Trump says he has nothing to fear from Flynn, then stokes new controversy with tweet

Trump’s lawyers have begged him not to tweet about Russia or the investigation, but the president said repeatedly Friday that he wanted to respond to the Flynn news, associates said.

Cobb has told others that he has been more successful than others at limiting Trump’s tweets because he talks to him frequently and reassures him

Meanwhile, an email written by a Flynn deputy that came to light Saturday suggests that many of Trump’s closest aides were informed that Flynn planned to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Flynn made a December phone call to Kislyak.

.. Burck said that Priebus “confronted General Flynn several times, including in front of others, on whether he had talked to Kislyak about sanctions and was consistently told he had not.”

.. Trump was in a buoyant mood as he crossed Manhattan on Saturday, bragging about his election win in Rust Belt states and the improving economy.

At several stops, he touted the Senate’s passage of the GOP tax bill and predicted that Democrats who voted against it would lose their next elections.

Trump’s stops included the palatial Upper East Side apartment of Steve Schwarzman, chairman of a global private-equity firm.

.. Trump also told the wealthy donors at the event that the legislation was for the middle class

 

Republicans Are Coming for Your Benefits

Republicans don’t care about budget deficits, and never did. They only pretend to care about deficits when one of two things is true: a Democrat is in the White House, and deficit rhetoric can be used to block his agenda, or they see an opportunity to slash social programs that help needy Americans, and can invoke deficits as an excuse. All of this has been obvious for years to anyone paying attention.

.. And it was also predictable that they would return to deficit posturing as soon as the deed was done, citing the red ink they themselves produced as a reason to cut social spending.

.. Hatch declared his support for the program, but insisted that “the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore” — just before voting for a trillion-and-a-half-dollar tax cut that will deliver the bulk of its benefits to the richest few percent of the population.

He then went on to say, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything.”

.. The House version of the big tax cut would eliminate the estate tax entirely; the Senate version would double the level of wealth exempted from the tax, to $22.4 million for a couple. How can this be justified if it’s supposedly hard to find money for children’s health care?

.. The important thing to realize, however, is that the hypocrisy and contempt for the public we’ve seen in the past few days is just the beginning.

.. offsetting those deficits will require going after the true big-ticket programs, namely Medicare and Social Security.

.. Republicans have given their donors what they wanted — and now they’re coming for your benefits.

Why the GOP Tax Bill Is So Unpopular

The public seems to be against the plan precisely because they know what’s in it.

President Donald Trump says he doesn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. His Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he doesn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. The Democratic Party says they don’t want to cut taxes on the rich. Americans saythey don’t want to cut taxes on the rich.

The House and Senate Republican tax bills are taking a different approach: They are cutting taxes on the rich—significantly.

.. Nearly 50 percent of the benefits of the Senate tax cut would go to the top 5 percent of household earners in the first year of the law, according to the Tax Policy Center. By 2027, 98 percent of multimillionaires would still get a tax cut, compared to just 27 percent of households making less than $75,000.

.. Republican politicians, whose campaigns are often financed by wealthy conservative donors like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch family, are worried that a failure to cut taxes on corporations will have a detrimental effect on contributions from the party’s corporate-libertarian wing. “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,'” Representative Chris Collins

.. The “financial contributions will stop” if the GOP fails to deliver corporate tax cuts, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, told NBC News. “The donor class … has concluded that the inaction of this administration and Congress is totally unacceptable,” Josh Holmes, the former chief of staff to Senator Mitch McConnell, told CNN.

.. David Frum wrote this week, “the broad outline of tax reform seems obvious: Lower corporate rates to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, the developed-world norm [and] tighten collection so that the rate is actually paid.”

.. that very idea has already been proposed by President Barack Obama in 2012.

Republicans immediately rejected it, just as they rebuffed the president’s inclusion of ideas hatched at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the Affordable Care Act.

Days of Greed and Desperation

The House tax bill is wildly regressive; the Senate bill actually raises taxes on most families, while including a special tax break for private planes.

.. many Republicans now see themselves and/or their party in such dire straits that they’re no longer even trying to improve their future electoral position; instead, it’s all about grabbing as much for their big donors while they still can.

.. these members will need new jobs in 2019 whatever they do — and the best jobs will be as K Street lobbyists, except for a few who will get gigs as Fox News or “think tank” experts

.. one way or another their future lies in collecting wingnut welfare, which means that their incentives are entirely to be loyal ideologues even if it’s very much at their constituents’ expense.

.. the next few months will be the last chance they have to deliver on their promises to the Kochs and suchlike.