Melania is having another Marie Antoinette moment.
There aren’t enough roses or renovations in the world to cover up the stench of this regime.
While this and other supposed price drops in drugs are surely a good thing, I will believe it when I see it actually happen.
And it still won’t change all the WRONG he does.
I agree on believing when I see it. And will it cover all types of insulin? And also the test strips? Pretty sure my type 1 son spends as much on the strips as he does on the insulin.
The Kodak inside trading scandal is blowing up.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/KODK?p=KODK&.tsrc=fin-srch
Personal note: my cousin’s sister-in-law belonged to this group, Turning Point USA, they’re like super-MAGA, I had to unfollow her on Twitter because her posts were so intentionally triggering. This group is kinda weird. She’s one of those popular “citizen journalists” with a decent following now, did a tour on Fox News about a seattle story, I watched her content go from normal catholic school girl to full on MAGA troll. Strange world, when I first met her she seemed like just nice normal teenage girl. 
Was researching whether Sen Mitch McConnell’s ex-wife was going to write a book on him, and I could not find too much, except that it was written in this Jane Mayer article Trump’s Enabler - New Yorker that she was.
I excerpted some passages which highlight the huge power that McConnell has secured and how he is tied through thick and thin with T. He will not go up against T - but in little small ways we might hear him say that he supports masks, as a PR effort.
His daughters do not support him and one is an outspoken progressive.
It talks about what Mitch was ever after…does he have any big thoughts about governing - no he is about power, keeping power, and getting money rewarded and secured.
I am posting @MissJava mention of this article and I have taken the liberty to list it again. Mitch is up for re-election, and it looks like the polls fluxuate with Amy McGrath v. McConnell.
Excerpts
John David Dyche, a lawyer in Louisville and until recently a conservative columnist, enjoyed unmatched access to McConnell and his papers, and published an admiring biography of him in 2009. In March, though, Dyche posted a Twitter thread that caused a lot of talk in the state’s political circles. He wrote that McConnell “of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president,” and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has “no ideology except his own political power.” Dyche declined to comment for this article, but, after the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell’s opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, “Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards.”
McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the “predatory economic power” of “banks and billionaires.” One of its targets has been Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Blackstone Group, who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has, since 2016, donated nearly thirty million dollars to campaigns and super PAC s aligned with McConnell. Last year, Take On Wall Street condemned Blackstone’s “detrimental behavior” and argued that the company’s campaign donations “cast a pall on candidates’ ethics.”
Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate’s confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh’s supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh’s accusers. The husband of McConnell’s middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.
All three daughters declined to comment, as did their mother, Sherrill Redmon, whom McConnell divorced in 1980. After the marriage ended, Redmon, who holds a Ph.D. in American history, left Kentucky and took over a women’s-history archive at Smith College, in Massachusetts, where she collaborated with Gloria Steinem on the Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. In an e-mail, Steinem told me that Redmon rarely spoke about McConnell, and noted, “Despite Sherrill’s devotion to recording all of women’s lives, she didn’t talk about the earlier part of her own.” Steinem’s understanding was that McConnell’s political views had once been different. “I can only imagine how painful it must be to marry and have children with a democratic Jekyll and see him turn into a corrupt and authoritarian Hyde,” she wrote. (Redmon is evidently working on a tell-all memoir.)
…
For months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell. I travelled twice to Kentucky, observed him at a Trump rally in Lexington, and watched him preside over the impeachment trial in Washington. I interviewed dozens of people, some of whom love him and some of whom despise him. I read his autobiography, his speeches, and what others have written about him. Finally, someone who knows him very well told me, “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.”
…
McConnell was born in Alabama in 1942, and grew up in the segregated Deep South. He spent much of his childhood in Georgia before moving with his family to Louisville, Kentucky, just before his high-school years. His mother, the daughter of Alabama subsistence farmers, was a secretary in Birmingham when she met McConnell’s father, a mid-level corporate manager who had grown up in a more prosperous family but had dropped out of college. McConnell, in his autobiography, describes his mother’s wedding dowry as little more than “an apple corer and a can opener.” But his parents, he writes, gave him a comfortable middle-class childhood and “instilled me with a deep-seated belief in equal and civil rights, which, given their own upbringing in the Deep South, was quite extraordinary.” He quotes a moving letter from his father celebrating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and writes that he, too, supported the legislation. That year, McConnell even voted for Lyndon Johnson for President.
McConnell’s book does not mention that his father, who worked in the human-resources department at DuPont, was deposed by lawyers for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund in a historic racial-discrimination case. Kerry Scanlon, one of the lawyers, told me, “The leadership at that plant seemed to define racism. There was a plantation system in which the black employees did the hardest jobs, like working in front of these open fires where they got burned—and they got the worst pay. There was a systemic pattern of racism.” After years of litigation, the company settled the case, for fourteen million dollars.
McConnell writes that the formative experience of his early life was contracting polio at the age of two, ten years before Jonas Salk developed his vaccine. McConnell’s father was away, having joined the military after the start of the Second World War, and so for the next two years his mother, largely alone, confined him to bed except for a painful daily regimen of exercises. His first memory is of his mother’s purchase of a pair of saddle shoes that allowed him to look like other kids once the doctors finally allowed him to walk. He emerged unimpaired, other than having a weak left leg. He credits the experience, and his mother’s determination, with giving him the focus and drive that have propelled him throughout his career. Beating polio, he writes, was the first in a lifetime pursuit of hard-fought “wins.” In recent weeks, as McConnell has contended with the coronavirus challenge, he has said that it brings back “this eerie feeling” of “fear that every mother had” during a polio epidemic.
An only child, McConnell remained close to his mother, who shared his flinty personality. He also remained devoted to the idea that grit and preparation could beat even the longest odds. He keeps on his office wall a framed copy of a quotation often attributed to Calvin Coolidge, which begins, “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence.” (Some people who knew of this found it ironic when, in 2017, in the Senate, he criticized Elizabeth Warren for refusing to yield the floor, complaining, “She persisted.”)
…
According to Keith Runyon, McConnell was focussed on his political survival from the moment he arrived in Washington. He recalls that, the morning after McConnell was first sworn in to the Senate, McConnell told him that he would be moving to the right from then on, to keep getting reëlected. McConnell has denied saying so, but Runyon told me, “He is a flat-out liar.” Another acquaintance who has known McConnell for years said that, “to the extent that he’s conversational, he wore his ambition to become Majority Leader on his sleeve.”
McConnell envied better-known colleagues who were chased down the corridors by news reporters. He wanted to be like them, he later told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent, who interviewed McConnell for his book “Confirmation Bias,” about fights over Supreme Court nominees. The way McConnell ended up making his name was decidedly unglamorous: blocking campaign-finance reform. Even he derided the subject as rivalling “static cling as an issue most Americans care about.” Dull as campaign financing was, it was vitally important to his peers, and to democracy. Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, and so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming that it was purely about defending the First Amendment. According to MacGillis, behind closed doors McConnell admitted to his Senate colleagues that undoing the reforms was “in the best interest of Republicans.” Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
"McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a group that supports campaign-finance reform, said. “Money is the central theme of his career. And, if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”
…
Under McConnell’s leadership, as the Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world’s greatest deliberative body has become, “by almost every measure,” the “least deliberative in the modern era.” In 2019, it voted on legislation only a hundred and eight times. In 1999, by contrast, the Senate had three hundred and fifty such votes, and helped pass a hundred and seventy new laws. At the end of 2019, more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell’s desk. Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as “socialist price controls.”
Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not “fulfilling its constitutional duties.” Dick Durbin, of Illinois, who has been in the Senate for twenty-four years and is now the second-in-command in the Democratic leadership, told me that, under McConnell, “the Senate has deteriorated to the point where there is no debate whatsoever—he’s dismantled the Senate brick by brick.” McConnell was the Minority Leader from 2006 to 2014. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, McConnell used the filibuster to block a record number of bills and nominations supported by the Administration. As Majority Leader, he has control over the chamber’s schedule, and he keeps bills and nominations he opposes from even coming up for consideration. “He’s the traffic cop, and you can’t get through the intersection without him,” Durbin said.
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”
…
McConnell has pointed to his obstruction of Garland with pride, saying, “The most important decision I’ve made in my political career was the decision not to do something.” Many believe that, in 2016, the open Court seat motivated evangelical voters to overlook their doubts about Trump, providing the crucial bloc that won him the Presidency.
But McConnell’s predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. Although the two leaders had at first managed to be friendly, bonding over their shared support for Washington’s baseball team, the Nationals, they became bitter antagonists during the Obama Administration. “Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant,” Reid told me. “We’ve watched them stand mute no matter what Trump does. They have lost their souls. From a policy perspective, it’s awful. It’s hurt the Senate and damaged the country.”
Looks like quite a few notes from the record are going to be released against Ghislaine’s wishes.
Wow…
Dems first learned that a pro-Russian Ukrainian sent anti-Biden material to NUNES when they were inadvertenetly sent the DHL shipping receipt.
Dems reported it to the FBI on Jan. 27. Nunes declined to tell them if he got it or what he did with it.
Wade into this mess of documents from Ghislaine Maxwell Trial…#Dershowitz trending on twitter
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article244594067.html
A much-anticipated batch of newly unsealed documents from a settled defamation suit began trickling out Thursday night over the objections of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite accused of sex trafficking and alleged to be the madam of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
In a 2015 e-mail Epstein advised Maxwell to return to the high society world the two had inhabited without any shame.
“You have done nothing wrong and i would urge you to start acting like it,” Epstein wrote. “[G]o outside, head high, not as an escaping convict. go to parties. deal with it.”
Previously redacted version of this court document now reveals it is Alan Dershowitz, who required a NPA - non-prosecution agreement. He was the one who helped arrange the deal with Alex Acosta to get a single charge against Epstein - soliciting prostitution, as opposed to sex trafficking…
Six mentions of Bill Clinton and Virginia says Epstein has said “Clinton owes him favors.”
Another source
…not good.
Saudi Arabia, With China’s Help, Expands Its Nuclear Program - WSJ
WASHINGTON—Saudi Arabia has constructed with Chinese help a facility for extracting uranium yellowcake from uranium ore, an advance in the oil-rich kingdom’s drive to master nuclear technology, according to Western officials with knowledge of the site.
Neil Young is suing T campaign…Do not use my song “Rockin’ in the Free World”
Joins Tom Petty’s estate, Rolling Stones and more.
Biased news or straight news reporting is always going to be received with either scorn or open ears. With the constant mentions of “Fake News” and dismissals of news out-of-hand, the testing of democratic values and our reliance on a fair press has taken a huge hit. This can be looked at as another dismantling of a norm, where one expects at least some fact checking, and some basis for truth, and not castigated as false right off the bat.
This poll says that our reliance on a fair press has gotten weaker…much weaker.
NEW YORK (AP) — The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.
That was the conclusion of a “sobering” study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.
Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as “very biased,” the survey found.
“That’s a bad thing for democracy,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation. “Our concern is that when half of Americans have some sort of doubt about the veracity of the news they consume, it’s going to be impossible for our democracy to function.”
The study was conducted before the coronavirus lockdown and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.
Eight percent of respondents — the preponderance of them politically conservative — think that news media that they distrust are trying to ruin the country.
The study found that 71% of Republicans have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same way. Switch it around, and 54% of Democrats have a very favorable view of the media, and only 13% of Republicans feel the same way.
That divide has been documented before but only seems to be deepening, particularly among conservatives, Sands said.
“We’re starting to see more retrenchment among those who have already expressed deep concerns,” he said. “Moving the dial on these attitudes becomes more and more difficult for media organizations.”
The study doesn’t attempt to assign blame for these attitudes. President Donald Trump has constantly labeled journalism he doesn’t like “fake news.” Cable news networks Fox News Channel, MSNBC and CNN feature evening opinion shows that are an increasingly popular pasttime for viewers.
Who is to blame for the nation’s political divide? Well, 48% of those questioned says the media bears a great deal of the responsibility.
The study found 73% of Americans feel that too much bias in news reports is a major problem, up from 65% two years ago.
Those surveyed also didn’t believe much in honest mistakes. When there were inaccuracies in articles, 54% of Americans said they believed reporters misrepresented facts, while 28% said reporters were making things up in their entirety.
The picture isn’t much prettier when you take a step back. Knight and Gallup said 41% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the media to report the news fairly, down from 55% in a similar survey in 1999.
Eight in 10 Americans are calling for more diversity in news. Democrats and Black people are more likely to be referring to racial and ethnic diversity; while Republicans and white people prioritize diversity in political views.
In a clear message to Facebook and Twitter, nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said social media companies have to work harder to remove hateful language and inaccuracies from their platforms.
Knight and Gallup conducted a random sample of 20,046 American adults between Nov. 8, 2019 and Feb. 16, 2020, and claimed a margin of error of plus or minus 1%.
The report’s major findings include the following:
Americans think the media is vital for democracy. The vast majority of Americans (84%) say that the news media is “critical” (49%) or “very important” (35%) to provide accurate information and hold the powerful accountable.
Half (49%) of all Americans think the media is very biased. Fifty-six percent say their own news sources are biased, and seven in 10 are concerned about bias in the news others are getting. Eight percent — driven largely by conservatives — say distrusted media are trying to ruin the country.
Americans think the media is pushing an agenda. Three in four people (74%) worry that owners of media companies are influencing coverage, up five points since 2017. They also suspect that inaccuracies in reporting are purposeful, with 54% believing that reporters misrepresent the facts, and 28% believing reporters make them up entirely.
Distrust of the media cuts along partisan lines. Seventy-five percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of the media, and 61% say attacks on the media are justified. But only 22% of Democrats have an unfavorable view, and 70% say that attacks are not justified.
The crazy Q anon cult has gone mainstream on Facebook.
Heaven help us 
But you know what’s weird, is there is actually a pretty good real crime conspiracy happening in the White House right now and nobody gives two shits about that but the “resistance” who get called partisans just for speaking and writing about what’s already on the fucking record. Ok. End of mini-rant.
Damn! godspeed, ye courageous people on the ground.
The U.S. Energy Department proposed easing water efficiency requirements for shower heads Wednesday following multiple complaints from President Donald Trump about how low water flow is impeding his ability to properly wash his hair.
The plan would allow manufacturers to bypass a 2.5 gallon-per-minute maximum flow rate set by Congress in the 1990s. Under current law, each shower head in a shower counts toward that limit. If finalized, the administration plan would allow multiple shower nozzles with 2.5 gallon-per-minute heads to each meet that requirement separately.
[…]
“It’s gimmick to put multiple nozzles on a shower head,” Andrew deLaski, the group’s executive director, said in an interview. “There really is no good reason to reduce water and energy standards that have been around for 20 years.”
Who lobbied for this? The fuck? It’s a scam to sell a new shower product and waste water at the same time. He does know that consumers pay for the water they use right? Here’s a product that just pours your money down the drain. 
Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July. Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.
