Paul Ryan got down on one knee in unsuccessful bid to woo conservative Rep’s vote on healthcare bill



http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/paul-ryan-got-down-on-one-knee-in-unsuccessful-bid-to-woo-conservative-reps-vote-on-healthcare-bill/

During negotiations with stubborn members of the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) got down on one knee like a suitor asking for 83-year-old Alaska Rep. Don Young (R)’s hand in marriage when he asked him to vote for the party’s healthcare bill.

Sadly for Ryan, the Washington Post said, it wasn’t enough to convince Young — the longest-serving Republican in Congress — who never agreed to vote for the bill.

The somewhat silly scene represents the lengths that the normally staid Speaker was willing to go to in an attempt to whip up votes for the doomed bill, which the White House and GOP withdrew in the 11th hour on Friday.

White House staff and members of the GOP are reportedly angry and looking for someone to blame as we enter the 9th week of the Trump presidency.

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/846112245797007360



An image of Pres. Donald Trump playing golf over the weekend in Virginia (Twitter.com)

Fox News gets brutally mocked for ‘News Alert’ that Trump spent weekend ‘working from the White House’

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/fox-news-gets-brutally-mocked-for-news-alert-that-trump-spent-weekend-working-from-the-white-house/

On Sunday afternoon, Pres. Donald Trump’s favorite network, Fox News, got mocked online for sending out a “News Alert” that the president spent the weekend “working from the White House.”

“Many pointed out that Trump had traveled twice to the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia over the weekend. He was at the Virginia golf club on Saturday for meetings, and then again on Sunday for about an hour, during which he conducted three short meetings, according to pool reports,” TheHill.com said. “Sunday’s trip marked the president’s 13th visit to a golf course since taking office, though pool reports do not indicate he played this weekend.”

https://twitter.com/ErickFernandez/status/846131524894425088

Saturday’s stops marked the eighth weekend in a row — out of the 10 weekends he has been in office — that Mr. Trump has visited a Trump-branded property, including his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. White House officials have said Mr. Trump goes to his clubs and restaurants because he is comfortable there, but critics increasingly argue that the visits are priceless advertising and that Mr. Trump and his family are using the presidency as a way to enrich themselves.

“It is normal for presidents to get out — and it can be a boost for small businesses across the city and the country,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit group. “But with President Trump, he spends his down time as a walking advertisement for his businesses. It is a major departure from historic norm and degradation of the office.”

Eric Trump, in an interview this month, disputed any suggestion that his father’s visits to family properties represented a conflict of interest. But he agreed that the Trump Organization’s assets — from Mar-a-Lago, where interest in memberships has surged, to its golf courses — were doing well.

“The stars have all aligned,” said Eric Trump, who as executive vice president of the Trump Organization oversees its 16 owned or operated golf courses around the world. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/donald-trump-brand-properties.html?_r=0

Utah will soon have the toughest DUI law in the U.S.

Gov. Gary Herbert signed legislation Thursday that will lower the legal blood alcohol level from .08 to .05 for drivers.

To put that into perspective, a 160-pound man could blow a .05 after drinking two beers. And a 120-pound woman would be pretty close to the legal limit after just one drink.

Before signing the law, Herbert told reporters he believes it will help keep dangerous drivers off Utah's roads and prevent drunken driving accidents.

http://www.ktnv.com/newsy/utahs-governor-just-signed-the-toughest-dui-law-in-the-us

Steve Bannon recruited Jeff Sessions to run as anti-immigrant candidate before backing Trump



http://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/steve-bannon-recruited-jeff-sessions-to-run-as-anti-immigrant-candidate-before-backing-trump-report/

According to a report in New York Times Magazine, in 2013 Bannon invited Sessions and his close aide, Stephen Miller, to his D.C. townhouse for dinner and to talk politics.

Bannon had become intrigued by an article he read at Real Clear Politics, entitled, “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” that attributed Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama to the fact that whites who voted in the 2008 election stayed away in droves in 2012. According to author Sean Trende, those white voters disliked Obama but also were put off by Romney’s wealth and elitism.

According Bannon, those voters could be brought back to the polls by playing on both anger at jobs disappearing overseas and by scapegoating immigrants to the U.S. who were accused of stealing jobs from Americans.

According to the New York Times article, the dinner with Sessions was no fluke after the Alabama Senator made the case to his colleagues that the GOP should give up chasing after Latino votes and instead emphasize reducing the number of immigrants coming into the country and beefing up border security as a way to save working-class jobs.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/watch-donald-trump-trash-paul-ryan

In July 2011, Trump granted a long interview to conservative advocate Erick Erickson, in which he repeatedly blasted Ryan as a misguided ninny. At the time, Ryan was chair of the House budget committee, and a few months earlier he had issued a major plan to radically overhaul the federal budget. It called for slashing trillions of dollars from social programs for middle- and low-income Americans (while preserving tax breaks for the wealthy) and for essentially privatizing Medicare. It also urged reshaping Medicaid in a way that would likely reduce benefits for the poor. In his typically harsh manner, Trump accused Ryan of leading Republicans to ruin with this draconian proposal. "What he just did is destroyed the Republican Party," Trump complained to Erickson.

Trump insisted that it was boneheaded for Ryan to start budget negotiations with President Barack Obama with a plan that targeted Medicare:



Trump called the Ryan plan "political suicide for the Republican Party" and asserted that GOPers should disavow it. He insisted that the long-term financing problems of Medicare could be addressed by dealing with the "tremendous" waste and fraud in the program. And he kept smacking Ryan: "I don't know him, he seems like a nice guy, who cares. I'd rather have him not be a nice guy. But be a smart guy. I can tell you this: He's a bad poker player, and he's a bad chess player."