGreenDC
MNUCHIN on Trump: "He's got perfect genes. He has incredible energy and he's unbelievably healthy."

A lot of those drops are significant and greater than I had expected.

When the immigration officer discovered he would be receiving a fee for his keynote address at Texas A&M University, he ordered him to be deported, claiming he should have a working visa rather than a tourist visa.

“I told him I don’t need one, that the university took care of the formalities, as always, and especially, that I have been doing this for more than 30 years without any problem,” Mr Rousso explained in an article for the Huffington Post.

The officer’s attitude then became even more “suspicious”, ... The academic claimed he was then subjected to “extensive questioning”, fingerprinting and a body search, before being told he would be deported on the next plane to Paris. ....

Mr Rousso credited a team of lawyers, university officials and immigration experts [from Texas University] with securing his release, saying: “Without them, I would have been led handcuffed, chained, and shackled to board for Paris.”....

However he said his situation was “nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn’t be defended as I was".

“It is now necessary to deal with utmost arbitrariness and incompetence on the other side of the Atlantic. I do not know what is the worst," he said. "What I know, having loved this country forever, is that the United States is no longer quite the United States."

A close congressional ally of President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he would have an opportunity to explain to his constituents exactly what was in the GOP bill to repeal Obamacare once it'd already passed the House.

“In my district right now there's a lot of misunderstanding about what it is we're doing,” Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) told MSNBC’s Brian Williams. “And once we get it done, and then we can have the chance to really explain it.”

Quote:

Norman Ornstein‏ @NormOrnstein 29m29 minutes ago
It is a hoot to watch GOP House members blame Democrats for not coming to table.After 7 yrs of GOP stonewalling, sabotaging health reform

Norm enjoys a level of equanimity I can't match. I want to drop a cartoon safe on their heads.

What is tiring me out so much regarding US politics right now is all the winning. There's so much winning.

Today will be interesting. They could pull it out of the fire but then there's the Senate which looks to be a to be a greater problem. What a mess.

The United States has been taken over by a white nationalist puppet government contracted by the Russian government. They want to dismantle federal authority in the United States and all western nations for their own political, economic, social and military visions of an ethnically-cleansed, post western world order.

They are willing to lie, cheat, break laws, and murder to accomplish their goals. They know how to rig elections and utilize mafia tactics. They don’t respond to constituencies, political pressure, or the media. They cannot be shamed away, tweeted away, marched away or phone called away. They will not be investigated by the GOP controlled House and Senate Oversight Committees or Department of Justice. They cannot be impeached.

However you believe it and that's evidently all that counts in your universe.

Meanwhile, top Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon is also moving to blame Ryan for a loss, New York Magazine reports, by distancing himself from the bill and blaming Ryan for the fact that it doesn’t drive down costs. And so, if the bill goes down, the story will become whether Trump can shift the blame to Ryan and move on to other things, as Bannon apparently hopes to do. In this telling, the reason the bill failed (or the reason it was so close to tanking, if it prevails) will be that the White House underestimated the difficulty of getting the bill passed, or had too much faith in Ryan’s ability to do so.

But in all of the coverage of the White House’s internal thinking, there is no apparent recognition of why those mistakes were made, and there’s certainly not even a whisper of recognition of Trump’s own failures. The overarching problem here has been that the White House and Republicans never took the policy seriously, and had utter contempt for the process.

I wouldn't put my money in any US business linked to tourism or travel these days. E.g. US airlines stocks are going down.

Is he waving or drowning? Swimming or sinking?

I ask this question because we’re more than two months in and the trauma has not subsided, but it has, perhaps, bifurcated. Sure, Trump still shows alarming potential as a would-be tyrant, contemptuous of constitutional proprieties, and prone to trashing every last norm of liberal democracy. But he is also beginning to appear simultaneously as a rather weak chief executive, uninterested in competent management or follow-through, bedeviled by divisions within his own party, transfixed by cable news, and swiftly discrediting himself by an endless stream of lies, delusions, and conspiracy theories. Even the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal challenged his credibility last Tuesday. They did this because, at this point, among sane people, he quite obviously has none...

I don't think McG has any personal experience with illegals.
If they are here illegally, they're not going to commit crimes to get themselves returned to their own country where food and jobs are scarce.
In California, many Mexicans come here to harvest our crops, because Americans do not like laboring in the fields. It's hard work with low pay.