Collusion As Far As The Eye Can See-- You Don't Even Need Binoculars To See All The Collusion

When Devin Nunes, chair of the House Intel Committee, got caught colluding with the White House on the investigation and pretended to recuse himself, Mike Conaway (R-TX) supposedly took over as acting chair in all matters Putin-Gate. Conaway represents TX-11, a west Texas district (Midland, Odessa, San Angelo) so red that the PVI is R+32. Trump beat Hillary there 77.8% to 19.1%. In 2012 Obama took 19.6% of the vote. Conaway usually gets reelected with around 80%. He had no Democratic running against him in 2012, 2014 or 2016. It hardly matters to him how imbecilic his sounds. He constituents are even stupider. Yesterday on Meet The Press he admitted that the reason the committee didn't find any collusion was because they weren't looking for any. Nunes and Trump have been running around yelling "no collusion, no collusion." Look at the crazy orange chimp:

On Saturday, Trumpanzee was at it again: "The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime."

Conaway, yesterday, a slow-witted dullard doing his first Sunday morning talk show: "We were focused not so much on that, as it feeds into the collusion issue. Our committee was not charged with answering the collusion idea. So we really weren't focused in that direction." In fact a few days ago, Conaway said on a conference call that "we believe that the broader evidence available to us was that they [the Kremlin] favored her [Hillary] over him [Comrade Trumpanski], and the main issue was to sow discord." Watch Chuck Todd interview the poor stumbling, mumbling, simpleminded Conaway:



Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) were on CNN yesterday, warning Señor T that he better not fire Mueller and that he had to allow federal investigators looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 election to do their jobs. Graham said it was very important that Mueller be allowed to proceed without interference and that many Republicans share this view. Flake said it appeared the baboon’s latest comments were aimed at the firing of Mueller.

“I don’t know what the designs are on Mueller, but it seems to be building towards that, and I just hope it doesn’t go there, because it can’t. We can’t in Congress accept that,” Flake told CNN’s State of the Union.

“So I would expect to see considerable pushback in the next couple of days urging the president not to go there. He can’t go there.”

In a series of tweets over the weekend, Trump accused the FBI leadership of lies, corruption and leaking information. He called the Russia probe a politically motivated witch hunt.

... “The only reason Mr. Mueller could ever be dismissed is for cause. I see no cause when it comes to Mr. Mueller,” Graham said on CNN. “I pledge to the American people as a Republican, to ensure that Mr. Mueller can continue to do his job without any interference.”

“As I have said before, if he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency, because we’re a rule of law nation,” Graham said... "As I have said before, if he tried to do that, that would be the beginning of the end of his presidency, because we’re a rule of law nation."

...Senator Angus King, an independent, also warned Trump against trying to fire Mueller.

“This is a serious investigation, and if the president tries to terminate it prematurely, I think it will be a true constitutional crisis,” he said on CBS.

Trump also drew criticism from fellow Republicans on Sunday over the firing of McCabe, who said he believed he was targeted because he corroborated Comey’s claims that Trump tried to pressure Comey into killing the Russia probe.

“I don’t like the way it happened. He should’ve been allowed to finish through the weekend,” Senator Marco Rubio said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Rubio, who supports the special counsel probe, said the decision to fire McCabe was made before the release of the Justice Department inspector general’s report that Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited in his dismissal.

Flake said the Senate Judiciary Committee would look at the report, which Sessions said concluded McCabe leaked information to reporters and misled investigators about his actions.

“I’m just puzzled by why the White House is going so hard at this, other than that they’re very afraid of what might come out,” he said on CNN.

Rubio seems to be really scared of Trump, like a child afraid of a stove after he's burned his little hand on it. No one can count on him to oppose Trump no matter what he does. Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown was also on Meet the Press yesterday with an interesting way of phrasing that kind of mentality. "I hear so many Republican senators grumble about Trump’s ethics, about his name-calling. … At some point Republican enablers in the House and Senate are going to say publicly what they’ve been saying privately. And that’s when things change and we see a president back off this kind of name-calling, not telling the truth, sending out these tweets, all that." We'll have to see if that ever happens-- at least before November. Speaking of which...

By a pretty big 50-40% margin, registered voters want to see Democrats win the congressional midterms in November. Two even more important numbers are that voters over 65, by an 11 point margin, want Democrats to win and Independents, by a 12 point margin, also want Democrats running the House and Senate. Seniors vote in midterms more than any other group. And, in terms of districts not as red as Conaway's, independents, decide the races. So in basically all the Republican districts outside off the Deep South, it could be curtains for congressional Republicans. This is a doomsday scenario building for GOP members like from Maine (Bruce Poliquin) to all of them in New York and New Jersey and more than any Democratic strategists was counting in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio... I wonder if any of them will jump off a bridge or a building. They really should based on what they've been doing to allow Trump to run rabid and wild.

The Poor People Who Voted For Trump And For Republicans May Soon Learn What That Means To Their Families

Going into 2017, the Christian Science Monitor reminded its readers that boosting low wages has become less controversial as conservatives looked elsewhere to inflict their deadly ideology on working families. 19 states are about to see a rise in the minimum wage, causing the pay of more than 4 million workers go upon one fell swoop. Conservatives still make the same discredited, utrterly false argument about the minimum wage they’ve been making since the Black Plague decimated the English working class in 1348, prompting King Edward III to set a maximum wage, making it illegal to pay laborers too much. Real minimum wage proposals gained steam in the early 1800s and the first minimum wage laws were passed in 1894 (New Zealand), 1896 (Australia) and 1909 (England). The first national minimum wage law came to the U.S. in 1938, accompanied by predictions of the end of the world by conservative politicians and the businessmen who finance their shameful careers. They were wrong, of course, but that hasn’t discouraged conservatives to roll out the same arguments and baseless scare tactics every time there was an attempt to increase the minimum wage.

Debates surrounding the pros and cons of minimum wage raises have reverberated through society in “Fight for $15” protests and state capitals around the nation. While those on the left have said wage hikes will pull some of the nation’s most vulnerable low-income workers out of poverty, conservatives have argued that increased costs for businesses will hamper the economy and have harmful fallout for the very workers they purpport to help.

But in 2017, several reliably red states will join liberal havens like Massachusetts and California in increasing wages for their workers after voters approved ballot initiatives. In others, indexing will provide the increases.

Altogether some 4.4 million workers are expected to see their hourly wages go up.

In places like Arizona, where voters chose to send President-elect Donald Trump to the Oval Office, they also voted for wage increases, crossing over partisan lines to take on an issue from a more traditionally liberal perspective.

…In cities around the country that set the trend of increasing wages, fears of price shock or businesses losses have proved largely unfounded, with localities seeing little impact on their economies. Still, more conservative state governments, like that in Arizona, are pushing back, with state’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry filing a lawsuit to challenge the increase, which is slated to raise the minimum wage from $8.05 to $10. On Thursday, the Arizona Supreme Court refused to temporarily block the measure.

Low-wage workers largely have activists to thank for the change, but note there’s still a long way to go. As states and cities move to raise their wages, the contrast between places still abiding by the federal minimum of $7.25 last raised in 2009 becomes more pronounced.

Seattle recently raised the minimum wage-- conservatives were ready to perform the last rights. Instead, standards of living have risen and unemployment rates-- rather than the sky-- have fallen. Take look:

A few days ago, Kali Holloway, demonstrated one of the places conservatives are seeking to harm the working class instead— the food stamps program. Fox News, the far right’s fake news source, is, as usual, the mouthpiece for plutocracy, greed and hatred. “Pathologizing poverty,” she wrote, “has been a long-term, ongoing—and sadly, highly successful—project of the right in this country.” She cites Wisconsin Koch puppet Scott Walker and his recent appeal to Trump to allow his beaten-down state to drug-test food-stamp recipients, as well as another Wisconsinite, Paul Ryan, and his plans to make it harder, nationally, to qualify for aid. As has always been the case with conservatives, “the goal is to punish and stigmatize the poor while eliminating programs that help lift them out of poverty.”

As the el Presidente-elect Señor Trumpanzee made clear in another one of his idiotic tweets yesterday, Fox is the Republican Party’s vision of state TV, something Holloway remarked on as well, reminding her readers it “essentially functions as the media arm of the Republican Party, and on Wednesday it did its part to undermine a program that helps 44 million poor Americans. To that transparent end, an episode of Fox & Friends featured a segment titled, “Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?” The piece goes on to claim that USDA figures reveal “$70 million of taxpayer money was wasted in 2016 due to food stamp fraud.” Kevin Drum’s response: Fox News Screws Up It’s Latest Lie. Fox’s point was basically a question “Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?”

Now, the obvious response to this is twofold. First, they're just lying, aren't they? And second, this is like a headline that says, "Traffic Deaths at All-Time High: Should We Ban Cars?"

But at this point the story takes a strange turn. First, I have no idea where Fox's $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to "2016 USDA," but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP fraud more recent than 2011.

But that's not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget. Even if this is an all-time high, the Fox high command can't believe this is anything but a spectacular bureaucratic success.

And it would be, if it were true. But it's not. If you look at inaccurate SNAP payments to states, the error rate since 2005 has decreased from 6 percent of the budget to less than 4 percent. However, this isn't fraud anyway: It's just an error rate, and most of the errors are eventually corrected. SNAP "trafficking"—exchanging SNAP benefits for cash—is fraud, but it's been declining steadily too, from 3.8 percent in 1993 to 1.3 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which we have records):

So in any normal sense, the Fox story was a lie. SNAP fraud isn't at an all-time high. It's been declining for years. But here's the thing: The fraud rate in 2011 may have been low, but this was in the aftermath of the Great Recession, when total SNAP payments were very high. So although the percentage is low, the dollar value of fraud clocked in at $988 million. Fox could have used this far higher number, which is, in fact, an all-time high. It's only an all-time high because SNAP was helping far more people, but still. In the Fox newsroom, that would hardly matter.

Bottom line: Yes, Fox is lying in any ordinary sense of the word. But they're also vastly understating the amount of SNAP fraud. Even when they're trying to deceive their audience, it turns out, they're also incompetent.

And this is where Paul Ryan comes in. He and the Republicans, as PBS reported recently, have a plan and they are busy laying the groundwork for a fresh effort to “overhaul” the food stamp program during Trump’s presidency, with new work and stricter eligibility requirements for millions of people.

Right-wing freak Mike Conaway (R-TX) is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and he’s leading Ryan’s jihad against food stamps, although he noted that the GOP doesn’t want to eliminate the program (which would not be in the interests of the agricultural conglomerates that fund Conway’s shady career). Conaway has taken $2,167,352 in legalistic bribes from AgriBusiness. Democrats don’t even run against him in his central Texas district that includes Midland, Odessa and San Angelo. This cycle his only opponent was a Libertarian. Conaway was reelected with 89.5% of the vote. You think that might influence his priorities? Here’s the list of the 10 most corrupt members of the Agriculture Committee with the amounts of legalistic bribery they have taken in the 2016 cycle.

• Mike Conaway (R-TX) $701,773
• Jeff Denham (R-CA) $539,848
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) $484,950
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)- $467,524
• David Rouzer (R-NC)- $417,831
• Rodney Davis (R-IL) $381,754
• Dan Newhouse- (R-WA) $346,442
• Frank Lucas (R-OK)- $276,475
• Doug LaMalfa (R-CA)- $256,089
• Rick Crawford (R-AR)- $255,300

Ryan would love to abolish the program entirely, but understands that isn’t going to happen in the real world, at least not in one fell swoop.

Food stamp policy is included in a wide-ranging farm bill every five years; the next one is due in 2018. It also could be part of a larger effort headed by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to tackle a welfare or entitlement overhaul, if that should happen in the next Congress.

Still, food stamp changes always have been a hard sell in Congress.

Democrats almost unilaterally oppose any changes. Some Republicans from poorer districts are also wary. The 1996 welfare law added some new work requirements, but Congress declined to convert federal food stamp dollars into block grants for the states, a move that would cut spending for the program.

In 2013, House Republican leaders tried to cut the program by 5 percent annually by passing broad work requirements as part of the last farm bill. The House bill also included drug testing for recipients.

The then-Democratic Senate balked, though, and the final bill included a much smaller cut and no allowances for drug testing. Conaway said he’s open to any of those policies, but suggested that block granting the program — a past priority for Ryan — or drug testing recipients are not his priorities.

“We don’t want to be helping folks on drugs, but then again, folks on drugs have children,” Conaway said.

One thing can be sure, though— for as long as the Republicans control the House: more pain and suffering is headed towards the poor. In the end, isn’t that the heart, the soul and the essence of modern conservatism?

Why Does No One Name The Names When It Comes To Congressional Corruption?

Republicans got rid of their head of corrupt practices; the Democrats haven't

Someone-- or a few someones-- must be responsible for the rules change that allows Members of Congress to take bribes in the form of lobbyist-sponsored travel without reporting it on financial disclosure forms. I read about the "rules change" and how "it happened" and how it has "occurred behind closed doors." But nowhere does it say who was behind those closed doors. All of the reporting sounded very passive… like it was something that happened, not like it was something John Boehner or his crooked Rules Committee Chairman, Pete Sessions, decided to make happen.

I called everyone I know who I thought might know, even my White House contacts. Everyone deplored it but no one knew who had initiated it or who had approved it. It was driving me crazy. Yesterday Pelosi had jumped on it and made it clear this was a Republican move and that the House Democrats would challenge it. By early today, there seemed to be some kind of move coalescing among Republicans to blame Eric Cantor for a move that had been blamed all day Monday on anonymous staffers from the House Ethics Committee which is led by ethics-free Republican Michael Conaway (R-TX) and also includes partisan pinhead Trey Gowdy (R-SC).

“The Committee adopted these changes and publicly highlighted them on page 2 of the financial disclosure instructions, which were provided to all financial disclosure filers and posted on the Committee's public web site months ago,” said Rust. “The Committee is committed to effective and efficient public disclosure, and will continue to look for opportunities to improve the public filings required of Members and staff.”

It's unclear how the change came about. Under the Ethics Committee guidelines, rule changes require a vote of the full committee, which consists of 10 members, five from each party. But interpretative changes may be made by the chairman and the ranking member acting jointly without the rest of the committee.

Pelosi warned that, if the members of the panel don't reverse the change, Democrats will push legislation to do it for them.

"If the Ethics Committee does not act, then we will call upon the Speaker to allow a vote on legislation to reverse this decision," she said. "In the meantime, Members are encouraged to disclose such trips to both the Clerk and in their annual disclosures.”

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), though, was quick to note that Democrats on the Ethics Committee had endorsed the change.

"Rep. Pelosi's staff needs to talk to her representative on the Ethics Committee, who signed off on this bipartisan change to reduce duplicative paperwork," Michael Steel said in an email.

Congressional Democrats and Democratic House candidates are outraged. One congressmember, who insisted on anonymity, said it smacked of a backroom deal between Cantor and Hoyer, both of whom claim power based on their ability to direct K Street money and favors to members of their respective caucuses. "When it comes to ethics, Steny and Cantor are like the Bobbsey Twins… no daylight at all… I don't know if I would use a legal term like 'corrupt' to describe them but they've helped craft a system that stinks of corruption."

Mike Obermueller, Democratic challenger to one of Congress' most corrupt chairman, John Kline, who has run the House Committee on Education and the Workforce as a personal piggybank, is fed up with the kind of self-serving corruption he sees in Washington. "While the Republican House recklessly impedes progress on bills that would create jobs or stimulate the economy," he said yesterday, "to no one’s surprise, yesterday they made time to change the rules to benefit themselves. You know who isn’t benefiting from this change? The working families in this district. They want Congress working on an increase in the minimum wage and making sure college is affordable. All this change does is minimize accountability and transparency in our representation in Washington, D.C. I’m ready to get to work, not spend my time securing special interest funded travel. Congressman Kline should join me in opposing this loophole that is intended to reduce oversight and transparency."

Meanwhile, the House Ethics Committee has let some of the worst crooks in government-- from Michele Bachmann and Joe Crowley to Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm-- get away with disgracing Congress and bringing it into the disrepute it now stands. Who remembers Jack Abramoff, "the man who bought Washington?" He's out of prison now and freely admits to having bribed Members of Congress. As usual, we have a briber but no bribees. Listen:




UPDATE: Mike Conaway Buckles

Under intense pressure from Democrats and nonpartisan good government groups, Boehner told Texas crook/Ethics Committee chairman Mike Conaway to give up on the GOP's sneaky plan to allow lobbyists to bribe congressmembers with all-expenses-paid luxury holidays that didn't have to be reported. "We will reverse that decision," Conaway said during an appearance on a local radio talk show in his Texas district. "It was a wrong decision and we're going to fix it." Conaway is still pissed off he was caught and forced to reverse himself, saying the firestorm occurred "only because one reporter who makes a living jacking people up about these trips" wrote about the issue. "We had gotten not one complaint from the public," he added of the unannounced change. "Not one person had looked for this information except this reporter." He also blamed Republican Ethics Committee Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA)-- "a guy named Mike Fitzpatrick," in his words-- for blowing the whistle on his sleazy maneuver and then joining the Democrats to denounce him as a crook.