16 Ways of Looking at a Mugwump

Mugwump, noun: 1. a Republican who refused to support the party nominee, James G. Blaine, in the presidential campaign of 1884. 2. a person who is unable to make up his or her mind on an issue, especially in politics; a person who is neutral on a controversial issue.
 

Kushner

1. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, has conducted a "purge" of certain members of Trump's transition team, starting with Gov. Chris Christie who was fired as head of the transition last Friday. Former Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan and Matthew Freedman, a lobbyist who consults with corporations and foreign governments, were also fired. Both had ties to Christie.

2. The President-elect sent a tweet very late last night insisting that everything was going smoothly. “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”

3. Rebekah Mercer, a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign and member of his executive transition team, told Republican operatives that she was having difficulty finding people interested in rank-and-file administration posts.

4. Trump took his first conversations with foreign leaders without reviewing official State Department briefing materials, and he broke from diplomatic practice by delaying conversations with close U.S. allies. Trump’s first call was with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, followed by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu. British Prime Minister Theresa May didn’t get through to Trump until almost a day later.

5. As of yesterday, officials at both the Pentagon and State Department said they have heard nothing from Trump’s transition team.

Bannon

6. Trump’s newly-named chief strategist, Steve Bannon, helped turn Breitbart News into a platform for the white nationalist alt-right. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a possible choice for attorney general, was once turned down for a federal judgeship after several U.S. attorneys testified that he made racist comments in court. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s extensive business ties to Qatar and Venezuela complicate reports that he could be chosen as secretary of state.

7. Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official who had criticized Trump during the campaign but said after his election that he would keep an open mind about advising him, said yesterday on Twitter that he had changed his opinion. After speaking to the transition team, he wrote, "stay away!” adding, “They’re angry, arrogant, screaming ‘you LOST!’ Will be ugly.”

8. Donald Trump and some of his family went to dinner last night at the super-expensive 21 Club in Manhattan (where you can get a ribeye for $68) and said to the well-heeled diners, "We'll get your taxes down -- don't worry about it."

9. Vice President-elect Mike Pence -- who now heads the transition after the firing of Christie -- did his own purge, reportedly dismissing the several registered lobbyists who had moved in, leaving the transition "short-staffed" but closer to Trump’s campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”

Mnuchin

10. Former Goldman Sachs partner and Trump loyalist Steven Mnuchin is the frontrunner for treasury secretary. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions is now favored to serve as attorney general. Seen arriving at Trump Tower yesterday was one-time campaign rival Ted Cruz. Joining the national security transition team is Frank Gaffney Jr. -- labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes,” and who last year defended Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “common sense.”

11. Rudy Giuliani let his freak flag fly and admitted in public that he's pretty sure he'll be picked as Secretary of State. John Bolton’s name also surfaced for that job. Republican Sen. Rand Paul immediately objected, calling Bolton “unfit” for the job. “You want to have a diplomat in charge of diplomacy. You don’t want a bomb thrower,” Paul told CNN. Then Paul lumped the former mayor of New York City in with Bolton: “I think Giuliani and Bolton are very similar. Bolton just has a more extensive cheerleading background with regard to war in the Middle East.”

12. Republicans will have a one-seat majority in the Senate, meaning any defection -- by a senator like Rand Paul -- could pose a serious roadblock to confirming Trump’s top Cabinet picks. 

13. One source with knowledge of the Trump transition described it as a "knife fight."

14. A particular challenge for the Trump transition is lack of clarity about the division of power among Reince Priebus, named Chief of Staff of the Trump White House; Steve Bannon, the Harvard-educated white supremacist and campaign Svengali; and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has Trump's ear like no one else. Another source tied to the transition described the resulting confusion as "buffoonery."

Flynn

15. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has emerged as a leading candidate for national security adviser. Flynn was a vocal and sometimes inflamatory advocate for Trump during the campaign. At the Republican National Convention he delivered a fiery speech attacking Clinton (as being in the enemy camp, along with Barack Hussein Obama) and waving the bloody flag of "American exceptionalism." He echoed Trump's rhetoric of crushing terrorism, cozying up to Russia, and dissing NATO.

16. Trump on the campaign trail promised repeatedly not to change Medicare. Now his official website says: “modernize Medicare, so that it will be ready for the challenges with the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation – and beyond.” "Modernize"? House Speaker Paul Ryan has a different term: "Medicare is going to have price controls.”

A nation and its Constitution are one. A nation and its Constitution and Donald Trump are one. (Apologies, Wallace Stevens!)

Dick Burr Mistakes His Thumb for a Magic Wand

How did Sen. Dick Burr vote yesterday on the Paul Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a Republican coupon worth approximately 13 aspirin? He voted for it, natch! He's one of only 40 Republican senators who've decided to make what Jennifer Steinhauer at the NYTimes calls a "chin-out" defense of a scheme that would effectively end Medicare.

All righty then! The Ryan "end Medicare" budget is now about as popular as prickly heat in August. So deciding to lead with one's chin when one's biceps have gone soft like pudding might seem a strange sparring technique, but Burr perhaps figgers he has almost six years for people to forget where he stood on this issue before he has to stand on his record.

The Republican senators who said "no thank you very much" to the Ryan scheme and who voted with the Democrats to defeat it?

Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts
Susan Collins of Maine
Olympia J. Snowe of Maine
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska

Lisa Murkowski, ever since the Palin tea partiers ran a candidate against her in last year's Republican primary, and after she won reelection anyway as a write-in candidate, has been saying "up yours" right regularly to the mullahs of conservatism ever since.

A fifth Republican senator also voted "no" on the Ryan budget, and he's a bit of a surprise: Rand Paul of Kentucky, who bears no resemblance to the other four except that he breathes air. According to Steinhauer of the Times, Paul thought the Ryan scheme was just too weak.

Remind me to send a sympathy card to the voters of Kentucky.

Virginia Foxx, Out of the Closet

She's been coy at times about privatizing (a.k.a., eliminating) Medicare, but with her vote last Friday she's fully on record (with all her Republican pals except for four brave souls) in support of Congressman Ryan's Big Scheme to defund Medicare. Not one Democratic Rep voted for this Black Frost of a budget plan.

No need for Death Panels, eh, Congresswoman? Every old, poor person can get to their dirt couch without delay under your vision of the future.

The Republican non-believers? David McKinley of West Virginia (sudden heart palpitations in the Kingdom of Coal?), Walter Jones of North Carolina (!), Ron Paul of Texas (!!), and Denny Rehberg of Montana.

This Grass Has Plastic Roots

This is the bus supplied by Americans for Prosperity for the rally against health care yesterday in Winston-Salem. (Hat-tip: this and other pics gratefully found here.)

Grassroots, right? Yeah. Uncle Ted and Aunt Esther and some of their friends found themselves an old touring bus, and with some gallons of flat paint and a few camel-hair brushes, they painted that sucker to exercise their American right to disagree.

Well, no. This is "astroturf," so-called because it's fake grass(roots).

Americans for Prosperity started the tea-bagging movement. It's funded by corporations and other rich guys who've figgered out how to con the modestly salaried into screaming about taxes. Other than the outside agitators they bussed into Winston yesterday, they attracted local Republican activists, Paularoid remnants, birthers, the "Obama is the devil" crowd, and racists (but I repeat myself).

Madam Doctor Virginia Foxx was there and didn't say a word about the government putting old people to death. Instead, she harped on abortion, claiming that proposed health-reform was really a sneaky way to force teenaged girls to abort their babies.

Many in the crowd were clearly over 65 and therefore already on Medicare, that terrible, socialistic, government-run insurance program that they claim they're dead-set against. They are either willfully ignorant, or duped, or simply hateful, but all of them are serving the interests of big corporations who've labored all these years to take over our government and who have no intention of relinquishing their grip now.

Republican Hypocrites and One Brilliant Smart Ass

These Republican members of Congress voted on Friday in the House Energy & Commerce Committee against eliminating the most socialistic government plan known to man ... Medicare:

Joe Barton, Tex., ranking member
Ralph Hall, Tex.
Fred Upton, Mich.
Cliff Stearns, Fl.
Nathan Deal, Ga.
Ed Whitfield, Ky.
John Shimkus, Ill.
John Shadegg, Ariz.
Roy Blunt, Mo.
Steve Buyer, Ind.
George Radanovich, Calif.
Joseph Pitts, Pa.
Mary Bono Mack, Calif.
Greg Walden, Ore.
Lee Terry, Neb.
Mike Rogers, Mich.
Sue Myrick, N.C.
John Sullivan, Okla.
Tim Murphy, Pa.
Michael Burgess, Tex.
Marsha Blackburn, Tenn.
Phil Gingrey, Ga.
Steve Scalise, La.

The Republican hypocrisy on this issue is (duh) so blindingly obvious. They scream against "government-run health-care," but when given the opportunity (by Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.) to once and for all vote to end socialized medicine in America, they all voted to keep it. (Medicare is not only "government-run" ... it's SINGLE-freakin'-PAYER!)

You can see Mr. Weiner introducing his amendment and daring the Republicans to vote for it -- "I double-dare you!" -- on YouTube. He admitted up front that his amendment was not anything he personally was in favor of, but it should be something every conservative Republican should jump on.

An eye-witness wrote up what followed in the committee (via Scrutiny Hooligans):

...Wiener observed that a lot of Republicans had been warning direly about the dangers of socialized medicine and government interference in the health-care market, and so offered "the amendment they've been waiting for" to give them the opportunity to vote to end the scourge of single-payer health care in America. As a counterpart to the now-famous Republican flow chart of Obamacare, Wiener had a nice simple chart demonstrating how Medicare works (with just 3 boxes: patients, providers, government). There was also a poignant moment when everyone paused to honor John Dingell, who actually voted for Medicare 44 years ago (and is now on crutches and looking rather feeble).

The Ranking Republican, Joe Barton of Texas, made some nonsensical and indecipherable distinction about "government-mandated" health care versus "government-run" health care, and said that Republicans support the Medicare because it is in the former category (if that's true, they sure ought to be supporting the current House health care bill). Wiener asked if the Republicans would support a public plan if it looked like Medicare, and Barton dodged the question. Later Barton hit on the semi-coherent response that Medicare only pays 80% of the cost of treatment, so the private insurance market has to pick up the slack to ensure that doctors and hospitals stay solvent. My understanding is that that's completely false, but at least it sounds coherent.

The debate on Wiener's amendment got pretty heated, with Rep. Steve Buyer calling Wiener an "intellectual smart-ass" and Wiener calling all the Republicans hypocrites (with good reason, though). Initially, Chairman Waxman was not amused by the amendment, since he was trying to keep the markup moving quickly in order to finish on Friday. By the end of the debate, though, Waxman was clearly enjoying it. In the end, despite Wiener's "double-dare," all the Republicans voted no (how often do you see a unanimous "no" vote?), thus proving on the 44th anniversary of the signing of the Medicare Act that nobody's going to mess with Medicare anytime soon.

The company line among Republican rank-and-file (who don't know any better but who grasp at any straw to oppose President Obama) is that Medicare was present in Eden, granted by God in his first creation, and has nothing to do with government and certainly isn't "socialism." Which is how they can stand in their tea-bag protests holding signs saying "FIGHT SOCIALISM," while either they themselves or their parents are direct beneficiaries of Medicare ... and would skin several cats to keep it.

The World Turned Upside Down

Good Gawd, ya'll. Virginia Foxx voted to over-ride El Presidente's veto of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act.

Going all soft and squishy in her 65th year?