I have seen David Friedman, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next US Ambassador to Israel, described in the mainstream press as a supporter of settlement expansion. The analogies that readily spring to mind are too coarse for me to repeat. Let’s say this is a wild understatement. Friedman represents the extremes of the most vicious and destructive elements of rightist Zionism and the indeed the most radical elements of American Jewry.
This is just a small part of a sprawling story. But indulge me for a moment while I focus in on it. John Podesta has a piece out tonight in the Post which is a broad indictment of the FBI, for its obsession with Secretary Clinton’s private email server and its lackadaisical indifference to Russian sabotage efforts against her party and then her campaign. In the beginning of that piece Podesta zeroes in on something that jumped out at me too when I read the big New York Times story on the history of the Clinton hacks.
Here’s the passage.
A big, big driver of Obamacare repeal is that it’s a big tax cut for the super wealthy. Taxpayers in the top 1 percent see an average tax cut of $33,000. Those in the top .1 percent will get an average tax cut of $197,000.
This is first reported by CNN, apparently a video originally dug up by American Bridge. Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, backed up Mitt Romney’s “47%” comments back late in the 2012 campaign in an interview on Indian TV station NDTV. Ross makes the factually incorrect statement that 47% of Americans pay no taxes. Actually more telling than that are the comments about scofflaws on unemployment and various safety net programs. Video after the jump. “A very high percentage of the unemployed people claim disabilities so that they can get more money,” says Ross at one point and “40-some-odd percent of the ones who claim disability claim sudden mental disability.”
47% part starts at approximately 1:30 …
A “Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” compiled by Dem ex-Hill staffers is making the rounds and uses the Tea Party’s effective sabotaging of the Obama agenda as its touchstone.
It seems to me that Democrats are now involved in a pointless proxy battle between what we might call a “deep causes” explanation of the 2016 loss (strategy, ideology, candidate) and one focused on illegitimate outside interventions: Russian hacking and subversion or James Comey’s week-out intervention in the presidential race. Any effort to hold these two explanations as alternatives, as though one obviates the other seems either dishonest, pointless, distracting or simply silly.
What stands as perhaps the most brazen element of the lame-duck North Carolina legislature’s last-minute effort to weaken the office of the governor before Democrat Roy Cooper is sworn in involves what we traditionally think of as patronage positions.
This really is something to behold.
What’s happening in North Carolina right now is worth shifting some of your attention away from Trump.
The biggest reason Obamacare repeal and delay is a crock.
GSA tells Trump he has to fully divest himself of his new DC hotel before he gets inaugurated.