It looks like the House has passed a CR. Haven’t seen details yet, but it sounds like while it wasn’t totally clean, there was nothing about THE WALL, and no stiffing of health care subsidies. The Senate has also passed a one-week continuing resolution. It now goes to, I still can’t believe I’m typing this, President Trump for signature. Navy Federal, USAA, and First Command are offering government shutdown assistance for people on DoD payroll.
I’ve been reading a lot of those “first 100 days’ articles, and few mention Russia. It’s scary that a hostile foreign power can hijack our election and the media is so enmeshed in j-school “report card” habits that they don’t mention it. This isn’t a new thought. There’s a WaPo opinion piece that basically says the same thing. It’s just, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing it. The state is more focused than the media, though: the Defense Department is investigating money Mike Flynn received from foreign groups.
Facebook has acknowledged that it was exploited by governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries. [pdf, Guardian]
We’re all – including foreign countries – getting used to the president saying one thing and then the vice president and everybody else saying, “oh, no, it’s totally cool, just ignore him.” [Lawfare]
The Trump administration is trying to pass another TrumpCare bill, now with even more cruelty, enough to satisfy the Freedom Caucus, except that now moderates are unhappy. Molina Healthcare will withdraw from the marketplace immediately if Congress doesn’t fund the cost sharing reductions in the spending bill. About 650k people would lose coverage.
Tax reform is still struggling.
Apparently if we stay in NAFTA, we’ll have new Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue to thank, because he brought a map to the White House with highlighted areas on who’d be hardest hit by pulling out of NAFTA, showing Trump they coincide with areas with lots of Trump voters. Oh yeah, we finally got an Agriculture Secretary (Sonny Perdue – amazingly, not associated with Perdue Farms). It’s super weird, because he doesn’t appear to be the worst possible person for the job. New Labor secretary too (Acosta).
Trump has one success (by his metrics, not mine): a big reduction in Mexican immigration. Because if you were Mexican, would you come here right now? Jesus Murphy.
Interior Secretary and former oil pipeline technologies company board member Ryan Zinke (who I know of only because he’s the dude who went to work on his first day on a horse, in downtown Washington, DC, which I have to admit I thought was a baller move) wants to bring logging, mining, and drilling to the lands of national monuments. Sierra Club, Patagonia, and the NRDC all of course oppose this.
Senators were summoned to the White House to hear about North Korea. Apparently it was a mess. North Korea is pretty unhappy with us right now. (Personally I could give a shit, except that Seoul is *right there* and I’m really worried that South Korea will suffer because we elected a no-nothing.)
The Atlantic has provided a rundown of Trump’s conflicts of interest.
Roy Moore is running for Jeff Session’s seat in the upcoming special election. He is, if you can imagine this, even worse of a human being than Jeff Sessions.
Homeland Security’s immigrant database of alleged criminals includes babies and children.
The Trump administration maintains that you can lose your citizenship for lying about or omitting *anything* on their forms, no matter how trivial. Chief Justice Roberts points out that this position allows prosecutors to denaturalize anybody they want to.
Ephrat Livni, Quartz: An astrophysicist used NASA data to make an insanely detailed map of US racial diversity.
WTF. Senator Rand Paul will teach a course on “dystopian visions” at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. Is it wrong that I kind of want to enroll just so I could take this course? What does Rand Paul think is dystopian, functioning social safety nets?
[Note from the future: NYMHM grew out of these public posts from Joanne Merriam’s Facebook account. We retain them here in archives to provide a record going back to the beginning of Trump’s presidency.]