“When I ran for office, I said he is a chaos candidate and would be a chaos president. Unfortunately, so far chaos organizes the presidency right now.”
— Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), telling the Miami Herald that she isn’t going to vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton for president, but she has no plans to vote for a third party candidate.
Conservatism is temporarily dead. I mean, if you look at it, we have two candidates. Donald Trump is barely a Republican. He’s certainly not a conservative.
Trump, you know, to his credit was very smart at exploiting these kind of opportunities. He’s a master at understanding how the media works – more than anybody I’ve seen in politics. Kudos to him for, you know, kind of creating the environment and then manipulating the environment to his effect. The tragedy of this though, is that there isn’t going to be a wall built. And Mexico’s not going to pay for it. And there’s not going to be a ban on Muslims. None of that is – this is all like an alternative universe that he created. The reality is, that’s not going to happen. And people are going to be deeply frustrated and the divides will grow in our country.
— Jeb Bush, telling NBC News that voters are going to “feel betrayed” by Donald Trump if he wins the election.
It had to be hard for Gov. Rick Scott (GOP-TEA) to ask Pres. Obama to declare a disaster in Orlando worthy of federal funding. After all, Scott’s request for all American taxpayers to cover the bill for the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub flies in the face of everything that tea partyers hold dear. As they say, they are Taxed Enough Already.
“I urge you to declare an emergency under the Stafford Act so that ‘the full resources of the federal government’ can be made available for the individuals, families and communities impacted by this ‘horrific massacre,’” Scott wrote.
Scott has gotten his response. We can save you some time and tell you the answer was, “No.” But reading the full letter from FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate is just too much fun, so here it is.
Jeb Bush came out of Loserland to endorse Toxic Ted Cruz,
And Li’l Marco Rubio just bristled and pouted at the news.
From down in Florida,
South of the I-4 Corridor,
Jeb explained: “I always knew that Marco Rubio would lose.”
“President Trump weighed in at 243 pounds during his physical last week, an increase of four pounds from last year,” USA Today reports. At Trump’s reported height of 6 feet 3 inches, his weight would give him a body mass index of 30.4, just over the line of obesity. “The administration released the report in the midst of a busy news cycle, just minutes after officials announced that Trump would declare a ‘national emergency’ at the border in a bid to obtain funding for a border wall.”
A new Fox News poll finds that nearly half of Republicans, 45%, believe that God wanted Donald Trump to be president, with another 18% indicating that they weren’t sure. “More than half of white evangelical Protestants — 55% — said that God endorsed Trump. Only 3 in 10 evangelicals said categorically that they didn’t think Trump had God’s explicit support in the election.”
“The House voted on Wednesday to end American military assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, a defiant and rare move to curtail presidential war powers that underscored anger with President Trump’s unflagging support for Saudi Arabia even after the killing of a Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi,” the New York Times reports. “The 248-177 vote, condemning a nearly four-year conflict in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians and inflicted a devastating famine, will pressure the Republican-controlled Senate to respond.”
“A super PAC closely linked to Paul Manafort is facing questions about why it failed to report a $1 million contribution received just before the 2016 presidential election,” TPM reports. “In a Tuesday letter, the Federal Election Commission asked the Rebuilding America Now PAC for more information about the contribution, which the PAC first disclosed in an amended report in November 2018—some two years after the fact. The FEC letter raises new questions about the murky financial operations of the PAC, which was operated by two Manafort deputies.”
A new Gallup survey finds President Trump’s job approval rating has risen to 44% after the conclusion of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. His current approval is just one percentage point shy of his personal best, achieved twice in his presidency.
It’s the universe’s most coveted endorsement,
And it carries the clout of the firmament.
Almost half of Republicans
And more evangelical Christians
Believe God wanted Donald Trump to be president.
“The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and for me… If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”
— Wyoming state Sen. Lynn Hutchings (R), quoted by the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, arguing that without the death penalty Jesus Christ would not have been able to die to resolve the sins of mankind.
“I always have plan B and C and D and E and F. I have great flexibility. I probably have more flexibility than any man that’s ever been in this office.”
“I learned from people impacted by my words. When will you?”
— Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), responding to President Trump’s call for her resignation by accusing him of having “trafficked in hate your whole life” and questioning when he would learn from his experiences, as Omar said she has, the Washington Post reports.
“In hindsight, the shutdown didn’t help us. You have to ignore reality to say anything different. It didn’t help us. The deal we ended up with now is worse than we had before the shutdown.”
— Rep. Chris Stewart (R-UT), in an interview on CNN.