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I’m proud to see TPM becoming the go-to place for reporting on the legislative fate of Obamacare, Medicare and now Social Security, all of which are now under varying degrees of threat under unified Trumpite Republican rule. Here’s a quick run-down of the GOP plan for drastic cuts to Social Security. Notably, this is not phaseout, not privatization. It’s a broad-ranging series of hikes to the retirement age, and cuts to benefits, mostly engineered through changes in the cost of living adjustment formulas, with some means testing thrown in for good measure.
For all the criticism and intrigue about Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russia, his lack of any conventional foreign policy experience (despite having contended with various world leaders) and status as an oil company executive, just why did Trump pick him? Like no conspiracy theories, just why? Were they old friends? Is there some business connection? This Politico article gives a more detailed version of the story I’ve now heard in a number of press accounts: Trump had no prior relationship with Tillerson. But he was recommended to Trump by Bob Gates, Condi Rice and finally James Baker.
GSA tells Trump he has to fully divest himself of his new DC hotel before he gets inaugurated.
The biggest reason Obamacare repeal and delay is a crock.
What’s happening in North Carolina right now is worth shifting some of your attention away from Trump.
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.
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.
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.
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 …