PastaJoe

That's how Sean Spicer looks every day trying to explain the unexplainable.

People aren't given immunity so they can just clear their name. They have to tell the people who would grant immunity beforehand what they're willing to say under oath in public. Usually it's to give up someone higher in the chain than them self. Otherwise they're not given immunity, and could be compelled to testify by a subpoena.

I don't watch anything on CBS except Hawaii 5-0. It's like the old person network with corny jokes or repetitive drama scripts. I stopped watching ESPN years ago when they became obvious shills for the sports leagues. Monday Night Football used to be must see tv when on ABC, now I might tune in for a couple minutes just to check the score. Never watched Homeland, I can't stand Claire Danes.

Anyone remember S&H Green Stamps? My parents got me a table hockey set with them. I remember going to a place to pick it up, but I don't remember if they had their own building or you went to a regular store to redeem them.

I think there was a Two Guys near the Boulevard Mall. There were Ames in the Syracuse area. I thought they were more like Target. I remember one was a new building east of Syracuse near Chittenango. Now the building is the Yellow Brick Road Casino.

I assume they will have origin explainations in the movie. I would have preferred their black character be GL John Stewart. He "died" in the last movie, but he'll be coming back.

There is still a possiblity that Trump will order HHS Secretary Price to change some of the ACA regulations, which would be an alternative way to tamper with it. If they do so and modify the ACA regulations from what was orginally enacted, they then take ownership of it as Trumpcare. So will Trump be vindictive and try to weaken it, or will he act presidential and work for a bipartisan solution.

Ivanka got an office in the White House and a security clearance? Hmm...

Paul Ryan failed in passing tax breaks for the wealthy disguised as health reform, so he's going to move on to tax breaks for the wealthy disguised as middle class tax reform. Trump didn't really care about the details of the bill, he just wanted a win to fulfill a campaign promise. Now his reputation as a dealmaker is exposed as a fallacy, and his signature campaign promise has been broken. After Ryan cried "uncle" and pulled the bill, Trump said, "I think what happened is the best thing that could happen.". So he was for it before he was against it. I agree the best alternative is for Democrats to work with moderate Repubs to come up with modifications to the ACA, or even single payer, and offer it to Trump as a win-win for Americans and Trump.

But they are voting on the bad Trumpcare bill on Friday. After 7 years and finally having control they still can't get it right, or even get agreement within their own party. So they had to appease some conservatives by making the bill worse, and upset the moderates. And even if it passes the House, it won't pass the Senate without changes. And then the House conservatives won't like it again. And through it all Trump will blame Obama, who could close the deal, when he can't on a bill he supports 100%.

New CBO estimate of latest Trumpcare bill: will save $150 billion LESS than the original bill the CBO scored, and STILL will result in 24 million less people with health insurance.

President Trump had a remarkable interview with Time magazine on March 22 about falsehoods, in which he repeated many false claims that have repeatedly been debunked. Here’s a round-up of his key misstatements. “Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems. … A day later they had a horrible, horrible riot in Sweden, and you saw what happened.” This is false. Trump at a rally on Feb. 11 made a reference to “what’s happening last night in Sweden,” confusing people in that country since nothing had happened. Trump then clarified in a tweet that his statement “was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews concerning immigrants& Sweden.” Then two days later, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of the country’s capital, Stockholm. But no one died. “NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that, and I said that the allies must pay. Nobody knew that they weren’t paying. I did. I figured it. … What I said about NATO was true, people aren’t paying their bills.” False on several levels. NATO has been involved in counterterrorism since 1980, and especially since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. As for NATO’s financing, Trump apparently still does not understand how it works. NATO’s guideline, established in 2006, is that defense expenditures should amount to 2 percent of each country’s gross domestic product by 2024. In 2016, only four countries besides the United States met that standard, but NATO documents also show that defense spending has increased about 3 percent from 2015 to 2016. In any case, the money would not be going to the United States or even necessarily to NATO; this is money that countries would spend to bolster their own military. Trump’s timeline is off. Trump said in March 2016, three months before the June 23 vote on whether Britain should remain part of the European Union, that he thinks “Britain will separate from the EU. I think that maybe it’s time, especially in light of what’s happened with the craziness that is going on with immigration, with people pouring in all over the place I think that Britain will end up separating from the EU.” “Now remember this. When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wire tapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes. What I’m talking about is surveillance.” Trump has invented a convenient excuse to cover up the fact that he accused the Obama administration of spying on him. In some tweets, he used quotes. But this is the key tweet: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” “Here, headline, for the front page of the New York Times, ‘Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides.’ That’s a headline. Now they then dropped that headline, I never saw this until this morning. They then dropped that headline, and they used another headline without the word wiretap, but they did mean wiretap. Wiretapped data used in inquiry. Then changed after that, they probably didn’t like it. And they changed the title. They took the wiretap word out. … Front page, January 20th. Now in their second editions, they took it all down under the internet. They took that out. Ok? But that’s the way it is.” Trump is mixing up different headlines for the print and Internet editions. In print, the headline was: “Wiretapped data used in inquiry of Trump aides.” Online, the headline read: “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates.” The headlines were not changed as part of any stealth editing. In any case, the text of the New York Times article did not support in any way the claims made by Trump about Obama. Q: The claim that Muslims celebrated 9/11 in New Jersey… A: Well if you look at the reporter, he wrote the story in The Washington Post. This is yet another Four-Pinocchio claim that we have checked over and over. Trump claimed he saw on television thousands of Muslims cheer the collapse of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks. There is no TV footage, no newspaper coverage, just scattered, unconfirmed reports of five or six people — not necessarily Muslim, probably teenagers — celebrating. There was a small reference buried deep in an article in The Post. When the reporter said it did not support Trump’s claim, Trump mocked his disability. Well, now if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong, in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people. In fact I’m forming a committee on it.” We’ve repeatedly debunked this. There are instances of people illegally voting, but they are rare. The National Association of Secretaries of State said it did not know of “any evidence” backing up Trump’s claims.“ .“This just came out. This is a Politico story: Members of the Donald Trump Transition team possibly including Trump himself were under surveillance during the Obama administration following November’s election. House intelligence chairman Devin Nunes told reporters, wow. Nunes said, so that means I’m right, Nunes said the surveillance appears to have been … incidental collection, that does not appear to have been related to concerns over Russia.” Nunes cited one anonymous source and didn’t provide any details. Still, the same Politico storyTrump quotes says Nunes disputed that the information Nunes obtained vindicated Trump: “The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former president Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows. “Why do you say that I have to apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper, just like I quoted the judge the other day, Judge Napolitano, I quoted Judge Napolitano, just like I quoted Bret Baier, I mean Bret Baier mentioned the word wiretap. Now he can now deny it, or whatever he is doing, you know. But I watched Bret Baier, and he used that term. I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano, and he said that three sources have told him things that would make me right. I don’t know where he has gone with it since then. But I’m quoting highly respected people from highly respected television networks.” Fox News said it has no evidence to back up claims by Andrew Napolitano, a judicial analyst and commentator on Fox News. Bret Baier said on his show: “We love the judge, we love him here at Fox, but the Fox News division was never able to back up those claims and was never reported on this show.” As for Baier, Trump is apparently referring to a March 3 interview with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Baier referred to an unconfirmed report that there was a “wiretap at Trump Tower with some computer and Russian banks.” Ryan responded: “I am saying I have seen nothing of that. I have seen nothing come of that.” “And then TIME magazine, which treats me horribly, but obviously I sell, I assume this is going to be a cover too, have I set the record? I guess, right? Covers, nobody’s had more covers.” Trump is well behind any sort of record for Time covers. Trump has been on the cover of Time magazine about a dozen times. Richard Nixon holds the record: 55. “I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, okay.” The economy was not a mess when Trump became president. The stock market was booming and the unemployment rate was below 5 percent. Trump has falsely claimed that 94 million Americans cannot get a job but most of them do not want a job, as they are retired, in school, taking care of young children or are disabled. Trump consistently astounds us with his inability to acknowledge that he repeatedly gets facts wrong and consistently misleads the American public with inaccurate, dubious claims. He earns Four Pinocchios for this interview. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/03/23/president-trumps-cascade-of-false-claims-in-times-interview-on-his-falsehoods/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_fact-checker-940am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.205b5603d559

It's a legislative shell game; they have to replace the ACA in this fiscal year so they can use reconciliation in the Senate and not have to get 60 votes, then they can do the same in the next fiscal year for their proposed tax cuts. They know their proposals will never get 60 votes. So they're pushing a bad bill faster than what they complained the Democrats did, for their ultimate goal of tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting services for everyone else. "Under the budget resolution passed in January, GOP lawmakers can repeal sections of the Affordable Care Act with a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate—Republicans have 52 seats—without the threat of a Democratic filibuster. They can do this through a procedure called reconciliation, a legislative process allowing for the repeal of certain pieces of a bill pertaining to the budget that permits only twenty hours of debate under Senate rules. However, once the current fiscal year expires, Republicans lose that reconciliation directive and have to resubmit for permission at the outset of the next fiscal year. Reconciliation allows Congress to consider just three items per fiscal year, whether they pertain to one bill or multiple. Those items are spending, revenue and debt limit. Since the GOP also wants to pass its tax reform agenda using reconciliation, it cannot statutorily do that under this budget blueprint because the two policy measures overlap. Therefore, the administration plans to use the 2018 budget to pass tax reform through reconciliation, according to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. It plans to adopt the 2018 budget in May or June, which would mark the first time in the 43-year history of the Congressional budget process that Congress passed two budgets within the same year, according to Forbes. “The limit they face is they cannot start tax reform reconciliation through the legislative process until the next budget resolution has been through both Houses,” Brian Riedl, former chief economist to Senator Bob Portman (R-OH), told FOX Business. “Tax reform reconciliation is on hold until they finish health care.” Pushing back the timeline would put pressure on these windows. Not to mention, midterm elections are at the end of 2018, so there is no guarantee Republicans will maintain a majority in Congress through the following year." http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/03/22/health-care-domino-why-trumps-tax-cuts-depend-on-obamacare-repeal.html

Add another to the growing list of disappointed Trump supporters. It is a sad story of how much this man trusted Trump on an issue close to his heart. The grieving father stood with his guitar and his cowboy hat in the cold, crowded lines for hours, driving to towns big and small in nearly every corner of the country. Beginning in January 2016, Kraig Moss traveled to 45 rallies, belting out songs in support of Donald Trump and telling the story of his late son, Rob, who died three years ago from a heroin overdose. In this way, the musician earned the title of “the Trump Troubadour,” a true believer said to symbolize “the voice of unheard America.” He stopped making his mortgage payments and sold the equipment for his construction business to stay on the campaign trail, galvanized by Trump’s promise to help young people — like Moss’s late son — who struggle with drug addiction. Trump, Moss thought, was the candidate most capable of bringing an end to the heroin epidemic sweeping the nation. Trump made this promise to Moss personally at a rally in Iowa in January 2016. Speaking through a microphone to the crowd, he addressed Moss directly: “The biggest thing we can do in honor of your son … we have to be able to stop it.” “I know what you went through. And he’s a great father,” he said of Moss to the crowd. “I can see it. And your son is proud of you.” But about two weeks ago, Moss caught his first glimpse of the Republican proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. The proposed health care bill, slated for floor vote in the House Thursday night, would eliminate a requirement that Medicaid cover basic mental-health and addiction services in states that expanded it, a mandate that covered nearly 1.3 million people. “This bill is just the absolute opposite,” Moss told The Washington Post. “I felt betrayed. I felt let down.” [GOP health-care bill would drop addiction treatment mandate covering 1.3 million Americans] He had put all his weight behind the Republican’s promise, sacrificing his business and his livelihood to sing Trump’s praises. But this bill backed by the president “disgusted” him. He no longer sings songs about Trump, and he now wonders if any of his sacrifices were worth it. “You hear that echo?” he said in a phone interview from his home in Upstate New York. “That’s because there’s no furniture in this house. It’s completely gutted.” “The one platform that I was just so genuinely involved in with my heart was the one thing that he just turned right around,” Moss said. “He’s turning his back on all of us.” Moss said he initially supported many of Trump’s other promises as well, such as his pledge to build a border wall with Mexico. But lately he has been upset hearing the stories of families being separated by deportations. “If I contributed to anything like that I’d be ashamed of myself,” he said. Many have been criticizing Moss for publicly voicing his disappointment with Trump, but he knows there must be many others feeling similar pangs of regret or betrayal. “I was very instrumental in getting these ‘closet Trumpsters’ to come out” during the presidential campaign, Moss said. In a similar way, he hopes he can encourage other disillusioned Americans to speak up about their concerns with the new administration. “I’m not the lone ranger out here doing this,” he said. “It’s a little guy like me that put Trump in the office,” and it’s the “little guys” who can call lawmakers and ask for a new health care proposal, he said. “Don’t turn your head on this problem Mr. Trump,” Moss said. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/23/the-trump-troubadour-went-to-45-trump-rallies-in-honor-of-his-late-son-now-he-feels-betrayed/?hpid=hp_hp-morning-mix_mm-troubador%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.389b0c8a6bc9

Yes, someone who doesn't consider Transgender people "mentally ill", and doesn't claim Obama "isn't a Christian". You're an embarrassment.

Hopefully Trump will once again ask his friends in the Kremlin to release emails. WASHINGTON — Exxon Mobil Corp. acknowledges it lost months worth of communications from an alias email account that former CEO Rex Tillerson used to discuss climate change. An attorney for the oil giant explained Tuesday in a letter to a New York state court, filed as part of a climate fraud investigation, that emails from Tillerson’s secondary account, which used the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker,” went missing as a result of a “unique issue.” The lawyer said the account was exempted from a “file sweep” that prevents emails from being automatically deleted ― an issue “limited to the Wayne Tracker account.” Tillerson, now President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, used the Wayne Tracker account to discuss climate change and other matters with members of the company’s board, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who subpoenaed Exxon in November 2015 to obtain documents related to allegations that it had lied to the public and its investors about the risks of climate change. The investigation is ongoing. At a court hearing Wednesday, a New York state judge ordered Exxon to turn over additional documents as part of the investigation and cooperate with Schneiderman’s office in tracking down the lost emails, according to Reuters. A lawyer for Schneiderman’s office described the revelation of lost Tillerson emails as a “bombshell,” Reuters reported. Exxon has faced mounting legal troubles in recent months. A year ago, shortly after Schneiderman issued his subpoena, a coalition of state attorneys general, including Maura Healey of Massachusetts, pledged to crack down on corporate climate fraud. The move came in response to reports by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times that Exxon executives were aware of the climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions, but funded research to cover up those risks and block solutions. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exxon-mobil-rex-tillerson-emails-lost-us_us_58d2d26de4b02d33b7481181?26&

There are plenty of reasons why Trump will be a one-term president, if he even lasts until 2020. But a Republican lawmaker says he is trying to save Trump by voting against the White House-backed health care bill. "We're afraid he's a one-term president if this passes,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told CNN’s Kate Bolduan. “We are trying to save him.” Massie also made headlines on Wednesday for saying he's changing his vote on Trumpcare from “no” to “hell no.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/thomas-massie-one-term-president_us_58d34d79e4b0b22b0d19d176?

Well according to his recent tax returns, Trump pays alot of taxes so he should be entitled to.... Oh wait, nevermind.

Wow, you are simply an embarrassment. On the topic, Kapernick would be a credible backup if they get him at a reasonable price, and would be an upgrade over EJ. If he wants to express his 1st amendment rights, so be it. It's not like he's beat up his girlfriend, done drugs, driven drunk, or abused teammates.