BY BRIAN BEUTLER

& CROOKED MEDIA

Monday, March 11, 2019

—Nancy Pelosi, on impeachment, sounding like a badass even when she’s wrong

MEDICAID? WHAT MEDICAID?

President Trump unveiled his budget today. It’s very bad! And it’s a reminder that the bigotry and fear mongering he pumps out every day are smokescreens for a wildly unpopular, far-right economic agenda. (From Lovett: Trump in the streets, Mulvaney in the sheets. Sorry.).

The budget itself won’t become law thanks in large part to the fact that Democrats now control the House, but the law requires the White House to issue a budget every year, and every year it is a window into how the president’s party would govern if it had unchecked power.

So what are Republicans real ambitions?

• Cut Medicare spending $845 billion. (One small bright spot in this budget is that it shelves the GOP’s more unpopular goal of privatizing Medicare, so these cuts would be to provider reimbursements, which is why hospitals are so upset.)
• Cut food stamps $220 billion.
• Cut student loans $207 billion.
• Cut Medicaid by $1.5 trillion—fully eviscerating the program.
• Repeal Obamacare.
• Another $1 trillion regressive tax cut.

There’s much, much more damning stuff in the budget, but these are the lowlights.

It is fashionable for insiders to focus on the fact that this budget won’t become law, but it is more importantly a clear cut statement of the Republican Party’s values and will likely echo across politics through the 2020 election cycle. In that way, it’s not unlike the Green New Deal, which also isn’t going to become law any time soon, but has become one of the organizing issues in both the Democratic primary campaign and the Trump re-election campaign. The differences is, Democrats don’t have to lie about what’s in Trump’s budget to turn it into an effective political weapon, while Republicans drone on dishonestly about fake hamburger bans.

While you were weekending:

• Fox News host Jeanine Pirro advanced a conspiratorial anti-Muslim smear by saying Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) may practice Sharia law, and thus have no allegiance to the Constitution, because she wears a hijab. Gross!
• Fox News host Tucker Carlson refused to apologize for defending child rape and calling women “primitive,” “basic,” “cunty,” and many other disparaging things. Also gross!
• Media Matters, which unearthed the Carlson comments, claims there’s more to come. Yay?

Fox ultimately condemned Pirro. But this is a good reminder that less than one week ago, mainstream journalists rallied around Fox News, and the network’s news-side anchors and reporters, because the Democratic Party denied Fox the opportunity to host a Democratic presidential primary debate. None of those news-side anchors and reporters have condemned Carlson and Pirro. It’s almost as if they refuse to accept their role in lending credibility to the most destructive political organization in American public life! Weird!

The Democrats will hold their 2020 convention in Milwaukee, after finally figuring out where Wisconsin is on a map. Wisconsin Republicans responded the way Republicans do by attacking the biggest city in their state, where they held their own convention just last year. Cheese curds! Yes!

An aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) resigned over her office’s handling of a sexual harassment claim, which is particularly bad because Gillibrand has built a presidential campaign around her leadership in the #MeToo movement.

Facebook temporarily removed several Elizabeth Warren-for-president ads touting her plan to break up Facebook, which was, unintentionally, an in-kind ad for both Warren’s campaign and for her break-up-tech-monopolies proposal.  

President Trump, king of nuance, says that Democrats hate Jews, and his press secretary, who has no limit to what she’ll defend, backed him up by citing his support for Israel. This equation of Jewry with Israel (and, really, Israel’s current right-wing government) is textbook antisemitism in and of itself, but Republicans will celebrate it instead of pretending to be offended.

The founder of the Florida massage parlor-turned-human-trafficking front where Robert Kraft got busted reportedly sold Chinese executives access to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and helps lead two groups associated with the Chinese government, so this definitely isn’t a blackmail/espionage nightmare. Reminder, all Republicans in Congress have made it their mission to let Trump continue to operate his private businesses and conceal his tax returns.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell teamed up to invite NATO’s secretary general to address a joint session of Congress next month, a not-so-subtle bipartisan swipe at Donald Trump who has relentlessly attacked the western alliance since around the time Vladimir Putin offered to set him up with a lucrative real estate deal in Moscow.

Dark horse presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg turned heads at SXSW in Texas this weekend, and had a great answer when Jake Tapper asked him whether Vice President Mike Pence would make a better or worse president than Trump.

Can you imagine if AOC had confused a journalist named Germán Dam for an actual dam called German Dam, and used her misunderstanding to advocate for a Green New Deal? Anyhow, the point is that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is not very bright, and our political system is lousy with partisan, gendered, and other double standards.

Donald Trump is good now.

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to privately “clarify” the dishonest testimony he gave the House Judiciary Committee at a contentious public hearing last month. Whitaker famously denied that President Trump had leaned on him to interfere in the criminal investigation of his campaign underway in New York, and chairman Jerry Nadler claims to have evidence that Whitaker lied under oath. But on Saturday, the liberal watchdog group American Oversight unearthed a directive from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordering an extensive investigation of Hillary Clinton. DOJ had denied under penalty of perjury that any written directive to investigate Clinton existed, but it was sitting in Whitaker’s inbox all along. Whitaker abruptly left the Justice Department last week. Cool cool cool.

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An appeals court in New York has taken an initial step toward unsealing the file in the case of Jeffrey Epstein, which would likely reveal key details about a sex-trafficking operation the politically-connected billionaire ran with his partner, and the filings that resulted in the unlawful, sweetheart deal that allowed Epstein to avoid prison time. The federal prosecutor who cut the deal with Epstein, Alex Acosta, now serves as President Trump’s labor secretary.

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