This time, I've got about twelve minutes…
- "Trumpism," as Kevin Drum notes, is becoming the new trend in politics. It's based on the premise that you can put out deliberate lies and also hide things that the public has a right to know…and you can still win. Winning, in fact, is the only thing that matters. You can even lose and as long as you lie and insist you're winning, a lot of your supporters will believe it.
- People around Trump are suggesting he fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and put an end to the whole Russia investigation. He would cite James Comey's statement that he [Trump] was not under investigation and say, "That shows there's nothing to investigate" and shut the thing down. Of course, that ignores the fact that (a) Comey said there was no investigation of Trump at that moment, not forever…and (b) the Special Counsel is supposed to investigate many Trump associates. Matt Yglesias has more…but clearly, someone thinks Trump — unlike Nixon and his Saturday Night Massacre — could survive the outrage, especially with a Republican Congress.
- Sarah Kliff sees a real possibility that the Senate will sneak in a health care bill with no public debate and no scoring and get it through, thereby repealing most of Obamacare, gutting Medicaid, leaving lots of poor and middle-class folks with no affordable insurance or way higher premiums. Then they will be able to give the rich that huge tax cut that seems to be the point of all this. They're counting on no one realizing for at least a few elections what they've done or that they'll blame Democrats for it.
- And Paul Krugman says that the Republicans are doing this thing to our health care because they want to do it and they can, with no pretense or theory that it will make anyone but the very rich better off.
John McCain says "American leadership" on the global stage was better when Obama was president than it is now. Back when there were actually people in this country who respected John McCain, that might have been significant.