#I think it would read better if I reordered the panels but ah I simply do not feel like it. take it as it is.

[chiropteracupola]

dress up nice (and don't get any blood on yourself this time, please)

[collaboration with @dxppercxdxver again. we are still going.]

[arlingtonpark]

Top 5 News Stories of 2017 pt. II

4. Fox News Alt History

Ah yes, Fox News. Fox started out as being hostile to Trump (who could forget the infamous Trump-Kelly feud?), but now they’ve completely acquiesced to him.

Most Fox News anchors, particularly their prime time hosts, are total sycophants. These people will say and do most anything to cover for Trump’s failures. This inevitably leads to hilarity since Trump’s failures are both many and obvious.

The most frequently used and abused tactic is to simply ignore any bad news regarding Trump and report on some substitute scandal involving Hillary Clinton.

Fox News has always been an anti-Clinton network. This goes all the way back to Bill’s presidency in the nineties. Fox News really made it big by being the voice of the Republican Party calling for Clinton to be impeached and anti-Clinton fervor is what has fueled the network ever since.  But now that Hillary Clinton has lost the 2016 presidential election and is therefore no longer an active voice in politics, coupled with Trump’s own flailing about, means that Fox has no choice but to keep reporting on fake Clinton scandals. Like a drug addict chasing after that high, Fox News must (MUST!!!) get that Clinton coke.

There really is no getting around it: Fox News is the closest thing to a government run propaganda news network that we have in this country. Whenever something bad befalls the President, the network will run interference.

For example, the Uranium One “scandal.” In 2010, a uranium mining company with operations in the US, Uranium One, was purchased by Rosatom, a Russian government owned company. This deal required the tacit approval of the President of the United States, Barack Obama; tacit because while Obama couldn’t literally approve of it, he could veto it if it hurt US national security. Obama stipulated that he wouldn’t veto the deal if Rosatom agreed to retain Uranium One’s current corporate management and structure. They complied and the deal went through. Hillary Clinton was not involved at all.

But that didn’t stop Fox News from absurdly trying to link Clinton to this, clearly in an attempt to deflect from Trump’s own apparent dealings with Russia.

Then you’ve got the scandal that will never die: the Clinton emails. Make no mistake, Clinton did act carelessly by using a private email server for official government business, but the idea that there’s some big secret being withheld is laughable.

All of this leads to absurd situations where something of obvious importance is going on involving Trump, but Fox is off rambling about Clinton in a clear non-sequitur. 

After a certain point you start to feel like Fox News is reporting from Earth-2, the alternate version of Earth where Hillary Clinton won the election and became the President. Here on Earth-1, Hillary Clinton is completely irrelevant and there is no reason to report on these fake scandals. Any sign of rough water for Trump and Fox News will mobilize its stooge army to protect him.

In spite of this insipidness, Fox News still commands great influence over a significant chunk of the population and that chunk happens to be very motivated to vote in GOP primaries. Because of this, while most Americans may eventually get tired of all the winning, there will always be a dangerously large number of people who will not be afraid to defenestrate any Republican who steps out of line. And so Republicans will keep cow towing to Trump. 

3. L’Affaire Russe

Easily the most well-known story line of the past year has been L’Affaire Russe, the story of Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 election, the Trump campaign’s possible involvement, and apparent subsequent attempts to cover this up.

Where do I even start?

As is usual with every major news story this year, the most prominent component has been insipidness.

I’ve already mentioned the stupidity of the Trump WH, add to that the stupidity of Trump’s lawyer for all matters Russia related, Ty Cobb. No seriously, that’s his name. He looks just as unbelievable too. Cobb has repeatedly assured Trump that the Russia investigation will end by New Year’s, and that they’ll exonerate him, even though the Mueller Probe is obviously just getting started.

It probably sounds mean for Cobb to lead Trump on like this, but I think it makes sense: it can be so awful to crush a kid’s hopes, it’s better to just humor them and play along.

In all seriousness, Cobb really is incompetent. Cobb is so incompetent that he actually thought it would be a good idea to discuss important details about his planned defense of Trump in public. At a popular DC restaurant. During the lunch rush. At a restaurant just down the street from the Washington Post’s DC Bureau. Yep.

And oh my God, Carter Page! Page may or may not have been involved with Russia, but his apparent defense strategy is to discredit himself as a perpetrator by painting himself as a total idiot. Everything he does seems geared towards this. His testimony before the HSCI, his media interviews, even his clothes! Just recently, he released a statement saying that his privacy has been so thoroughly violated (it hasn’t been) that women would rather choose to be groped than face the violation he’s had to endure. Seriously!

And then there’s the Pee Tape Dossier. What started as an oppo research file by the Free Beacon has ballooned in to an incredible file alleging that Trump had Russian hookers piss over his hotel room bed because Obama had previously slept in that same bed. According to the Dossier, Putin has this on tape and is blackmailing Trump with it.

And who can forget Devin Nunes? I feel sorry for the 700,000 plus Fresno-area people who call him their Representative. Nunes has been an extended highlight of this whole show. Holding clandestine meetings with random people on the WH lawn in the middle of the night, spilling classified intel live on national tv, and being too stupid to realize it, all this while serving as the chairman of the House Intel Committee.

As of now, Robert Mueller is on the case and he’s assembled what can only be described as a Justice League of Avengers. No less than the best possible team of sleuths ever brought together. He’ll get to the bottom of things, assuming Trump doesn’t shit can him.

This section of the post is very disjointed, but that’s because there’s just so much to this. They say the human brain is like a computer. If that’s the case, then L’Affaire Russe is like a DDoS attack.

This is your brain on L’Affaire Russe.

The only way to succinctly describe it is this: it’s the greatest comedy on Earth. That sounds very glib...well actually no, it isn’t. This is legit a comedy, a black comedy. Burn After Reading comparisons are not uncalled for. 

Despite being the most well known news story of this year, L’Affaire Russe is not the biggest one in terms of potential impact. A lot of people will probably not like this, but the truth is that this will probably amount to nothing. Yes, Trump did try to collude with the Russians, but most likely what happened is that they tried to, but never actually succeeded. Because they’re just that stupid. But why would they apparently go to such lengths to cover up a nothing burger? Easy: they’re just that stupid.

That said, L’Affaire Russe will likely result in Trouble on other fronts since Mueller is apparently investigating Trump’s shady activities from before the campaign. (Mueller’s mandate is to investigate Russia’s election interference and any other crimes uncovered over the course of that investigation.) They may not be able to nail Trump on Russia, but they might be able to on money laundering, and that means Trump, in desperation, could try something drastic like forcefully ending the investigation, which he can do if he truly wanted to. 

Things can go from zero to one hundred real fast, so brace yourselves. 

2. The Clown Car Congress

The 115th Congress is only half way finished and it’s already been a total shit show.

The centerpiece of that show was the Republican’s attempts to repeal Obamacare.

When the 115th Congress first convened, there was serious fear that the GOP would implement a whole swath of legislation that would dramatically reorder American society. Or at least it felt like that’s what was going to happen. But it turned out the GOP was simply too incompetent to do much of substance. Passing laws in the United States is very difficult since many hoops need to be jumped through to do it and the Republicans, well…

I call this high school slacker syndrome. For all their talk of personal responsibility, Republicans decided to go the high school slacker route by focusing on stupid conspiracy theories like Obamacare death panels instead of trying to work out what exactly they wanted to replace Obamacare with if given the chance. Now that chance has come, and they’ve basically been caught with their pants around their ankles. Like a lazy high schooler who played video games instead of studying, the Republicans have been caught completely unprepared for the pop quiz.

Political parties are composed of various factions of people. This is especially true of the Republicans since their party is host to a sizable group called the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), who have a take no prisoners approach to politics that is ultimately self-destructive. The Freedom Caucus is large enough in number that they can deny the GOP a majority to pass legislation if those bills don’t meet their stringent standards. Because of this, Republican leaders are forced to work with the Democrats to get must pass legislation through Congress, which empowers the Democrats to demand concessions in exchange for cooperation. This results in laws being passed that are less conservative than they otherwise would be if the HFC had chosen to just compromise.

But the GOP was forced to try to repeal Obamacare without any Democratic support because of course Democrats weren’t going to vote for that. This meant crafting an O’care repeal bill that could win over both the moderate Republicans who represent swing districts and the Freedom caucus extremists. Note that this is just the dynamics of getting a bill through the House that I’ve described; the Senate is a completely different beast.

Implicit in all this was one simple truth: Republicans didn’t actually want to repeal Obamacare. 

Yep. 

Republicans like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but they hate Obamacare. ACA is the official name of the healthcare law, Obamacare was coined by the Republicans to derisively refer to that law, and whenever they would talk shit about ACA they would always refer to it as Obamacare. Thus, Obamacare is a politically charged term whereas ACA is not and because of this, GOP voters like the ACA but hate Obamacare, even though they’re exactly the same thing!

This put Republican politicians in the awkward position of not wanting to repeal Obamacare because they know that would be a bad thing, yet having to do it because their supporters will shank them if they don’t. They don’t want to do it, they don’t even know how they’re going to do it, but by God, come hell or high water, they are going to do it.

They failed.

The funny thing is that it didn’t have to be so difficult. They could have just repealed Obamacare and then passed a law exactly like Obamacare except with a different name. Then they could claim they repealed Obamacare when they really didn’t. That would be ridiculous, and their talking points would be obviously wrong, but they could get away with it because Fox News would back them up, and their base, which only watches Fox News, would believe them. That is the world we live in.

So Republicans decide to write a law they only have to because they boxed themselves in. You’d at least expect them to try and do it right, right? Nope. The bill was a complete train wreck.

It’s important to understand that in a country with only two political parties, one of those parties is completely given to flights of fancy. Indeed, for literally decades the Republican Party has abandoned any adherence to reality- no, they’ve outright attacked reality, choosing to live in a cocoon of rancid bullshit. Especially since the Tea Party came on the scene, the GOP has waged war on intellectualism and expertise. As such, their O’care repeal bill was crafted with no expert consultation and was derided by even conservative healthcare experts.

The process of writing the bill was outrageous. Republicans heavily criticized the passage of Obamacare for its supposed secrecy, but the GOP’s repeal bill actually was crafted in unprecedented secrecy. Legislation is usually written in a way that bypasses the committees, but the GOP healthcare bill was written in an almost autocratic way. Paul Ryan, the House GOP leader, and then Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, wrote the bills without input from anyone and even tried to lie to their fellow Republicans about the contents of the bill to win their vote! Among other various shenanigans. 

Things were touch and go at several moments, and things got pretty wild at times, but ultimately, the GOP failed to repeal Obamacare.

After that, they moved on to tax reform, and it was basically a repeat of O’care repeal except with a slightly different ending.

Once again, the GOP set out to do something ambitious: remake the federal tax system. This had not been done in decades.

They tried this a decade ago with the Bush Tax Cuts, but were forced to settle for temporary reductions in the tax rate rather than full on reform due to a quirk in the rules by which the law was passed. That ended up happening again here.

Their plan was to use a process called reconciliation to pass their reform plan once they got around to actually writing it. They wanted to go this route because bills passed using reconciliation only require a majority of US Senators to make it through the Senate, and a majority of US Senators were Republicans. Without reconciliation, the bill would need 60 Senators to pass, meaning that Republicans would need buy in from Democrats to pass it. The reconciliation process starts with Congress passing a resolution setting out parameters that the reconciliation bill is bound by. 

One of those parameters was that the budget deficit would not increase more than $1.5 trillion over the course of 10 years under their reform. Except, oops, they miscalculated and $1.5 trillion wasn’t a large enough space to fit tax cuts of the size they wanted to implement. They managed to make it work, but they had to significantly cut down on their ambitions. Just like with the Bush Tax Cuts.

Another important motivating factor was voter enthusiasm. As the process of writing the tax reform bill went along, it became increasingly hard to deny that Republican voters were not as energized as their Democratic counterparts. This boded poorly for the GOP since the upcoming 2018 elections were a midterm election, and enthusiasm is important in determining who wins. In order to win, you need the people who support you to vote, but they are less likely to vote if they aren’t enthusiastic. Republican politicians believed that they could energize their base if they passed tax reform because….uh...why not?

Look, the logic here never made much sense. Traditionally, Republican politicians campaigned for election by emphasizing cultural issues like gay marriage or racial issues, so why GOP voters would care about tax reform is beyond me. Not only that, but the Democrats passed sooo much more than the Republicans did here during the 111th Congress, and they still got annihilated in the 2010 midterms.

The second session of the 115th Congress opens in January 2018, and there’s little chance that anything meaningful will happen. The midterms are mere months away, which means politicians will be focused on posturing outside of areas that require a serious effort.

CHIP (government provided health insurance for needy children) will need to be reauthorized. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which authorizes the federal government to surveille non-US citizens without a warrant, will also need to be reauthorized. Democrats are pushing for a deal involving the Dreamers and DACA, and funding for the government will need to be provided for soon, or there’ll be a government shutdown.

Good luck.

Part 1 | Part 3