April 30, 2018

John McCain in New Book: I'm Freer Now to Speak My Mind

The senator has penned a book while coping with brain cancer. Here’s what he has to say in the final chapter of his remarkable life.

GIDEON RESNICK
04.30.18 1:47 PM ET

In a new book, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) writes that his battle with brain cancer has given him a sense of liberation to vote and speak his mind.

“This is my last term,” McCain writes in his upcoming book The Restless Wave, which he co-authored with former adviser Mark Salter. An excerpt of the book was posted Monday on Apple News.

“If I hadn’t admitted that to myself before this summer, a stage 4 cancer diagnosis acts as ungentle persuasion,” McCain continues. “I’m freer than colleagues who will face the voters again. I can speak my mind without fearing the consequences much. And I can vote my conscience without worry. I don’t think I’m free to disregard my constituents’ wishes, far from it. I don’t feel excused from keeping pledges I made. Nor do I wish to harm my party’s prospects. But I do feel a pressing responsibility to give Americans my best judgment.”

The book, which comes as McCain remains in Arizona undergoing treatment, includes sharp shots at President Donald Trump, according to the Apple News write up. “He has declined to distinguish the actions of our government from the crimes of despotic ones,” McCain writes. “The appearance of toughness, or a reality show facsimile of toughness, seems to matter more than any of our values.”

Describing the political environment overall, the Arizona Republican writes that he is dismayed by the “scarcity of humility in politics these days.”

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/mccain-in-new-book-im-freer-now-to-speak-my-mind?ref=home

April 30, 2018

Rubio admits GOP tax cut is a bust: 'No evidence that money's been poured back into the American...

Source: RawStory



Rubio admits GOP tax cut is a bust: ‘No evidence that money’s been poured back into the American worker’

BRAD REED
30 APR 2018 AT 13:05 ET

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) voted in favor of the Republican Party’s massive tax cut late last year — but now he says that there’s little evidence that handing out big breaks to corporations has significantly trickled down to American workers.

Talking with The Economist, Rubio criticizes his party for believing that large corporate tax cuts will inevitably produce windfalls for workers in the United States — and he says that so far, we haven’t seen very many corporations using their additional money to invest in their employees.

“There is still a lot of thinking on the right that if big corporations are happy, they’re going to take the money they’re saving and reinvest it in American workers,” Rubio tells the publication. “In fact they bought back shares, a few gave out bonuses; there’s no evidence whatsoever that the money’s been massively poured back into the American worker.” Rubio also hinted that neither the GOP’s tax cut plan nor Trump’s protectionism will do much to help workers who are seeing more and more jobs disappear thanks to automation and technology.

“I have no problem with bringing back American car-manufacturing facilities, but, whether they’re American robots or Mexican robots, they’re going to be highly automated,” he explains. “My relatives are firefighters and nurses and teachers and electricians. These are people who are not all that excited about the new economy.”

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Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/rubio-admits-gop-tax-cut-bust-no-evidence-moneys-poured-back-american-worker/

April 30, 2018

This is a bad time for Trump to appear before the NRA

By Paul Waldman April 30 at 1:23 PM

The White House has confirmed that President Trump will be addressing the National Rifle Association convention this weekend, as will Vice President Pence, joining conservative video bloggers Diamond and Silk on the already star-studded speaker’s list. While Trump has appeared at NRA conventions before, he comes before them at a moment of greater risk for himself — and for the gun-rights group.

And this time, Trump will probably hurt their cause more than help it.

It is unlikely that Trump’s speech itself will produce something significant, because we’ve seen so many of these before. He arrives with a prepared speech paying tribute to his audience and their issue, then proceeds to ramble on for an hour about his great electoral college victory, the dishonest news media, the phony Russia investigation, and whichever liberal happens to be annoying him that week (look out, Michelle Wolf!). That’s how his speech to the NRA last year went. But the context is different this year. In the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, the politics of guns have shifted in one critical way: Democrats are no longer afraid of the issue. The idea that the NRA wields terrifying power before which every politician of any party must bow has been punctured; more Democratic candidates are talking openly about new gun control measures, and liberal organizing on the issue has increased significantly.

One of the president’s goals in coming to the NRA convention is to convince gun voters — that subset of gun owners for whom gun rights are the most important issue of all — that they must vote in November. The message is not just that if Democrats are elected then Nancy Pelosi will personally come to your house, take away your guns, and then invite marauding gangs of minorities/immigrants/terrorists to kill you and defile your women, because every speaker at the convention will say that (not quite literally, though Wayne LaPierre might). It’s that loyalty to Trump himself demands you vote and work to make sure Republicans win.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/30/this-is-a-bad-time-for-trump-to-appear-before-the-nra/?utm_term=.56bf0da8243e&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

April 30, 2018

As California moves to speed up executions, a man is exonerated after 25 years on death row

By Radley Balko April 30 at 2:02 PM

This Los Angeles Times editorial lays out the brutal details of yet another death-row exoneration:

A Kern County Superior Court judge last week ordered that a 68-year-old former farmworker, Vicente Benavides Figueroa, be released from San Quentin’s death row after the local district attorney declared she would not retry him. Benavides had been in prison for more than 25 years after being convicted of raping, sodomizing and murdering his girlfriend’s 21-month-old daughter.

-snip-

Benavides was freed after all but one of the medical experts who testified against him recanted their conclusions that the girl had, in effect, been raped to death — conclusions they had reached after reviewing incomplete medical records. In fact, the first nurses and doctors who examined the semiconscious and battered girl in 1991 observed no injuries suggesting she had been raped or sodomized, but those details were not passed along to the medical expert witnesses who testified in court. Injuries later observed at two other hospitals were likely caused by that first effort to save her life, which included attempts to insert an adult-sized catheter.

Two points to add some context to this unimaginably horrific story:

First, Kern County, home to Bakersfield, was also the terrain of longtime district attorney Ed Jagels, one of the pillars of the law-and-order movement of the 1980s and 1990s. There was a joke that Bakersfield’s unofficial motto was “Come for vacation, leave on probation.” Jagels used to brag on his official Web page of having a higher per-capita imprisonment rate than any county in California. He was elected head of the state’s district attorneys association multiple times and was often referred to as the dean of California prosecutors. He also led the charge for nearly every draconian crime bill the state passed in that era, including the state’s notorious “three strikes” law. He helped get three anti-death-penalty justices removed from the California Supreme Court and lobbied heavily against medical marijuana.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/04/30/as-california-moves-to-speed-up-executions-a-man-is-exonerated-after-25-years-on-death-row/

April 30, 2018

Mike Pence and the NRA have a lot more explaining to do

By Tom Toles April 30 at 1:00 PM




https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/04/30/mike-pence-and-the-nra-have-a-lot-more-explaining-to-do/

April 30, 2018

Megyn Kelly slams Hillary Clinton over Tom Brokaw sexual misconduct allegations

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/megyn-kelly-slams-hillary-clinton-tom-brokaws-sexual-misconduct-accuser-taken-seriously/

April 30, 2018

Shut up about Michelle Wolf if you've been silent on Trump's offenses

By Jonathan Capehart April 30 at 8:23 AM

As happens after every White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (a.k.a. Nerd Prom), the question is “What did you think?” What did you think of the comedian hired to skewer the president, the press corps and the political class gathered in the Washington Hilton for a dinner that raises money for scholarships, awards and other things done by the WHCA? The query takes on an added urgency when the comedian crosses a line that offends the glittering precious souls in the ballroom.

Michelle Wolf, the former correspondent and writer for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” whose eponymous special HBO cemented her on the comedic map, didn’t just cross the line. She blithely blew past it like a bank robber through a red light — after plowing through a cement-truck barricade. I’m no shrinking violet. I love a well-executed salty joke wrapped in blue. But Wolf even had me agape and clutching my pearls. She was a riot!

There are two things everyone should keep in mind about the comedian with the Nerd Prom gig. First, it’s a thankless job. Only delivering the response to the State of the Union is more a thankless task. Both have to thread a needle so difficult that most who attempt it fail. Only one person in each job has been successful in recent memory.

Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) did a good job in his Democratic Party response to President Trump’s first State of the Union address in January. " target="_blank">Hasan Minhaj of “The Daily Show” killed it at Nerd Prom last year. His comedic flame alternately roasted, baked or flambéed his targets in the heart of This Town while paying respectful homage to the First Amendment. He got a standing ovation for it. Wolf did not.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/04/30/shut-up-about-michelle-wolf-if-youve-been-silent-on-trumps-offenses

April 30, 2018

In private chat with senator, Trump hints at policy shift in Afghanistan - and a return to isolation

Source: The Washington Post



By Michael Scherer, Greg Jaffe and Josh Dawsey April 30 at 9:57 AM

In the days leading up to a key vote over the fate of his nominee for secretary of state, President Trump found a way to win over one of the biggest skeptics in the Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), a rare isolationist Republican, was signaling that he would oppose Trump’s pick, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a hawkish former congressman who had backed the Iraq War. But the more Trump and Paul spoke, including three calls on Monday, the more assured Paul became that the president was moving back toward the non-interventionist world view that Trump had championed on the campaign trail. The conversations left Paul with a particularly enticing notion: that Trump was prepared to end the war in Afghanistan.

“The president told me over and over again in general we’re getting the hell out of there,” Paul said in an interview Thursday in his Senate office. “I think the president’s instincts and inclination are to resolve the Afghan conflict.”

The two men discussed no exit dates and did not strike a written agreement, as Trump urged Paul to meet one-on-one with Pompeo and ultimately secured the senator’s support ahead of a key Foreign Relations Committee vote that paved the way for confirmation.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-private-chat-with-senator-trump-hints-at-policy-shift-in-afghanistan--and-a-return-to-isolationism/2018/04/30/e0e9b1ec-4995-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html

April 30, 2018

'Ready, shoot, aim': President Trump's loyalty tests cause hiring headaches

By Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey April 29 at 6:55 PM

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then the star of President Trump’s early Cabinet, was assembling his staff and picked Sarah Isgur Flores as his top spokeswoman.

There was just one problem: She had criticized Trump, repeatedly, during the 2016 Republican primaries. Flores’s prospects for a Justice Department job stalled, and Trump’s advisers knew there was only one way Sessions would be able to hire her: If she kowtowed to Trump.

So she paid her respects to the president in the Oval Office — a cordial visit during which she told the president she was on board with his agenda and would be honored to serve him, according to several people with knowledge of the meeting.

The early 2017 episode, which has not previously been reported, underscores the extent to which Trump demands loyalty in vetting administration officials — even well-qualified Republicans like Flores seeking jobs on the personal staffs of Cabinet secretaries, who historically have had considerable leeway to do their own hiring.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ready-shoot-aim-president-trumps-loyalty-tests-cause-hiring-headaches/2018/04/29/7756ec9c-4a33-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html

April 30, 2018

GOP Candidates In Legal Trouble Borrow From Trump Playbook: Blame Obama!

By Cameron Joseph | April 30, 2018 6:00 am



When a top Republican candidate for governor was confronted over his family company’s illegally underpaying workers earlier this week, he responded with a familiar refrain in modern GOP politics: Thanks, Obama.

Adam Putnam, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and a top candidate for his party’s gubernatorial nomination in the key swing state, responded to questions about his family company’s failure to pay four workers minimum wage by blaming it on the previous president.

“After three days of Obama regulators crawling around our lower intestine, they came up with a $250 fine, which was later dismissed,” he told local reporters — even though that Department of Labor investigation into his family’s company, which forced them to pay $1,672 in back wages, began a year before Obama was even in office.

Putnam’s strategy of blaming a politicized government and sowing doubts about the integrity of federal officials is just the latest example of a Trump-era GOP candidate with legal problems attacking the former administration. That borrows from the president’s own playbook of attacking the intelligence community, the FBI and anyone else who’s investigating his team for possible wrongdoing as being politically motivated members of the “deep state” loyal to the former president, even if they’re career civil servants or Republicans.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/gop-candidates-in-legal-trouble-borrow-from-trump-playbook-blame-obama