HAMMERNEWS- Michael Hammerschlag

Current Political Commentary by journalist Michael Hammerschlag; Thoughts on foreign policy, Republican outrages, liberal strategies, science by 8 year correspondent in Russia/Ukraine over 22 years and longtime commentator; Website: http://HAMMERNEWS.com

Saturday, March 25, 2017

TRYAN-CARE COLLAPSES, GORE-SUCH CYCLES JMY STEWART, FREAK SHOW CABINET, CRACKPOT MERCER MAKES CHUMP, COMEY INVESTIGATES (18 mo+)?, NUNEZ WH SHILL, EXTINCTION OF EXONOUS REX?, PUTIN'S LATEST- KYIV ASSASSINATION + AMMO DUMP EXPLODED, GB2 RETURN FROM THE DEPTHS


TRUMP AS LOSER: 
April 5  MIKE on NPR re. Trump-Xi Jinping meeting, S. China Sea land grab, Stress-Testing Chump, Assad poison gas: OnPointRadio   MP3 (6 min)        TRANSCRIPTS of Posted Comments + MP3 

March 27  In the collapse of the Repub's careless half-asssed Frankenstein monster of a health care program (forecast to be more expensive), what was really interesting was how stable and even keeled TPD was- and it occurred to me: He is USED TO LOSING- in his many wildly flaky and ambitious projects... he usually FAILS!! Of course considering the level of pathology, viciousness, and paranoia... there might be a period of retaliation, turmoil, and confusion.... BUT the one thing businessmen are good at is cutting losses, in walking away from projects, people, friends when the project goes belly up. Like he did with Christie or Flynn. And if he engaged in long crazy post-mortems, how would his crooked company (rife with enemies he has cheated) have survived this long??? But as he overtly said, the cruel + crude plan is to encourage Insurance Co.'s to bail on the ACA until it does collapse in a year (instead of enacting penalties and mandates for them).... and then take it up again. Just abandoning the penalties for not signing-up when young could cause the death-spiral Trump is promoting, although I was never a fan.  I'm not sure what, if anything, can be done to stop that, short of some Zyklon B in the Repubs Committee room. For those making under $24K, though, ObamaCare is COMPLETELY FREE!! But even poor Hill emerged from the woods to celebrate. 

    It is so laughable hearing media amazement that the Repubs hadn't planned (best news report) for a replacement- THEY NEVER WANTED A REPLACEMENT- they only wanted to destroy the ACA- they were divided by those who wanted the poor and women to DIE (since this defunded #1 womens' health provider Planned Parenthood, only 3% involved in abortions), and those who wanted them to die, just not as fast. Since ACA's preventive treatments actually SAVE money; and ripping up the painstakingly created framework of coverage would be EXPENSIVE, the latest estimates were that besides giving half of supposed savings to people making over $1 mil, it might actually cost more- so the ONLY reasons for the slapdash AHCA were to humiliate Obama, honor their promises (to themselves), and kill the poor. No fooling Americans didn't think that was a great idea- even Repubs opposed it 3 to 1;  56% to 17% and howled their outrage. Suddenly RW "Take your Gov hands off my Medicare" dimwits understood just what ObamaCare was and how much THEY, the moocher Red States, were getting from it!

GORSUCH HEARINGS: Anyway, it's important for Dems to pivot quickly also to deal with his next threat. Schumer is going ALL IN in opposing Neil Gorsuch with a filibuster - a BIG gamble.  It seemed pretty clear to me Repubs would just Kill Phil, then there will be no way to stop the RW steamroller as they crush the hopes of half of America- see my #1 radio comment below. But now that might be in doubt with the fracturing of the Repubs- lead by the extremist Orwellian named FREEDOM CAUCUS- either way maybe it is time for Dems to pull out all the stops to stop this criminal Theft of the 3rd Branch. The Freedom Freaks are neo-facists who were against any replacement health care bill- these anti-Gov jihaddists (like goofball Rand Paul) can be counted on to make many Repub bills so unpalatable that if the public can be mobilized, they can be stopped.  GORSUCH Repetition RAP mp3 1min,  SUPREME COURT RAP on Cameras in the Court mp3 (3:20 min)

My frenquaintance RI's own champion of liberty + AGW crusader Sen. Sheldon held Neil to account on the $11 mil of Black Money backing him, and Al Franken (whom my college bud knew in Edina) scored some solid shots to the brittle RW soul with his excoriation of his hard-hearted decision in the (black) frozen trucker case (read my own frozen trucker story at end of this Post) - but he really said nothing, trying to recycle classic corny lines of Jimmy Stewart. (Hilarious Rap take of Gorsuch's dozens of repetitions at 26:00 min into NPR Politics show- rt click SAVE AS) And I think he would trash Roe- these Originalists are such extremist frauds. If the really RW Gorsuch makes it to the Supreme Court, he is great friends w Kennedy and could swing him back into the RW camp, and I believe would overturn Roe v Wade, but concerning Chump's Muslim and anti-Immigrant ban, I don't think Gor-Tex is that sympathetic.

Still if he is defeated on Gorsuch, I see Chump just nominating someone worse or as poor. They can keep running RW clowns till they wear down the Dems- since this is a LIFETIME appointment to pervert an entire branch of Gov. for maybe a generation.
My #1 radio show Gorsuch comment is here:   (see comments) after article links:   750 comments    Hammmermann
  • This ORIGINALIST true meaning stuff is nonsense. Repub Justices have no problem overruling 100 years of precedent in radical extreme decisions like Citizens United or the Recess Apptmt Ruling, when it furthers the RW agenda. Gorsuch is a (nice) creep, but it may be hopeless to filibuster him because after they Kill Phill, the Repubs will be able to pass every psycho bill with only 51 votes. At least hold that for the nightmare fascist bills or ones that would blow up the world economy (like scrapping NAFTA, or a 20% import duty!).
              Obama's greatest failing- he could have rammed through a recess appointment- it was his absolute right, the SC ruling that the Repubs could define "In Session" as FOREVER was inherently corrupt- they can't remove the Prez's authority to appoint them without a Constitutional Amendment, it would be as if Obama doubled his salary by Presidential Order. I was going to write him to beg him to do that over Summer Recess, but like everyone- I didn't think Trump could be elected. I was right- it took Russian espionage, Trump treason, Cumey's criminal Oct Surprise, and massive Dem disenfranchisement in 32 states- without that Hillary won by 8 million votes!! Obama's legacy, because of his weakness in dealing with Putin, China, and Repubs.. will sadly be trashed.
    •          We must go back and parse their words for EXACT MEANING, before cars, electricity, phones, lights, trains, buses, Internet, computers, mass production, et al. Because it is frozen in time and the Founders were Gods- no they were wise but WE ARE A LIVING EVOLVING COUNTRY, you stupid RW cracker!!
IN THE OTHER GIANT EXPOSE NEWS,
the bugsht lunatic hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer's longtime successful $50 mil secret backing of Breitbart and Chump was the most deadly result of the corrupt Citizen's United (+ subsequent decision) ever. Mercer is the crackpot conspiracist Denier billionaire who funded Breitbart, Amer. Spectator, anti-Clinton fanatics for 20 years, and a urine (drinking???@#) doctor Arthur Robinson (DANGER, Mr. Robinson!!) who has the world's biggest collection of human urine (Mercer has the biggest collection of machine guns). They wanted him for a Cabinet post- Secretary of Pisss!!! Well, everybody must be good at SOMETHING! AGW denier Mercer also actually believes that the Clintons have had dozens killed over the decades and that radiation is good for people, and is far down the rabbit-hole, but his successful Bannon-Trump conspiracy led to his equally addled hateful daughter Rebekah picking half of Chump's Cabinet roster of:   "tyrants, zealots and imbeciles (Taibbi)- all bent on demolishing our government from within- the most fantastic collection of creeps since the "Thriller" video,.. whose sole qualification for office appeared to be their open hostility to the missions of the agencies they were tapped to run."

I thought if ANY ONE of Chump's freak-show Cabinet could be stopped, it was PRUITT- Taibbi details how the Dems fought like banshees, even did a day filibuster, but were sold out by Quislings Hide-camp and Mansion!! Great Joe, when the EPA is
completely gutted, your miners will welcome the return of black lung, gas/dust explosions, and floods!!! Make America Poisoned Again. My God, if the Nixon-created Environmental
Protection Agency isn't in the bipartisan interest of all Americans (except for pig polluters), what is? But they rolled over on other disgraceful nominees- even Dem stalwarts like Warren or Durban!! There were maybe 3 decent nominees: Mattis, Kelley, + Amb to China- every other one were absurdly unqualified- "I guess he's lived in a house," was the NPR correspondent's offer of Ben Carson's ability to run the $50 bil HUD.

Likewise the moneybags Amway fat-cat donor religious/charter school fan Betsey DeVos slimed her way into the Education Dept on an almost solid  We Don't Need No Edjucashun  Repub vote (2 defected, inc my bet to destroy the solid R coalition Susan Collins)- after all 2 Repub Presidents in a generation can barely put a sentence together or read above a 4th grade level!! Who needs excellence, as proof is coming out that US Universities are going to lose billions LINK of foreign enrollment due to Chumps anti-immigrant Jihad.

 There will be steadily cascading economic hits now due to the recklessness, extremism, shallowness, and instability of the Chump's hateful anti-Brown agenda. These looked to be dark days as the RW hateful poison of Chump spreads through the Fed Gov like a cancer, but one very excellent thing is the Judiciary definitively knocking down Trump's racist Muslim ban- every sick, contemptible,
and despicable thing he has said in courting his base base will come back to haunt him in Court, where he will lose over + over- unlike with his SLAP abuse of the Courts, he can't string things out for 7 years now.  This creature Trump is the most pathological liar I've ever seen, and the voluminous record of those lies will now plague him at every turn!

COMEY HEARINGS:
Dems again let Cumey off the hook for his criminal trashing of HRC in his Oct Surprise announcement- he should have been excoriated:
 "Are you a Russian agent Mr Comey? In 8 months that you knew the Russians were hacking the DNC and DCCC your agent couldn't walk 15 min down the street to meet them??? Who ordered that? You had evidence of Trump collusion with Russia, and Russian hacking, but instead of telling the American people this VITAL fact, you chose to destroy Hillary with your last minute trash E-mails 'scoop'. WHY??? AM I talking to J. Edgar Comey here, a man who has the goods on the President and is using it for his own purposes?? Do you serve the American people, Mr Comey, or yourself?"
 
Obviously the 18 month "Investigation" will NEVER be concluded by this sleazebag- this started  in Sept 2015, yet the fact he is investigating Trump Minions is suddenly NEWS???!@#$$%!!  That's enough time for 10 Conclusions + Reports but Cumey is the Director for the Repubs only- control of the evidence must be removed from him. Congress must force the creation of an INDEPENDENT Investigation within the FBI , as well as a CONGRESSIONAL INDEPENDENT Investigation- although that will inevitably be compromised by Repub control- the real FBI Investigation may force their hand. Cumey belongs in prison, ironically this double-dealing weasel is the single greatest threat to Chump and his criminal agenda, so he can't and won't be replaced by this Admin (or these toady Repubs)!!

CHUMP's insane claim that "bad, sick guy" Obama had personally bugged him in Trump Tower took a turn when House Intelligence Committee Chair/ Trump Transition Team Nunez's  incredibly went running to the WH to report on the possible overhearing of Chump minion crimes (hacking in Chump parlance)- it was a breathtaking betrayal of any commitment to really investigate Chump's collusion. Nunez was a big backer of the Nat. Security 502 Provision "Incidental Wiretaps of Americans talking to foreign targets" law, and obviously views common leaks as worse than TREASON. But Nunez and Comey had stated flatly that the alleged bugging "didn't happen".

  Repubs have been almost universally AGAINST any real investigation of Chump's likely Treason, other charter toady political hacks are only experienced at abusing their power to torture Dems: now Head of CIA Pompeo, who tortured Hillary over and over on Bengahzi, "a Jesus-humping conspiracist who embraces torture and once called politics a never-ending struggle ... until the Rapture." ; bookie and IRA bomber dimwit Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, "a congressman best known for inspiring a downgrade to America's credit rating by threatening to default on the national debt", pledged $100 mil cuts to kill all action on AGW-  a 'waste of your [tax] money'... Trump picked a fast-food titan who prefers robots to human workers for Secretary of Labor, put a brain surgeon in charge of federal housing, picked a hockey-team owner to be secretary of the Army... and chose for Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, who not only admitted that he didn't know what the Department of Energy actually does, but had called for that very agency's elimination as a presidential candidate (and forgot)." - Taibbi
Garry Kasparov tweeted:  "The house is on fire, Donald Trump is running around with a box of matches, and the Republicans only want to know who called the fire dept!!!!"
 
        Holland's Gert Wilders and winning PM Mark Rutte
   To Europeans holding off the Right, Trump winning must be the ultimate nightmare, the Evil Puta Empire spreading it's dirt and poison straight into the heart of their only real opponent. For us too, though you wouldn't know it to listen to the dimwitted Media chasing every spurious Trump rabbit story rather than the ONLY one: IS THE PRESIDENT A TRAITOR OR RUSSIAN AGENT???? On the OTHER HAND, the example of the ugly radical ignorance of the Orange Monkey desecrating the Beacon of Liberty  ironically may have crested the European RW neo-fascist "populist" (a real misnomer) movement - in the March Dutch election, conducted by paper ballots (the terror of Russian hacking was so intense), Wilder's Party only picked up 3 seats, and the Moderates will stay in charge, good news for France, the EU and the world!!! The hacking of our Election and installation of Donald Trump was an act of war, and we should have blown down some of their power grid, or at the least booted them off SWIFT (Inter. ATM system)- let them develop their own PutaCard for their Eura Asian Economic Union.
 
SECRET SOS DUMPS PRESS- PAYS THE PRICE
Rex Tillerson has evaporated from the News as he jets around the world, signing off by default on the lunatic 29% State Dept. cuts, and then getting tagged with being too fatigued to meet with the South Korean Premiere- NOT TRUE says Bob Garfield March 24, the excellent defender of the 1st Amendment on ON THE MEDIA, but without any traveling media to report it, the story proliferated. It is not surprising the EX-EXXON chief is used to negotiating in the shadows- he was often making deals with corrupt dictators to basically rape the locals. Press are not useful in promoting these sweetheart deals, but SOS's actually rely on the reporting and promotion of the 4th Estate to generate interest, pressure, and tweak policy (look, SOMEBODY Needs us!!). In another example of Bad Press (both for him and us), despite being repeatedly reported that Rex was "missing the big Mar 6 NATO Summit to meet with Putin", they were NOT AT THE SAME TIME AT ALL- actually Chinese President Xi Jinping was coming to DC + Mar-a-Lago then!! No matter, Rex has had to reschedule to go to NATO meeting (cut out of the big action again) to stop the hemorrhaging. The March 22 OTM has a hilarious short clip Supreme Court Justice compilation rap at 18:30 min.
 
PUTINS TERROR CONTINUES in UKRAINE  As I said many times PUTIN will not stop until someone stops him, and with the Quisling Chump is power, there is little chance of that (I'll settle for not removing the Sanctions).  Latest is he has started messing with Libya!! With the Dutch stymying probable Russian hacking with PAPER BALLOTS (boo-yaa), the Russian Nationalists have focused their evil on Ukraine and whistle-blowers, with a brazen daylight assassination of a Putin critic in Kyiv Friday in front of the tony Premiere Palace Hotel (his excellent bodyguard killed the assassin, after being gut-shot!):
DAILY VERTICAL: "Former State Duma deputy Denis Voronenkov, who defected to Ukraine last year, was shot dead (actual video) in downtown Kyiv yesterday. Last month, Voronenkov told Ukrainian prosecutors that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych had asked Russia to send troops into Ukraine. And then there is the case of Nikolai Gorokhov, a lawyer representing the family of the deceased Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky- Gorokhov was critically injured this week after falling several stories from his apartment window (common assassination technique- in a Colonel's journos similar death they also threw his bag of groceries over, not too common in suicides -MH). And according to a report in The Daily Beast, he was a witness for the U.S. Justice Department in a money-laundering case involving Russia. And there's Aleksandr Perepilichny, a healthy 44-year-old Russian emigre who collapsed and died while jogging in Surrey, England, back in 2012. An autopsy later found traces of the rare toxic plant gelsemium, a poison used by assassins, in his stomach."

And in the Donbas, (RFERL video report) which has heated up in the 2 last months- with maybe 50 Ukrs killed, just this Wed March 22 a huge Ukr ammo dump in Balakiya 40 miles from Kharkiv was detonated by possible drones (better video)- a 2015 apparent attempt with (probably incendiary) drones in Dec 2016 had set it on fire without catastrophic detonations, according to President Poroshenk.
NPR POLITICS PODCAST (2-3x week) 

GEORGE BUSH THE DUMBER SLITHERS OUT OF THE DEPTHS

And if you by chance have been longing for the stable days of wise GB2 (by comparison), he just reappeared as the same ignorant despicable souless tone-deaf monster he always was, incredibly hawking his personal paintings of wounded warriors- the crippled guys that maybe he had consigned to the human threshing machine of Iraq by his criminal Neocon Iraq Invasion Conspiracy, just to show up his disrespectful father by finishing the job he couldn't- See Daddy, I'm a better man than you. His book is named (sorry JFK) Profiles in Courage. William Rivers Pitt carves him a new hole. 

FROZEN TRUCKER MIKE - In moving to Mpls once from Wisconsin in the dead of night + winter -15F and, I had a flat on my famous Econoline Supervan camper, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't crack one lug nut- I had aluminum mag rims that tended to either freeze the nut or throw it without warning- for 90 minutes in this Arctic hellhole, lying + sitting on the ground. Because my registration had expired I didn't want cops help (it was BCP- before cell phones)- I was going to register it forthwith in MN. But surprisingly in half friendly (+ half Nzi- where Scott Walker rules) Wisconsin, NOBODY stopped. By the time I succeeded my core temp was probably in the low 90's. The van had hot running water, stove, refridge, TV but the heater was very lame. I cranked up the range and heated it up to 90!
MN blizzard