The White House in melt down… Trump implicated in Russia coverup, as Scaramucci is escorted off White House grounds

Shortly after taking his position as White House Communications Director, Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, discussing how unauthorized leaks were keeping the President from pursuing his agenda and making America great again, said, “I want to fucking kill all the leakers.” Well, today, there was another leak, and it was a big one. According to the Washington Post, someone within the administration has confirmed that it was Trump himself who had instructed his son to lie about the meeting he’d taken with representatives from the Kremlin last July, a revelation which essentially puts Trump at the center of the coverup. Scaramucci, for what it’s worth, was not available for comment, seeing as how, earlier in the day, he’d been escorted off the White House grounds.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when asked why Scaramucci had been fired after just ten days, said that the former Wall Street executive had been terminated because the President felt the language he’d used in a discussion several days ago with New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza was “inappropriate for a person in that position.” This, of course, contradicts what we heard by way of Axios directly after the incident, which is that Trump “loved” Scaramucci’s over-the-top, shit-stirring quotes, even if it did irk him a bit to be upstaged. As for why the Mooch was really fired, the most believable theory I’ve heard thus far is that retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, Trump’s brand new Chief of Staff, made the call this morning, and that Trump begrudgingly went along with it.

So, just to sum up for those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the news this past week; Trump hired the Mooch to be his third Communications Director since May; Spicer, who warned that he’d quit if the Mooch was hired, left in disgust; the Mooch then forced out Priebus, who he called a “paranoid schizophrenic”; Kelly was hired to replace Priebus, who, we learned, had been given the job of killing flies in the White House; and Kelly fired the Mooch, who, by the way, missed his son’s birth a few days ago, causing his wife to file for divorce… And all of this happened in just eleven days.

I know what you’re thinking… What happened to that “fine-tuned machine” Trump was telling us about?

Well, judging from Twitter, nothing’s changed. Trump just posted that today was another great day at the White House. [All of the chaos, I guess, is just an illusion being projected by the “fake news.”]

Which brings us to this message, shared earlier today by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who clearly seems to think that Trump is beginning to crumble, along with his support in Congress. The following, says Reich, is a conversation that just took place between himself a former Republican member of Congress. Make of it what you will.


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This is how public health care ends…. (or maybe not!)

When historians look back and wonder what happened to American democracy, they won’t have to look too hard for examples. Here’s a great one from just a few minutes ago, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans are running down the clock before casting their votes to kill Obamacare. Senator Patty Murray asks if Democrats will have an opportunity to address the Republican health care bill, which, according to the CBO, will raise insurance premiums by 20% the first year, and result in 16 million Americans losing the health care they currently enjoy. Senator Mike Enzi responds to Murray by saying that her time would be better spent reading the bill… And, with that, it looks like public health care, as we know it today, is going to come to an end in the United States.

[Am I the only own who’s reminded, when hearing Enzi tell Murray to just sit quietly and read the bill, of Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams suggesting that victims of rape should just “relax and enjoy it“?]

As for why Enzi won’t yield the floor, here, from Senator Mazie Hirono, who is currently battling cancer, is a pretty good example of what they’re fearing.

Oh, it’s also being estimated that, if this bill passes tonight, and is signed into law in its current form, over 20,000 Americans will likely lose their lives. And for what? A tax cut for the super-wealthy, and the momentary high that comes from destroying the legacy of Barack Obama.

update: What a happy, unexpected feeling to wake up this morning and discover that John McCain actually had the courage to join Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski in voting no against Mitch McConnell’s “skinny” repeal bill, much to the surprise of everyone on the floor of the Senate, sending Trumpcare 3.0 down in flames. Here’s video of McCain casting his vote agains the bill that would have taken health coverage from 16 million Americans. You can actually hear the gasps of his fellow Senators, all of whom, obviously, had been led to believe that he would be voting with the other old, white men of the GOP. And that’s what makes the whole thing so much better. Not only did McCain kill the bill, but he obviously led McConnell to think it was going to pass right up until to the last minute. Otherwise, McConnell would never have called for the vote, and had Vice President Pence waiting in things to cast the tie breaking vote… Good work, John McCain… And that goes double for Collins and Murkowski, who stood strong in the face of unbelievable pressure from the right… Today’s a good day. But the fight isn’t over by a long shot.

And here’s video from outside the Capitol early this morning, when word came down about Trumpcare’s 51 to 49 defeat.

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Losing his shit over White House leaks, the Mooch says he’ll fire everyone, calls Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic,” and fantasizes out loud about Bannon attempting to suck his own cock

I know I said yesterday that we should only be taking about health care, and I meant it. So please don’t read the following unless you’re on hold, waiting for one of your Senators to pick up the phone, OK? And definitely don’t leave a comment if it means taking even a second away from writing to your friends and relatives, imploring them to speak up against Trumpcare, the newest versioning of which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would raise premiums by 20% the first year, and ultimately take insurance away from 16 million people that presently have it… With all of that said, though, I’m going to post something here about Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci, our newly minted White House Communications Director, and how he’s spent his last 24 hours.

I’ve been wanting to write about Scaramucci since he stood at the podium last week and declared his passionate, undying “love” for Trump, but I restrained myself, thinking my late-night blogging time was better spent trying to figure out what was happening on the health care front… Well, I’ve now gotten to point where I can’t hold back.

Here, if you’ve successfully avoided the media for the past 24 hours, is what happened.

Apparently late last night, after having dinner with Trump, Melania, Sean Hannity and some other questionable Fox News types, Scaramucci got it in his head to call the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and vent about what he saw as an attack against him being waged by White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. It would seem that, earlier that evening, Scaramucci’s financial disclosure form, which people have to submit upon taking jobs such as his, had gone public, and he’d become convinced, perhaps with the help of Trump, that Priebus had leaked the documents to the press… Yes, it would appear as though Scaramucci didn’t know that the document that he filled out, which said “public disclosure” right across the top, was in fact a public document. [As we discovered today, the disclosure form had been requested by Politico through normal, well-established channels, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Priebus.]

Well, Scaramucci, who Sarah Huckabee Sanders described today as being “a passionate guy,” decided to call Lizza and go off an unhinged rant, which included Scaramucci, talking about himself in third person, declaring, “The swamp will not defeat him.” And we know what he said, word for word, because it was taped. What’s more, Scaramucci did not ask that the call be off the record, which seems like the kind of mistake that wouldn’t be made by the White House Director of Communications, right? Well, at any rate, here’s a bit of Lizza’s account, which ran in on the New Yorker site today.

…Now, he wanted to know whom I had been talking to about his dinner with the President…

“Is it an assistant to the President?” he asked. I again told him I couldn’t say. “O.K., I’m going to fire every one of them, and then you haven’t protected anybody, so the entire place will be fired over the next two weeks.”

I asked him why it was so important for the dinner to be kept a secret. Surely, I said, it would become public at some point. “I’ve asked people not to leak things for a period of time and give me a honeymoon period,” he said. “They won’t do it.” He was getting more and more worked up, and he eventually convinced himself that Priebus was my source.

“They’ll all be fired by me,” he said. “I fired one guy the other day. I have three to four people I’ll fire tomorrow. I’ll get to the person who leaked that to you. Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” The issue, he said, was that he believed Priebus had been worried about the dinner because he hadn’t been invited. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” Scaramucci said. He channelled Priebus as he spoke: “‘Oh, Bill Shine is coming in. Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.’ ” (Priebus did not respond to a request for comment.)

Scaramucci was particularly incensed by a Politico report about his financial-disclosure form, which he viewed as an illegal act of retaliation by Priebus. The reporter said Thursday morning that the document was publicly available and she had obtained it from the Export-Import Bank. Scaramucci didn’t know this at the time, and he insisted to me that Priebus had leaked the document, and that the act was “a felony.”

“I’ve called the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice,” he told me.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“The swamp will not defeat him,” he said, breaking into the third person. “They’re trying to resist me, but it’s not going to work. I’ve done nothing wrong on my financial disclosures, so they’re going to have to go fuck themselves.”

Scaramucci also told me that, unlike other senior officials, he had no interest in media attention. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said, speaking of Trump’s chief strategist. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.” (Bannon declined to comment.)

He reiterated that Priebus would resign soon, and he noted that he told Trump that he expected Priebus to launch a campaign against him. “He didn’t get the hint that I was reporting directly to the President,” he said. “And I said to the President here are the four or five things that he will do to me.” His list of allegations included leaking the Hannity dinner and the details from his financial-disclosure form…

OK, so everything we suspected about this administration, which Trump has referred to as a “fine-tuned machine” is true. It’s a fucking madhouse… In fact, Fox News, which rarely says anything even remotely unflattering about the administration, just posted a story quoting an anonymous White House official as saying, “I am honestly getting concerned for my safety in the office tomorrow.”

But let’s get back to the call with Lizza… It ended with Mooch saying that he was going to “start tweeting some shit to make this guy (Priebus) crazy.” And that’s exactly what he did.

It’s been removed since, but Scaramucci tweeted: “In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45“.

Again, it wasn’t a felony, and it wasn’t even Priebus that gave the document in question to the press. But, in Mooch world, he was going to get the White House Chief of Staff thrown in prison for it.

Which bring us to this morning, when Mooch made an unscheduled call to CNN to pick thing up where he’d left off the night before, ranting about how, among other things, these White House leakers, had they lived at another time, would have been put to death… Here’s video of the half hour long segment.

And, now, things are really beginning to escalate, as Bannon’s goons at Breitbart, have started to go after Scaramucci. [Apparently Steve doesn’t much like the idea that he can only “try” to suck his own cock, and not actually perform the act.]

And this, my friends… to bring it back to health care… is why McConnell and Ryan are so anxious to kill Obamacare. They know the ship is sinking, and they know they’re running out of time. So do your best, OK? Make your calls. Stalk your Senators. Make them know that there will be a price to pay if they side with the billionaires over their constituents. And say a prayer for the folks working in the White House. Things could get really ugly tomorrow.

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If you really care about people who are transgender, or just people in general, please stay focused on health care for the next 24 hours

As much as it pains me to look the other way, and not go off on a long, angry rant about the counterproductive, offensive, and very likely illegal ban against transgender individuals serving in the U.S. military which Trump proposed by way of Twitter this morning, I really think that it might be in our best interest to stay focused on health care for the time being. And I’m not saying this because I don’t care about trans rights. I truly do. I just think that this was a political stunt on the part of Bannon and Trump to distract us from the fact that, at this very minute, the GOP is conspiring to take health care away from approximately 20 million Americans, a disproportionate percentage of whom, by the way, are transgender, and I’m hesitant to give them what they want.

I’m not suggesting that Trump won’t follow through with this newly announced policy of his. In fact, as I think it likely polls well with the evangelical set that he’s been trying to cozy up to since news broke about the secret June 9, 2016 meeting between senior members of his campaign staff and a delegation from the Kremlin apparently sent to broker a deal concerning the launch of a collaborative kompromat campaign against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I suspect he’ll likely keep pushing it forward aggressively. I just think, as the big vote on Trumpcare will likely happen tomorrow, we can’t allow ourselves to be distracted, no matter what offensive thing Trump might say or tweet in hopes of breaking our concentration.

Yes, I know that many of us can multitask, but, judging from my Twitter feed, I’m getting the sense that people are starting to get pulled away from the health care fight, and I’d like to ask that, before donning rainbow fatigues and launching a protest at your local recruiting station, you first see this health care battle all the way through to at lease the end of the round we’re currently fighting.

So, please, if you haven’t already, pull up a call script, dial the offices of your Senators, and let them know that you not only consider health care a human right, but that you’ll vote against them the next time they’re up for reelection if they prioritize the desires of the billionaire class over the very real, life and death needs of constituents like you. And, then, tell everyone you know to do the same, especially if you know people who live in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, where there are GOP Senators that might be wavering in their support of Trumpcare. And, if you still have time, take to the streets with a sign. This, as we’ve discussed before, really is a life and death fight, and we need to demonstrate to those in power that we’re focused, and we’re not going to be divided by ridiculous games.

update: The CBO has weighed in on McConnell’s so-called “skinny repeal” bill. If it were to become law, they say, insurance premiums would rise by 20% next year, and 16 million Americans would lose their health care by 2026. And, as we’ve discussed, this would likely get even worse with the House bill and Senate bill are reconciled to produce a final piece of legislation for Trump to sign… All the more reason to reach out to your Senators right this minute.

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OK, we’re now officially fighting for our lives. And this isn’t hyperbole.

OK, so the vote to advance Trumpcare in the Senate didn’t got our way today. It was close, but we lost, and now the limited period of meaningless discussion masquerading as ‘debate’ begins. As I mentioned yesterday, both sides can propose amendments during this 20-hour period, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is under no obligation to include any of them in the final bill which he brings to the floor for a vote, which could happen as early as Thursday… So, we’ve got a fight on our hands. The Republicans have started the countdown clock, and a vote is eminent – a vote which, in violation of Senate protocol, will happen without a Congressional Budget Office score telling us how this proposed health care legislation will likely impact our economy, our families, etc.

Last night, I shared some links to sample scripts and the like – things that you can refer to when you’re calling your Senators. Please, if you haven’t had a chance already, take a look at them, and make a few calls tomorrow. Urge your Democratic Senators to slow down the process as much as humanly possible, as every additional minute we have will allow more people to learn about what’s going on, and demand that your Republican Senators vote “no” when McConnell eventually brings whatever he’s created to a vote.

I know, like me, you’re probably feeling pretty defeated right now, but we’ve still got a shot at this. While the big money donors are threatening Republican Senators with primary challengers, if they don’t vote for McConnell’s bill (which, by the way, will put hundreds of millions of dollars back into their pockets), we’ve also got leverage. These Republicans know that, if they vote yes on this bill, which will likely rob over 20 million Americans of the health care they currently have, they probably won’t hold elected office again. Republicans like Dean Heller of Nevada, know full well that this could be the end of the road, regardless of how they vote. We just need to make it clear to them that, they’ve got a better chance of surviving if they do the right thing for the American people. Or, at the very least, we have to try to convince them that, if they’re going to die anyway, they might as well die with dignity.

I could say more about McCaine, McConnell, or any number of other things, but, really, all you need to know right now is that this isn’t over yet, millions of lives hang in the balance, and we still have an opportunity to stop this from happening. All the Republicans are obligated to give us, though, is 20 hours of debate, so we have to make it count. We have to tell everyone we know to start paying attention, showing up at the offices of their Senators, calling and tweeting. We need to make ourselves into a human landslide, blocking roads and crashing phone lines… We need to make them see us. We need to make them know that we’re out here. We need to make them appreciate just how much we value our lives, and those of our loved ones, and how doggedly tenacious we intend to be. We cannot just allow this to happen.

The good news is, we know that they can hear us. They may be hiding in D.C., avoiding their home district offices, but they know we’re out here. And we’ve got proof… Capital Hill police were apparently making journalists delete videos from the phones showing the protests at the Capital, but, thanks to C-SPAN, we have audio of what our elected officials heard in the Senate chamber this afternoon. And it’s up to us to make sure that it doesn’t stop. While the Trumpcare train may have left the station, we still have it within us to knock it off the track.

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