Donald Trump "Russia if you're listening" ~ an illegitimate election

Trump's 'Russia, if you're listening' remark is still dogging him

"For the first time, Americans were shown in granular detail how Russian spies worked to sway the election in Trump’s favor, with everything from social media campaigns and ad buys to the organization of rallies and payments to demonstrators dressing up as Hillary Clinton in a cage."

Worries about Trump's legitimacy resurface with Russia indictment

Mueller's charges came to no conclusion about voter influence, but described extensive efforts to tip the election in his favor.

New charges on Friday in the special counsel’s Russia investigation put attention squarely on a notion President Donald Trump has aggressively sought to avoid: the legitimacy of his 2016 election.

Trump and the White House were quick to argue that the indictment of 13 Russian nationals further indicated there was no collusion between Russian operatives and the campaign — and that the vast Russian operation, dubbed “information warfare” by the Justice Department, had no impact on the election result.

For the first time, Americans were shown in granular detail how Russian spies worked to sway the election in Trump’s favor, with everything from social media campaigns and ad buys to the organization of rallies and payments to demonstrators dressing up as Hillary Clinton in a cage.

It's cliche but fits the mantra of "where there's smoke, there's fire".

Russian interference was summoned by Donald Trump every time he gave the clarion call with "Russia, if you're listening".

Robert Mueller accused 13 Russians with 2016 election interference - casts shadow on the legitimacy of the election

The indictment, brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, only compounds fears in the White House that Trump will attack the FBI in the wake of a school shooting in Florida that left 17 dead, and revelations that the bureau mishandled a tip about the alleged shooter it received in January. 

Senior staffers are actively urging Trump to avoid attacking the FBI, one administration official said.

But for Trump, famously furious about the notion that a foreign adversary aided his political rise, the detailed revelation that Russia poured resources toward securing his win could prove an instigation too far. He has frequently railed against the Russia investigation, dismissing it as a “witch hunt” and “fake news.” And he has bristled at the notion that Russian interference assisted his upset win over Hillary Clinton, calling the notion a “phony Democrat excuse for losing.”

“Trump has always been concerned about the legitimacy of his election,” said Rick Tyler, a former communications director for Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid. “This is criminal activity that these indictments point to that helped Donald Trump get elected. … My guess is he will try to delegitimize it and dismiss it.”

Alberto Martinez, Sen. Marco Rubio’s chief of staff from 2013 to 2017, said: “The good news for the Trump campaign in today’s indictment is that there is still no smoking gun on collusion (MaineWriter ~ I certainly disagree with this unsubstantiated assessment!), and that at least in how it pertained to these indictments they were unwitting beneficiaries of Russia’s actions. The bad news is that, at some point, the effort which began as an operation to sow chaos in the entire process turned into an effort to help the Trump campaign. The challenge and opportunity for the Trump administration is to erase any doubt that Putin made a grave mistake in thinking a Trump presidency would somehow benefit Putin’s ambitions.”

In the White House, there is hope that Trump can be steered away from inflammatory attacks on the special counsel’s findings.

“What needs to happen is someone senior around Trump needs to explain the distinction between Russian meddling and Russian collusion,” said one White House official, voicing fear that Trump will leverage his frequent denials of collusion into a broader effort to dismiss Mueller’s findings that Russia actively interfered in the election.

A cadre of Trump’s senior aides, including White House chief of staff John Kelly, joined the president on Friday as he traveled to Florida for the weekend.

But Trump has demonstrated a difficulty in the past with accepting any information that raises doubt about his election victory, which he frequently brags about. He still, for example, stands by a claim that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of widespread voter fraud, despite no evidence to support the assertion.

Trump’s retreat into a defensive crouch was quick, as he posted on Twitter Friday afternoon: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!” (MaineWriter ~ Short term memory loss ~ Trump campaign met with Russians during the campaign in New York City at Trump Tower.)

The White House also released a statement from press secretary Sarah Sanders that said there was “NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the outcome of the election was not changed or affected.”

The White House statement also included a line from Trump calling for an end to “the outlandish partisan attacks, wild and false allegations, and far-fetched theories, which only serve to further the agendas of bad actors, like Russia, and do nothing to protect the principles of our institutions.”

Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, went so far as to say he was “very happy,” when asked by POLITICO for his reaction to the Mueller indictment. He did not elaborate.

Other Republicans were eager to note that Russia’s efforts extended beyond Trump cheering and Clinton bashing, noting that the Russians also sought to hurt the campaigns of Sens. Cruz and Rubio and help Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who was vying for the Democratic nomination against Clinton.

“If anything, it just showed that they were trying to sow the seeds of discontent,” said Marc Lotter, Vice President Mike Pence’s former press secretary.

In the White House, there is hope that Trump can be steered away from inflammatory attacks on the special counsel’s findings.

“What needs to happen is someone senior around Trump needs to explain the distinction between Russian meddling and Russian collusion,” said one White House official, voicing fear that Trump will leverage his frequent denials of collusion into a broader effort to dismiss Mueller’s findings that Russia actively interfered in the election.

A cadre of Trump’s senior aides, including White House chief of staff John Kelly, joined the president on Friday as he traveled to Florida for the weekend.

But Trump has demonstrated a difficulty in the past with accepting any information that raises doubt about his election victory, which he frequently brags about. He still, for example, stands by a claim that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of widespread voter fraud, despite no evidence to support the assertion.

Trump’s retreat into a defensive crouch was quick, as he posted on Twitter Friday afternoon: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!”

The White House also released a statement from press secretary Sarah Sanders that said there was “NO COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia and that the outcome of the election was not changed or affected.”

The White House statement also included a line from Trump calling for an end to “the outlandish partisan attacks, wild and false allegations, and far-fetched theories, which only serve to further the agendas of bad actors, like Russia, and do nothing to protect the principles of our institutions.”

Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, went so far as to say he was “very happy,” when asked by POLITICO for his reaction to the Mueller indictment. He did not elaborate.

But other Republicans were less sanguine about the difficult Mueller accusations and the Russia findings.

“We have known that Russians meddled in the election, but these indictments detail the extent of the subterfuge,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement. “These Russians engaged in a sinister and systematic attack on our political system. It was a conspiracy to subvert the process, and take aim at democracy itself. Today’s announcement underscores why we need to follow the facts and work to protect the integrity of future elections.”

Nancy Cook and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

Our News Media Abandons the Stupid Sequester Impact - Hurting the Poor Doesn't Make News

Thankfully, The Atlantic re-visted the impact of the stupid federal budget sequester in "The Sequester's Devastating Impact on America's Poor", by Nancy Cook.  

Nevertheless, our pop-culture media has abandoned this story because it only seems to impact the poor.  Our American media are obsessed with advertisers and viewer ratings, so NBC anchor Brian Williams might end his nightly news program with a story about how dogs who are lost and found, but seldom with a story about how poor children are impacted by the stupid sequester.  

Most upsetting to me about this media oversight is that the solution to the stupid sequester cuts is amazingly easy - it's just a vote of the US Congress to lift it! It's easier than flushing a toilet.  But, Congressional Republicans (many of them self proclaimed pro-life Christians) won't budge on lifting the stupid sequester, just because they can.

It's fashionable in political circles to say the mandatory sequester budgets cuts haven't been the predicted disaster. Yet, cuts to programs like Head Start suggest otherwise.

The federal government's across-the-board sequestration cuts, which began taking effect in March, 2013, may seem like an overhyped piece of political theater--that is, unless you're an unemployed adult living in Michigan. There, roughly 82,000 people, like Kristina Feldotte of Saginaw, have watched their federal unemployment checks dwindle by 10.7 percent since late March. That's as much as a $150 per month from payments that, at most, clock in at $1,440.

"It flabbergasts me that our government can't get its crap together," says Feldotte, 47, a mother of four and a laid-off public-school teacher. "With the air-traffic controllers, Congress fixed that right away because it affected the planes going in and out of Washington.  But they're not doing anything that benefits the people."

That's especially true of poor people since Congress and the White House failed to reach a deal to undo the cuts in March. Air-traffic controllers and meat inspectors, represented by powerful unions and lobbyists, got reprieves. Agencies such as the Justice and Homeland Security departments found wiggle room in their budgets to stave off furloughs. But programs outside of D.C. for low-income or distressed people -- such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, or federal unemployment benefits -- have suffered as the cuts kicked in, leading to cancellations, fewer meals, smaller checks, and staff layoffs.

"The impacts of the sequester have been hard to document, but it really is a diminution (cut) of services," says Sharon Parrott, vice president for budget policy and economic opportunity at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Meals on Wheels:

Take the Meals on Wheels program in Contra Costa County, California, which, like the national program, cut 5.1 percent of its budget because of the stupid sequester. After losing $89,000 in federal funding over a six-month period, the program had to scale back the number of meals it serves from 1,500 to 1,300 a day. This puts its director in the unenviable position of having to choose which low-income or lonely 80-year-olds are less deserving of a meal delivery. "We're only adding new clients in the direst circumstances -- like they will die or be institutionalized if we don't get to them," says Paul Kraintz, director of the county's nutrition program.

The Head Start program in Rockland County, N.Y., made similarly tough choices. It managed to keep open its summer program for the youngest children, ages 1 to 3, but had to cancel the summer sessions for 3-to-5-year-olds and lay off 12 staff members to save roughly $240,000, says Ouida Foster Toutebon, executive director of Head Start Rockland. Like the national program, it will lose about 5 percent of its budget -- in this case, $414,925 -- by the end of the fiscal year, September 30. "The parents were upset, because they needed to make other arrangements," Toutebon says.

This was not the way sequestration was meant to go. 

The reductions were designed to be so painful -- to both defense and nondefense discretionary programs -- that Republicans and Democrats would flock to the negotiating table to find a compromise. Instead, the effects of sequestration have been uneven, with small pockets of intense upheaval rather than widespread but mild disruptions. Now, many Republicans openly profess their love of the cuts, especially since the fiscal-cliff deal did not seriously slash government spending or tweak entitlement programs, as the GOP had hoped it would. 

In their view, sequestration turned into the next best option for shrinking the federal government.

Democrats did manage to safeguard programs for the absolute neediest Americans. The sequester exempts a long list of safety-net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, Medicare benefits, and Social Security. But Democrats have not been able to protect cornerstone social programs such as Meals on Wheels or Head Start, nor have they been able to prod Republicans to undo the cuts -- especially now that the White House's many dire projections have yet to come true. Border Patrol agents did not get furloughed, airplanes were not grounded, and the mass layoff of teachers did not occur.

"I think people look at what the impacts will be with a grain of salt now," says Barry Anderson, a former official with the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget who was involved in crafting sequestration legislation in the 1990s. "A 5 percent cut just wasn't the end of the world that some people thought it would be." Yet, in addition to the cuts to low-income programs, the Defense Department started to furlough 650,000 civilian employees this week. The IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, OMB, and others have also begun furloughs.

If the cuts have not been felt equally, it's because many agencies found extra money in contingency accounts or ways to cuts costs without reducing their head counts. But that's not true of programs like Head Start and grant-recipients like Meals on Wheels that already run on shoestring budgets. Further, many federal workers (who had a median salary of $73,000 last year) are better equipped to absorb the financial shock of (at most) 11 furlough days than are government dependents who rely on weekly unemployment checks or struggle to find their next meal.

The story gets even more complicated next fiscal year. Appropriators will devise their own implementation, and they needn't make across-the-board cuts as long as they remove equal sums from defense and nondefense programs and stay under caps laid out in the Budget Control Act. Senate Democrats want to use this discretion to undo the sequester, while Republicans want to cut more discretionary spending and bolster defense.

Yet again, the two parties are on a budgetary collision course scheduled to erupt this fall. Until a broader -- and more politically powerful -- group of people feels the effects (like Congressmen who must fly home or collect a pay check for themselves), legislators may never marshal the political will to tweak or change the cuts.

Pitiful. Sad.  Necessary.  Selfish.  But, reversible.  If only the media would do some investigative reporting....if only.

Thank you Nancy Cook.