Pwale wrote:The bill is dead!

The Affordable Care Act is staying in place. Now we have to convince Congress to actually try and fix it.

Best news I've had for ages!

Wow! Wow wow wow!

After seven years of constantly promising to repeal Obamacare, after making dozens of purely symbolic votes repealing Obamacare, after so many campaign promises and so much time to prepare...the Republican party didn't have a plan ready, and they weren't prepared to compromise even with each other.

There's an old saying about American politics. Republicans are good at winning but bad at governing. Democrats are good at governing but bad at winning.

I wonder if that has ever been so true?

I've been reading stories about how this whole thing went down, and it's remarkable. For one thing, I've learned that Trump's idea of negotiating with congressmen is to talk down to them, dismiss their concerns and threaten them. It didn't go over at all well.

That is truly the best news anyone could ever hope for. I'm so happy to hear they killed that bill and ACA is staying. I saw online a couple days ago that Trump said if he can't get his way he's going to keep ObamaCare. I laughed when I read that.

Okay, here's where we're at right now...

For the next few weeks, the White House and Congress are going to be in a fight over the budget. If they don't reach a deal, there will be a government shut down at the end of the month. One sticking point might be funding for Planned Parenthood. The White House wants to defund PP, (again, for the record, no federal dollars go towards abortion and the only "funding" PP gets from the federal government is reimbursement for Medicaid--in other words, PP only gets money from the federal government when people who get insurance from the federal and state government use PP) and Democrats won't vote for a budget that defunds PP. They also won't vote for a budget that funds Trump's wall. So that will be a huge fight.

There's also the Supreme Court nomination. If the Republicans can't get 60 votes, the Dems will filibuster Gorsuch's nomination. If that happens, the Republicans will most likely change the rules so that a filibuster isn't allowed, and then they will confirm Gorsuch. But that will be another huge fight.

On top of that, the Russia investigations continue. I've been watching the public hearings from both the Congress and Senate Intelligence Committees. The Congressional investigation is a partisan dumpster fire, really. But the Senate investigation seems to be worthwhile and I've actually learned some things from watching the public hearings. One thing I learned was that the intelligence community missed a lot of the earlier meddling in the election because they were looking for secret covert behavior but most of what was happening was happening publicly on Facebook and Twitter, and they thought that sort of stuff was unimportant. This confirmed my suspicioun that the US government does not fully understand cyber technology and social media.

Also, Manafort is back in the news. We spent a lot of time talking about him last spring, and now he's back with a vengeance. It looks like he's been taking money from Russian politicians and mob figures, and laundering that money through NYC real estate deals for at least a decade.

My question now is, are Manafort's Russian mob connections interrelated at all with Trump's Russian mob connections?

Also...take a moment to appreciate that articles about Trump's business deals with people who have worked for the Russian mob have been in print since at least the 80s and he's still president. What. The. Fuck.

Wow... Just wow.. I have no idea what to say besides that's a massive clusterfuck and how the fuck is that piece of trash still president if this crap is being found out already. I'd figure they might at least stop that baby from making choices. Especially since he had a hissy fit I guess at a paper signing for I forgot the word for it (lol) and walked out.

I just hope we hear that he's going to be kicked out of office. No one should have a president at all if he's got that many ties and it's been known for that long.

At least we now know our own government is stupid as hell for sure. They really need to be taught in this new fangled thing called the internet. Holy crap that will take wayyy to long to teach to that many of morons in our own government. (I'm so affectionate right now).

In Resistance news, there are mass protests planned for April 15th and April 22nd, and people are gearing up for another general strike on May 1st.

April 15th is Tax Day, so there will be marches and rallies all over the country demanding Trump release his taxes.

April 22nd is Earth Day. This year, it is the date of the March for Science. There will be mass marches is most major cities, led by scientists. The original messaging was a call to defend scientific discovery generally and to call for action on climate change specifically. Since then the Trump administration has also attacked scientists of all kinds especially medical researchers and has dismantled the White House science and technology departments, and so there are a huge range of different scientific fields that are currently under direct threat. The marches should be huge.

May 1st is always a big protest day, especially for progressives. The whole reason we even have a May 1st holiday is a ton of labor rights protesters were murdered. This year there will be a general strike in support of immigrants, in order to demonstrate how much immigrants contribute to the economy.

Sounds like an eventful month coming. I hope things work for everyone protesting. Those are perfect days to do protests too. God our next president has too much work ahead of them to do. They will surley go gray faster than Obama did.

No, what's happening there?

All I know is that a man who's a doctor was dragged off the plane after refusing to give up his seat for 4 United employees who needed to get to where the plane was going for work. (They overbooked and were demanding people to get off the plane for the workers to take their spot.) I don't know much else. I refuse to pay attention to the company excusing what they did (in the couple things I read.)