Courtesy of 5 Minute Activism
- After their hasty, partisan votes to pass Donald’s RepubliCare health care plan that will leave millions without coverage, America made its disgust with the GOP clear. Idaho rep Raul Labrador (R) was roundly booed at a town hall by constituents after ludicrously declaring “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.” Iowa rep Rod Blum (R) returned home during the House recess to face tough questions from local media–which he literally fled from mid-interview, on camera–and then fled from his constituents. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia (R) faced an angry crowd of 700 constituents as he attempted to justify his vote for the GOP’s RepubliCare. Rep Tom MacArthur (R–NJ) faced an angry group of constituents after proposing the amendment that brought the failed health care bill back to life. The GOP is seeing more and more that the resistance isn’t going away–and in fact is only getting stronger.
- In an increasingly rare victory for climate change regulation, the Senate thinly defeated a proposal to revoke Obama admin rules limiting harmful methane emissions from oil and gas production on federal lands.
- Sally Yates’s testimony created some land mines for Donald–like why he waited 18 days after she warned the White House that its national security director was compromised and vulnerable to blackmail. Yates magnificently ate for lunch their weak defenses–notably from Texan senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn–at her Senate hearing.
- A former George W. Bush White House ethics adviser has denounced a pay-for-play visa program (offering visas to foreign investors to raise $150 million for a Kushner & Co. luxury high-rise apartment building in New Jersey) hawked by family members of Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, using his close connection to the president, as “corruption, pure and simple.” Lawmakers are calling it a major conflict of interest and breach of ethics, which resulted in the Kushner family dropping out of another such upcoming huckstering.
- John Oliver broke the FCC–again. In 2014 he spurred 4 million comments and crashed the FCC Web site the last time there was an attack on net neutrality–when he asked viewers of his show to leave comments there again now that the FCC is reconsidering net neutrality rules passed in 2015, which require Internet service providers to treat all legal content equally. Comments once again soared and the site went down–though the FCC is blaming an external attack on their servers rather than the more likely explanation that America is swamping them with resistance.
- The ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee has put a hold on Donald’s nomination for Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence until the Treasury Department provides “any information that relates to financial connections between Russia and President Trump and his associates” to the Senate Intelligence Committee and Senate Finance Committee.
- A civilized, cultured country smacked down the extremist, racist, xenophobic isolationist populist candidate trying to co-opt its politics. Don’t you wish it had been us? But vive la France–Marine Le Pen’s populist far-right nationalist National Front party isn’t dead, but it took a serious blow when France voted 66-33% against her hate-fueled ideology and voted in Emmanuel Macron.
- Donald’s already tanking approval ratings are at their lowest point yet–a stunningly low 35%. Here’s a fun article with a full breakdown, including enjoyably abysmal rankings among Americans for his honesty, levelheadedness, treatment of the media, and other fun facts.