BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER 

& CROOKED MEDIA

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

—Nancy Pelosi saying it all with a clap

NICE UNION YOU GOT THERE

Forget the spin about “unity”—President Trump’s State of the Union was a long, tedious repackaging of the threats, lies, bullying, and racial demagoguery he’s famous for.

History will mark Tuesday’s speech as the first State of the Union in which a president threatened that the economy and legislative progress might suffer if Congress chooses to investigate the President’s corruption and potential crimes.

“If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” Trump said. “It just doesn’t work that way!”

Even Richard Nixon was subtler. In his 1974 State of the Union address, Nixon merely asked Congress to drop its Watergate investigations. “I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end,” he said. “One year of Watergate is enough.” He resigned less than a year later.

Trump also lied about the rest of the policy agenda:

• Trump said, “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” Last year Trump killed an immigration deal that would have traded a wall on the southern border for protections for Dreamers, because the proposal didn’t cut legal immigration.

• He claimed he wanted to “lower the cost of health care and prescription drugs, and to protect patients with preexisting conditions.” He spent the first year of his presidency trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and continues to support a lawsuit asking the courts to throw out the law’s pre-existing conditions protections.   

• Trump described the multi-trillion dollar corporate tax cut bill he signed as a “a massive tax cut for working families.” It's actually a huge tax cut for corporations, the benefits of which have flowed overwhelmingly to wealthy people.  

• He said, “the border city of El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime—one of the highest in the entire country,” until it built a wall, after which it “immediately” became “one safest cities in our country.” This is just a lie.

• Trump decried the politics of “vengeance” and “pointless destruction” but before the address he trashed John McCain, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer, and after the event he called House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff a “political hack.”

State of the Union addresses are supposed to set a legislative agenda. Trump came armed with no actionable proposals, and little more than platitudes about things like infrastructure investment that Congress could theoretically pass. His one big idea is that he shouldn’t be investigated for his potential crimes and corruption, and will blame any economic downturn on those investigations.

...THE ARISTOCRATS!

All three of Virginia’s statewide elected Democratic officials now face potentially career-ending scandals, which could result in Republicans retaking power in the state.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring informed fellow Democrats on Wednesday that he, too, wore blackface in college, and that he was photographed doing so. Herring is second in line to the governorship behind Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D-VA), who faces a detailed accusation that he sexually assaulted Dr. Vanessa Tyson at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Fairfax insists their encounter was consensual.

Fairfax will become governor if Ralph Northam steps down. Northam has been resisting widespread demands for his resignation since Friday, when a photo on his medical school yearbook page of men in blackface and a KKK hood came to light.

There is confusion within the state over what would happen if the lieutenant governorship becomes vacant, which means Democrats will have a hard time putting this horror show behind them by resigning strategically and appointing untainted replacements. But if all three men go down, the next person in line to become governor is the state’s Republican assembly speaker (who is only in that role because a coin toss to decide a tied delegate election resulted in a Republican majority). No good.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Republicans have gutted, announced plans today to roll back regulations on payday lenders so that they can fleece poor people with more short term, high interest loans.

President Trump’s second North Korean summit with Kim Jong Un will take place February 27-28 in Vietnam.

The House Intelligence Committee voted to release full witness transcripts from the Russia investigation to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice. Republicans, who led the committee prior to the midterm elections, had previously blocked Democrats’ attempts to share the transcripts.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has apologized for identifying herself as a Native American, because, she says, it conveyed a lack of respect for tribal sovereignty. She continues to insist that she never cited ancestry to get a professional leg up—through affirmative action and similar programs—and there is no evidence that she did.

For the first time, Pope Francis recognized the persistent problem of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns. Just last month, the top official at the Vatican office handling sexual abuse allegations within the church resigned after a former nun accused him of making advances on her during confession.

An Alabama police officer will face no criminal charges after fatally shooting E.J. Bradford, a 21-year-old black man whom the officer believed was a gunman in a shopping mall shooting. According to witnesses at the mall, Bradford had been helping other shoppers to safety, and according to video evidence, Bradford, who was carrying a gun, was running towards the real shooter. So this is what happens to the good guy with a gun.

The Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit to stop a nonprofit from creating supervised injection sites, where addicts can go to safely inject intravenous drugs without overdosing or using contaminated needles, under the supervision of medically trained staff. Just 24 hours ago President Trump declared his supposed commitment to eliminating HIV.

An anti-nuclear activist has accused the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel laureate Óscar Arias Sánchez of sexually assaulting her four years ago.

Former Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the longest serving member of Congress in American history, has cancer and is receiving hospice care.

Gwyneth Paltrow is coming to Netflix and people are PISSED.

A new CNN report shows that the weapons that the U.S. shipped to Saudi Arabia and the UAE have ended up in the hands of fighters linked to al Qaeda, Iran, and others who are fighting the war in Yemen. The exchange of American-made weapons to militias and other fighters violates the agreements the Saudis and Emiratis made with the U.S., and threatens to endanger the lives of U.S. troops while exposing military technology to adversaries.

A bill filed in Florida would allow school districts to teach students “alternatives” to concepts that are deemed “controversial,” including climate change and evolution, because the group that wrote the bill believes that the facts Florida schools are currently teaching are “political and religious indoctrination.”

Politically correct Billionaire-American Howard Schultz would like you to start referring to billionaires as “people of means.” A billion apologies, Howard.

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