The more that comes out about the Republican Tax Scam bills, the worse it looks. The latest version is a very anti-education bill, targeting deductions for teacher out-of-pocket spending and for research by graduate students and eliminating student loan deductibility while keeping carried interest.
Since denouncing Trump the other day, Jeff Flake has done exactly what you would expect him to do-- he's continued to support the conservative Republican agenda. That's because he's a conservative Republican and that agenda is far more his agenda than it is Trump's agenda. Trump barely understands the agenda at all, only that it's "his" team and he's their faux-leader.
My congressman, Adam Schiff, was a conservative state legislator who got elected in 2000 because voters wanted revenge for the role the incumbent, James Rogan, played in the Clinton impeachment. Schiff entered Congress, joined the Blue Dogs and started voting like a Republican. After his district shredded some Republican neighborhoods and added some of the bluest areas of L.A.
Today Jeff Flake announced his retirement with a withering blast at Señor Trumpanzee.""We must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal... It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end. In this century, a new phrase to describe the accommodation of a new and undesirable order, that phrase being the new normal. That we must never adjust to the present coarseness of our national dialogue with the tone set up at the top.
Trumpist by Nancy OhanianA week or so ago, Señor Trumpanzee launched an Adderall-fueled tweet storm against his perceived enemies within the Republican Congress. He struck out especially hard against Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, one of 3 Republicans especially vulnerable in the 2018 midterms.
The McConnell-controlled Senate Leadership Fund welcomed Señor Trumpanzee to the Arizona Republican Senate primary with the ad about Trump's candidate against Jeff Flake above. According to some eye-popping reporting from the NY Times by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. McConnell and Trump aren't speaking to each other any longer and, in fact, ended their last conversation by screaming and cursing at each other. And that was followed up by a close McConnell aide threatening Trump with impeachment!
Trump is fighting with Republicans again. He's all but endorsed one of the right-wing lunatics primarying Jeff Flake (R-AZ)-- and is expected to explicitly do so when he travels to Phoenix to pardon Joe Arpaio this weekend.
The Anti-Trump movement is failingEditor’s Note: we are not as giddy about Donald Trump as Prof. Victor Davis Hanson (see his essay below), mainly due to our anxiety over the president’s grave blunders in foreign affairs, beginning with his Jared Kushner-engineered partnership with the terrorist-enabling kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose only lightly-veiled alliance with the Israelis has markedly improved the Saudis’ status in Jerusalem, New York and Washington D.C. One can’t fight ISIS effectively while empowering the Saudi dictatorship.
