monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

He was just the first to do it with a private team instead of having it done by the FBI.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Saturday slammed the $110 billion defense deal President Trump signed with Saudi Arabia, saying the U.S. is relying on a country with "the worst human rights record in the region" to bring peace and security to the Middle East.

It appears the Trump administration is counting on the country with the worst human rights record in the region to enforce peace and security in the Middle East," Murphy wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed criticizing the deal. "The arms sale is a terrible idea."

Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Kingdom has repeatedly used U.S.-provided weapons against civilians in the region, citing attacks on Yemen during its civil war.

"Obama withheld precision-guided munitions because the Saudis were using U.S.-provided munitions to repeatedly target civilian and humanitarian sites in their bombing campaign inside Yemen, despite regular protests from the United States," Murphy wrote.

"By selling the Saudis these precision-guided weapons more - not fewer - civilians will be killed because it is Saudi Arabia's strategy to starve Yemenis to death to increase their own leverage at the negotiating table. They couldn't do this without the weapons we are selling them," he continued.

Saudi Arabia should fight their own wars, which they won't, or pay us an absolute fortune to protect them and their great wealth - $ trillion!

The New York Times‏Verified account @nytimes 2h2 hours ago
Opinion: Trump spent his entire political career warning that “the world is laughing at us.” But now it really is

Trump reportedly plans to sabotage Obamacare by cutting off low-income subsidies

The move would make it harder for millions of people to buy health coverage.

President Donald Trump has frequently suggested that Obamacare is “collapsing” and predicted that statewide marketplaces will soon cease to function. But if the health care law doesn’t fall off a cliff on its own, he appears more than willing to give it a push.

On Friday —amid a storm of Russia-related leaks and news of the president’s imminent departure for Saudi Arabia — Politico reported that Trump has quietly decided to end approximately $7 billion annually in cost-sharing subsidies for low-income people who purchase their health care on the Obamacare exchanges. Each year, these payments help reduce the co-payments and deductibles of approximately 7 million low-income people who get their insurance on the marketplaces.

Ending these payments wouldn’t just hurt those 7 million people. Without those subsidies to keep their lower deductible plans afloat, some insurance companies would likely exit the Obamacare marketplaces — or hike their premiums to compensate for the shortfall. The result could be a devastating ripple effect through the entire private marketplace system.

Trump has threatened to kill off the cost-sharing subsidies before, but seemed to back down after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Democrats would be willing to shut down the government if continued payments weren’t guaranteed.

On Friday, eight concerned parties — including the American Medical Association, BlueCross BlueShield, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — sent a joint letter to the Senate leadership of both parties, urging them to pass legislation that would ensure the cost-sharing payments continue.

“The individual market is their only option for getting coverage. Unless CSRs [cost sharing reductions] are funded, a tremendous number of Americans will simply go without coverage and move to the ranks of the uninsured,” they wrote. “This threatens not just their own health and financial stability, but also the economic stability of their communities.”

Jake Tapper‏Verified account
@jaketapper
2016: Trump says Clinton should return Saudi money; Saudi Arabia "want(s) women as slaves and to kill gays."

https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10157164318560725 …

Three years ago, now-President Donald Trump invited golf reporter and author James Dodson to see his new golf course to play a round and talk, as Dodson recounted to WBUR on Sunday.

There, Trump reportedly bragged to Dodson that he had access to $100 million to fund his renovations — which Dodson said struck him as odd, given that banks were leery of lending during the great recession. He then asked Eric Trump, his golf partner about it, as he recounted.

“As we were setting off, I said, ‘Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.’ And this is what he said. He said, ‘Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’ I said, ‘Really?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’ Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting.”

This wouldn’t have been the first time one of the Trump offspring bragged about Russian funding. At a real estate conference in 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said that the Russian money was “pouring in” to the Trump business.

“And in terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” he said.

As sources of financing for Trump business ventures go, this wouldn’t actually be that unusual: After most American banks stopped lending to him due to his history of risky investments and dealings, Trump turned to other streams of funding to build his empire, including borrowing heavily from German-owned Deutsche bank, to which he still owes millions.

Yet years later, under increased scrutiny over the role that Russian election hacking played in the 2016 election, the Trump administration and Trump himself have repeatedly denied ever having any ties to Russia at all.

Quote:

Donald J. Trump
✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump
Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!
6:31 AM - 11 Jan 2017

Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever
Fox News founder made this the hate-filled, moronic country it is today

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate...

Quote:

Trump reportedly plans to sabotage Obamacare by cutting off low-income subsidies

The move would make it harder for millions of people to buy health coverage.

President Donald Trump has frequently suggested that Obamacare is “collapsing” and predicted that statewide marketplaces will soon cease to function. But if the health care law doesn’t fall off a cliff on its own, he appears more than willing to give it a push.

On Friday —amid a storm of Russia-related leaks and news of the president’s imminent departure for Saudi Arabia — Politico reported that Trump has quietly decided to end approximately $7 billion annually in cost-sharing subsidies for low-income people who purchase their health care on the Obamacare exchanges. Each year, these payments help reduce the co-payments and deductibles of approximately 7 million low-income people who get their insurance on the marketplaces.

Ending these payments wouldn’t just hurt those 7 million people. Without those subsidies to keep their lower deductible plans afloat, some insurance companies would likely exit the Obamacare marketplaces — or hike their premiums to compensate for the shortfall. The result could be a devastating ripple effect through the entire private marketplace system.

Trump has threatened to kill off the cost-sharing subsidies before, but seemed to back down after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Democrats would be willing to shut down the government if continued payments weren’t guaranteed.

On Friday, eight concerned parties — including the American Medical Association, BlueCross BlueShield, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — sent a joint letter to the Senate leadership of both parties, urging them to pass legislation that would ensure the cost-sharing payments continue.

“The individual market is their only option for getting coverage. Unless CSRs [cost sharing reductions] are funded, a tremendous number of Americans will simply go without coverage and move to the ranks of the uninsured,” they wrote. “This threatens not just their own health and financial stability, but also the economic stability of their communities.”

TP

I totally dislike this guy more every day, nothing but a greedy lying mongrel.