Under pressure from the White House, it looks like Mitch McConnell and his Senate leadership team are pushing for a Trumpcare vote this month, before the July 4th congressional recess. White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short told reporters that that vote is definitely happening before the August recess so that the decks will be cleared for tax "reform" after Labor Day. Popular vote loser Donald Trump will be meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader McConnell Tuesday afternoon to discuss his legislative priorities, including Trumpcare.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen, or that the vote they force will pass.

Some Senate Republican aides and associates are already privately discussing how the GOP would craft its midterm campaign message if it fails to pass a health-care bill, suggesting they could tell voters they need to build a bigger majority to finally undo the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, as they have long promised.

There is also rising pessimism among rank-and-file Republican senators about the prospect of reaching consensus on legislation to make good on a signature campaign promise, highlighting the steep climb they face to securing the 50 votes they need to pass a it.

"I still think in the end there's a huge reason why we have to get to 50 on this," said Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) on Monday. He added: "Obviously, we're going to have a vote one way or the other, but if we don't pass something and we go into '18, you know, it's on us to try and get this fixed."

Donald Trump went to Saudi Arabia and he did it again: claimed credit for a YUGE deal that doesn’t exist and if it did exist, started during the Obama administration. Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has advised four presidents, writes that the $110 billion Saudi arms deal Trump keeps bragging is “a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts”:

An example is a proposal for sale of four frigates (called multi-mission surface combatant vessels) to the Royal Saudi navy. This proposal was first reported by the State Department in 2015. No contract has followed. The type of frigate is a derivative of a vessel that the U.S. Navy uses but the derivative doesn’t actually exist yet. Another piece is the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system (THAAD) which was recently deployed in South Korea. The Saudis have expressed interest in the system for several years but no contracts have been finalized. Obama approved the sale in principle at a summit at Camp David in 2015. Also on the wish list are 150 Black Hawk helicopters. Again, this is old news repackaged. What the Saudis and the administration did is put together a notional package of the Saudi wish list of possible deals and portray that as a deal. Even then the numbers don’t add up. It’s fake news.

So Trump “sold” the Saudis a boat that doesn’t exist that they’ve been talking about buying since 2015 and still haven’t signed a contract for. That’s some salesmanship right there! To put it another way, I’ve expressed interest in flying first class to Paris and staying at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, but neither Air France nor the Four Seasons can exactly count on my business in the near future.

There are other indications this deal isn’t a deal:

Moreover, it’s unlikely that the Saudis could pay for a $110 billion deal any longer, due to low oil prices and the two-plus years old war in Yemen. President Obama sold the kingdom $112 billion in weapons over eight years, most of which was a single, huge deal in 2012 negotiated by then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates. To get that deal through Congressional approval, Gates also negotiated a deal with Israel to compensate the Israelis and preserve their qualitative edge over their Arab neighbors. With the fall in oil prices, the Saudis have struggled to meet their payments since.

You will know the Trump deal is real when Israel begins to ask for a package to keep the Israeli Defense Forces’ qualitative edge preserved.

When Trump says he’s made a deal to save or create American jobs, always question it. Always. Either the deal will have nothing to do with him or it won’t exist. Or, as here, both.

Donald Trump has discovered the single source of all terrorism. A tiny spot that he can squelch with a few bombing runs—and it’ll be easy, because US bombers are already based there.

Qatar is a Connecticut-sized state that juts out into the Persian Gulf. It’s home to one of the largest US military bases in the Middle East, where 11,000 US military personnel launch strikes across the region. While on his World Embarrassment Tour, Donald Trump dropped in on the Emir and, according to the press pool report, made him a nice offer.

[Trump] said the two nations have "been friends now for a long time," and previewed the "very serious discussions" they would have. "One of the things that we will discuss is the purchase of lots of beautiful military equipment because nobody makes it like the United States. And for us that means jobs and it also means frankly great security back here, which we want."

He told the emir it was an honor to be with him. They shook hands but the emir did not speak.

Maybe it was the handshake. Maybe it was the not-speaking. Maybe it was the authoritative source that pointed Trump in the direction of Doha.

Follow Jen on Twitter at @JenSorensen

The suspicion that Mitch McConnell is going to follow the route to Trumpcare that Paul Ryan took—maximum secrecy and pressure on his members—is growing. The effort is facing serious obstacles and McConnell himself said he doesn't know "how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment" just before the Memorial Day recess.

All the public statements from Republican senators have been reflecting that they are working through this, trying to reach consensus. But it looks like behind the scenes, McConnell is pushing hard, even though supposedly there's not even a draft of a bill yet.

Some Senate Republicans hope to send their bill to the Congressional Budget Office by week’s end, allowing the nonpartisan CBO to begin work on estimating the bill’s cost and coverage details. Republicans’ goal is to vote on the legislation before July 4, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Senate Republicans have said their bill will diverge from a House-passed health bill, which would strike down much of the 2010 health law, often called Obamacare, and replace it with a new system of tax credits tied largely to age. The House bill would also cut $834 billion from Medicaid over a decade, a reduction that many Senate Republicans have said they cannot support.

One of the fiercest debates amid Senate Republicans is how to shape their own overhaul of Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor and disabled. The House bill would freeze funding for the ACA Medicaid expansion in 2020, gradually winding down the program in the 31 states that expanded eligibility. Some Republican senators involved in the negotiations are considering pushing that deadline out further.

No draft yet, but they think they can have something to send to the CBO by Friday of this week? That doesn't add up.

The rewards of embracing Donald Trump, even if you avoid getting chicken grease on your jacket, are fleeting.

Few Republicans were quicker to embrace President Trump’s campaign last year than Jeff Sessions, and his reward was one of the most prestigious jobs in America. But more than four months into his presidency, Mr. Trump has grown sour on Mr. Sessions, now his attorney general, blaming him for various troubles that have plagued the White House.

That ‘sourness’ was on full display Monday morning as Donald Trump addressed the Justice Department as if it were a foreign government—one that didn’t agree with Trump on how to handle his Muslim ban.

That was just one Tweet in a series where Trump shared what the Justice Department “should” do, which is apparently something he didn’t bother to pass along to Jefferson Sessions via a route other than a giant public rebuke.

In private, the president’s exasperation has been even sharper. He has intermittently fumed for months over Mr. Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election, according to people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal conversations. In Mr. Trump’s view, they said, it was that recusal that eventually led to the appointment of a special counsel who took over the investigation.

Among Trump’s superpowers is the ability to turn his biggest supporters into scapegoats and a willingness to sacrifice anyone if he feels it can give him a moments’ respite. Guess what, Jeff ...

Leading Off

● NC Redistricting: In a major victory for voting rights on Monday, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling issued last year that had struck down 28 of North Carolina's 170 state legislative districts on the grounds that Republicans had unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered these maps. These lines will now have to be redrawn, and new elections will be held under them, most likely next year or possibly even later this year. When that happens, Democrats could finally break the GOP's years-long veto-proof supermajorities in the legislature, which Republicans have used to run roughshod over democratic norms and impose a radical conservative agenda on an evenly divided swing state.​

​So why did the courts determine these lines were invalid? Republicans had taken seats like the 21st State Senate District in Fayetteville—the tentacular monstrosity shown in this map—that had a plurality of African-American voters and made them majority black. Republicans claimed that they were required to do so under the Voting Rights Act so that black voters could elect their candidates of choice, but that argument was entirely pretextual.

That's because black voters, even in plurality-black districts, were already able to elect their preferred candidates—typically, black Democrats. Republicans merely sought to pack as many black voters into as few seats as possible in order to make surrounding seats whiter. In the South in particular, blacks tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic while whites vote heavily for Republicans, so reducing the black population in these neighboring seats quite simply made it easier for the GOP to win them.

How come no one is hacking my alarm clock? That we can’t get done?

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Welcome to week 20 of Presidential Apprentice, and the 23rd round of the Donald Trump National Golf Tournament, David Waldman calls the shots: Is today the day Donald Trump finally became president? No, but it is about time to get alarmed. Greg Dworkin helps us figure out who the good guys are. Trump’s national security team thought he might be on someone’s side but his own. Of course they were wrong. Trump is on the stupid side, and stupid is winning. Trump doesn’t trust climate scientists, once he had a golf date rained out. The Associated Press doesn’t trust Trump to report the news. The Gop plan on you not trusting the media. What source is “official” anymore? Britain is not “under siege” or “reeling” and doesn’t need us to panic. Trump trails Obama by 55 points, so it is understandable to miss Barack now, but please don’t interview another poor Ohioan. Donald has caught Comey-mania early, but is unlikely to prevent its spread through executive privilege. Ivanka Trump’s lazy, disingenuous, shallow, self-involved political brand is still going strong. Armando thinks it’s a good time to invest in tar, feathers and rails to run Trump out on. One of the last legit places to give Donald Trump a loan, The Deutsche Bank, ignored a U.S. Trump/Russia query from the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. If you really need a reason to start panicking, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain are cutting ties to Qatar, and Qatar is deploying 1,000 ground troops to fight in Yemen. So, who wants Trump to mistrust Qatar? Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted. Coming up this week on KITM: An exploration into the myth of the kindly General Lee.  And—how the Trump-Russia data machine games Google to fool Americans. Now, you can’t google it to find out more, you need to tune into us!

(Thanks again to Scott Anderson for the show summary!)

Need more info on how to listen? Find it below the fold.

We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson’s excellent analysis of Donald Trump and his “out of control” presidency:

I know that is a radical thing to say about the elected leader of the United States, the most powerful individual in the world. And I know his unorthodox use of social media is thought by some, including the president himself, to be brilliant. But I don’t see political genius in the invective coming from Trump these days. I see an angry man lashing out at enemies real and imagined — a man dangerously overwhelmed. [...] We already knew that Trump had a narrow mind and a small heart. Now we must wonder about his emotional stability, his grasp of reality, or both.

Here’s the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s take:

This president risks inflicting serious damage to relations with America’s closest allies with his irresponsible, shoot-from-the-hip commentaries. His lawyers have asked Trump to stop, but he ignores them. [...] Conway’s own husband, lawyer George Conway, once a candidate to be Trump’s solicitor general, tweeted that Trump had made the job more difficult for his lawyers. “Sad,” he wrote.

It is sad. Trump is marching toward self-destruction. If his aides can’t stop him, perhaps they should get out of the way.

Robert Costa at The Washington Post says Trump’s antics are making Republicans uneasy:

Trump’s refusal to disengage from the daily storm of news — coming ahead of former FBI director James B. Comey’s highly anticipated public testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday — is both unsurprising and unsettling to many Republicans, who are already skittish about the questions they may confront in the aftermath of the hearing. In particular, they foresee Democratic accusations that Trump’s exchanges with Comey about the FBI probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign were an effort to obstruct justice. Some Republicans fear that Trump’s reactions will only worsen the potential damage.

Joseph Bullington grew up in the small town of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He recently spent more than a month living in and reporting on the Standing Rock resistance camps opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. At In These Times, he writes—Don’t Blame Montana Voters for Quist’s Loss: Blame the Frailty of Our Democracy. An excerpt:

 The Montana race has often been mentioned in the same breath as Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia—that is, as a referendum on a Trump-led Republican Party. But the comparison confuses more than it explains.

Ossoff, an outsider but centrist Democrat, is running just such a campaign: His slogan is, “Make Trump Furious.” This makes some sense in Georgia’s wealthy, suburban sixth congressional district, where usually dependable Republican voters were apparently not enthusiastic about Trump and his message of right-wing populism. After going for Romney by 23 points in 2012, the district went for Trump by only one and a half point.

Just the opposite is true in Montana’s at-large congressional district, which Obama lost by only two points in 2008 and Trump won by 21 points. It was no oversight that, at Quist’s rallies with Bernie Sanders in May, Trump’s name was barely mentioned. Instead of picking up the pieces of Hillary Clinton’s crashed campaign, the pair tried to articulate a left-Democratic platform that might fly in Montana: “You shouldn’t have to be a millionaire to hunt, fish and hike in our great outdoors, get a good education or be able to support your family,” states the campaign website.

The Quist campaign was not as much a campaign against Trump as it was a left attempt to reclaim populism from the Right. And so the Quist and Ossoff campaigns are more accurately seen not as cohorts in the Democratic resistance to Trump but as two sides in the internal battle to determine the shape of that resistance.

Quist was the underdog in both cases. Democratic PACs got into the race late, and when they did they spent less than $1 million. This is a lot of money. But two days before the Montana election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poured $2 million more into the Georgia race, pushing its total spending there to more than 10 times what it spent in Montana.

It is hard to say whether this spending gap results from big liberal donors’ antipathy to the left wing of the party, from the party’s misunderstanding of the rural West and consequent abdication of the region to the Republicans, or some of both. [...]

However, the more than $7 million in spending by outside groups, which made this the most money-infused house race the state has been subjected to since at least 1990, favored Gianforte 10 to 1.

In the face of that gap, Quist needed two things to win: a large voter turnout and media coverage of the race that could cut through the ads and help Montanans understand the stakes and where each candidate stood on key issues. Neither happened. [...]

[T]he unusual placement and reduced number of polling places presented an obstacle to increased turnout. After an expensive election in 2016, Montana’s rural counties were strapped for cash to run a special election and lobbied for a bill that would allow counties to run the election by mail-in ballot. Despite support from the elections offices in 46 out of 56 counties, Republican leadership fiercely opposed the bill. [...]

As a result, some counties had to cut election resources. For example, in Glacier, the rural county in northwest Montana where Quist is from and which contains the large and impoverished Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the number of polling places was reduced from seven to two. This might sound like a mere inconvenience until you consider the geography. The Blackfeet Nation comprises more than 2,300 square miles of land—about the size of the state of Delaware. Of the 10,400 people who live there, only 1,000 live in Browning—the only polling place on the reservation. And there is no public transportation.

As journalist Stephanie Woodard noted for In These Times in 2014, such structural barriers are part of a much larger problem. “American Indians are still working to obtain equal voting rights,” she observes. [...]

TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES

QUOTATION

“When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.” 
                    ~bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1999

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At on this date in 2010—Obama vows justice in address from the Gulf:

From the devastated shoreline of Grand Isle, Louisiana, armed with stories from local residents, President Obama used his weekly address this morning to bring passion and promises, not just to the Gulf region, but to the nation in some of his most powerful remarks to date about the BP disaster.

Every story he tells is an American story: of hard work and love of the sea and land, ravaged and despoiled by the carelessness of Big Business.

The president seems to be finding the path to his inner populist. And the results are impressive.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin helps take out the weekend trash. Trump tweet-flubs London response, doubles-down on travel ban. Armando stages an emergency Trump tweet intervention & sticks around to learn about the Qatar crisis. And Mercer’s gaming your Google.

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About seven years ago, singer/songwriter John Mayer gave a disastrous series of interviews where he talked about the life of a recording artist and all the women he was screwing, in the wake of being linked to an assortment of Hollywood starlets. At the time, Mayer was near the apex of his popularity, but the backlash from those interviews caused lasting damage to his public image. The most controversial of those interviews was with Playboy, where Mayer discussed an aversion to having sex with black women and used the N-word, claiming he had a “hood pass.” What followed after the interview was published was a lot of public condemnation and apologies.

Sometimes referred to as N-Word privileges, it‘s a fallacy white people have a tendency to fall into. They start thinking: “I’m liberal. I’m cool. I listen to hip-hop and have black friends who think I’m okay. Therefore, I can say anything I want and they’ll understand I don’t mean anything by it.” But that’s not exactly true. I know someone who dates a black man, and I was talking with her about the latest controversy in pop culture over the weekend. Her response was: “N*gga, please.” Now, she thinks she can talk that way because she’s having sex with a black guy, he doesn’t mind her saying it, and his friends don’t mind it either. But, as I’ve told her too many times, she’s gonna say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person one day, and they’re gonna set her straight on how they feel about that particular word coming out of her mouth.

The response to Bill Maher’s use of the N-word on his show has been heavy with criticism, leading to Maher apologizing for his actions, calls for Maher to be fired and Real Time to be cancelled, and with HBO calling Maher’s words “inexcusable” and vowing to censor the segment from both its streaming service and future broadcasts. Today, Sen. Al Franken, who knows a thing or two about comedy, canceled his appearance for this Friday because Maher’s comments had been “inappropriate and offensive.”  

Beyond arguments of whether or not racial epithets should ever be part of public discussion, the situation, like the Kathy Griffin controversy, leads into discussions of what exactly should be restrained in satire and comedy, especially given what’s happened before when Maher has said something controversial during a TV series which mixed humor and politics. But the past is prologue in this case in more than a few ways, since it’s also a situation where arguably context is king given some of Maher’s views about different ethnicities and religions, the general public perception of him as a smug asshole, as well as the overall imagery of watching two white men talk about “house n*ggas.” 

The week of March 26 wasn’t an extraordinarily busy one in GunFAIL terms. But it had an interesting mix of problems. Of course, there were all the usuals: 14 people who accidentally shot themselves, eight accidental gun fatalities, seven kids accidentally shot, five accidental shootings at or near the practice ranges (where “near” means someone missed their target & sent a stray into the neighborhood), four people who accidentally shot family members or significant others, and even two “defensive gun uses” that went wrong.

TSA agents at airports around the country discovered 71 guns “forgotten” in the carry-on luggage of passengers during the week of March 27-April 2. But TSA also made the news in Atlanta, where they were found to have missed one gun. The owner, finding it in her bag as she prepared to board at the gate, reported the gun to the authorities and was arrested. (Though she claimed to have a permit for the gun, issued in Alabama, she had neglected to take it with her. And then, I guess, promptly forgot she had the gun with her at all.) The Atlanta TSA screener who missed the gun was fired. No word on whether there was a TSA screener who initially missed the gun in Alabama, though. But I guess there was. We just don’t know who that was.

An unfortunate accidental gun death in Goetz, Wisconsin, gives us yet another opportunity to remind would-be cowboys that modern double-action handguns are not “safe” to spin on your finger. That trick you see in the movies is either just that—a movie trick—or is being performed with a single-action revolver. In other words, a gun that has to have the hammer cocked manually, and on which the trigger does nothing but release a cocked trigger. Guns like that shouldn’t fire when you spin them, no matter how hard you may hit the trigger, because the hammer isn’t cocked. That said, please don’t do this. There are a lot of people out there, and a lot of guns, and if enough of you do it, someone will screw it up and forget they’ve cocked the hammer, and accidentally shoot themselves while twirling a single-action revolver, and then we’ll have been wrong about something in a gun debate and will be forced under the Second Amendment to stop writing GunFAIL diaries. It’s a fact.

Other notable gun mishaps include a kindergarten teacher in Guns Everywhere Georgia, who merely did the unthinkable, thankfully, as opposed to the horrifically unthinkable. That is, she showed up at work drunk, with a gun in her purse, which she left under the desk in the classroom. But what she didn’t do was have her gun discovered by one of the students. So shut up, liberals! That totally won’t happen with armed teachers! Unless it does! In which case, Freedom! And also, “suck it,” snowflakes!

There was also some “good” GunFAIL, too. A racist would-be murderer accidentally shot himself when he tried to shoot a co-worker at the Desert Hot Springs, California Autozone store where they both worked. Rudy Arana allegedly brought a sawed-off shotgun to work and announced he was “there to kill a n----r.” Well, he didn’t. Instead, he shot himself in the “lower torso” when he pulled that shotgun out of his waistband, which is really no place to keep a shotgun, not that I want to counsel him in any fashion.

Finally, our title story, involving the “security” guard (and former Tulsa County “reserve deputy”) at a Tulsa, Oklahoma gun show who accidentally fired a gun he was handling, injuring a fellow officer also working “security” that day. Yes, reserve deputy Robert Bates was the one who accidentally shot and killed Eric Harris at contact range in 2015, somehow thinking he had drawn a Taser rather than a firearm. But you would have most recently seen Tulsa’s reserve deputies in GunFAIL in connection with a gun accident on February 23 of this year, when a former reservist’s gun “went off on its own accord” inside the the White River Fish Market restaurant in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Way to go, fellas! Good thing their training and certification methods are impeccable! Otherwise, you’d start to think that having this many accidents among them was due to some laxity in standards, or something!