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I do think we will see O'Reilly back on TV at some point, he's simply too popular for some network to not roll the dice. Might be a year from now, but CNN and MSNBC don't have a single show that even does half of what O'Reilly did at FOX, so I expect them to at least sniff around. I would also imagine this means Hannity slots into 8pm now, and ideally he's next to go at FOX. They've lost 3/4 of their primetime lineup in less than a year with Megyn Kelly and Greta already gone.
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"Think I'm gonna be the scapegoat for the whole damn machine? Sheeee......."
I do think we will see O'Reilly back on TV at some point, he's simply too popular for some network to not roll the dice. Might be a year from now, but CNN and MSNBC don't have a single show that even does half of what O'Reilly did at FOX, so I expect them to at least sniff around. I would also imagine this means Hannity slots into 8pm now, and ideally he's next to go at FOX. They've lost 3/4 of their primetime lineup in less than a year with Megyn Kelly and Greta already gone.
Maybe, but he's also almost 70 and also has a bunch of books that he "co-authored" (read, someone else wrote and he slapped his name on to boost sales). So perhaps he'll just be done.
Exxon has reportedly asked for a waiver from the Russia sanctions to work with Rosneft on a joint venture.
Which is just so brazen in the face of the Steele dossier allegations. It almost seems like it was put out there just for Trump to not approve it so that they could claim to not be in the back pocket of Russian oil interests.
Or, they roll it into negotiation of some peace deal in Syria... Russia backs off Syria a bit, in exchange the sanctions get lifted for Exxon/Rosneft, Trump claims he negotiated peace in the middle east, and Trump and whoever else got that 19% stake in Rosneft profits.
19% of Rosneft's market share is going to be in the neighbourhood of a $trillion USD. The whole thing is made even worse by the fact the Rex Tillerson (former head of Exxon until recently) is the Secretary of State and Russia has a crap ton of oil fields that can be only be explored using Exxon technology. He probably had a hand in engineering these deals/election and Tillerson/Trump will greatly profiting from just this one act while the US implodes on itself. How can anyone reading these not see at this point the Orange guy's presidency was bought and paid for from the start.
Count this as rumour-mongering at this point, but last week, Louise Mensch (significant because she broke the story of the FISA warrant, but she also has some pretty out-there conspiracy-theory stuff about Breitbart) said that Russia has Kompromat on Chaffetz, and now in a couple days he's gone to saying that he won't seek re-election to suggesting that he may not finish the term and may step down soon.
edit:
Alternate rumour is that he's considering a TV opportunity; wonder if any networks are looking for a Clinton-obsessed fake-outrage Republican to fill a timeslot?
Count this as rumour-mongering at this point, but last week, Louise Mensch (significant because she broke the story of the FISA warrant, but she also has some pretty out-there conspiracy-theory stuff about Breitbart) said that Russia has Kompromat on Chaffetz, and now in a couple days he's gone to saying that he won't seek re-election to suggesting that he may not finish the term and may step down soon.
edit:
Alternate rumour is that he's considering a TV opportunity; wonder if any networks are looking for a Clinton-obsessed fake-outrage Republican to fill a timeslot?
Analysis from Wapo on Nunes and Chaffetz having both stepped aside after being tasked with investigating Trump
Quote:
There are two House Republican chairmen tasked with possibly investigating President Trump. One of them — Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.) — messed it up so badly that he had to step aside. And now the other is retiring from Congress.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz's retirement announcement Wednesday came as a surprise. Talk quickly turned to whether it was because liberals successfully berated him at town hall meetings, whether he feared a well-funded opponent in 2018, and/or whether he was just trying to get a head start on the 2020 Utah governor's race.
The last of these makes complete sense, as The Fix's Amber Phillips notes. But the first feeds into an emerging reality of 2017: Trump is giving the people charged with investigating him fits.
Because Republicans are in the majority, those people happen to be fellow Republicans. And that's creating some impossible choices.
They were in an impossible position. They were supposed to put on a dog and pony show investigation and find nothing, but the corruption and collusion of the Trump team is so pervasive and sloppy that compelling evidence is being thrown at them from all sides and they can't find a reasonable way to ignore it all of it. The only thing left for them to do was get off the train tracks and keep their heads down in the hopes that people will forget about them because of how spectacular the crash will be.
If he is stepping aside because of a planned run for governor, I think that's an awful decision, because it does look a lot like dereliction of duty in his role as oversight committee chair, and Trump is not popular to begin with in Utah, as far as red states go. 2020 could end up being a referendum on how the GOP handled Trump at the national level, and he could end up being a lightning rod for that criticism even if he's only running at the state level. He might do better to at least look like he's trying to get to the bottom of the Russia scandal, then throw up his hands and resign when confronted with too much opposition from within his own party. Then, when it all blows up for the Republicans later, he can at least say he was on the side of trying to get to the bottom of things, not the side of covering it up.
If he is stepping aside because of a planned run for governor, I think that's an awful decision, because it does look a lot like dereliction of duty in his role as oversight committee chair, and Trump is not popular to begin with in Utah, as far as red states go. 2020 could end up being a referendum on how the GOP handled Trump at the national level, and he could end up being a lightning rod for that criticism even if he's only running at the state level. He might do better to at least look like he's trying to get to the bottom of the Russia scandal, then throw up his hands and resign when confronted with too much opposition from within his own party. Then, when it all blows up for the Republicans later, he can at least say he was on the side of trying to get to the bottom of things, not the side of covering it up.
That is only if you take his word at face value. I doubt he is going for Governor especially since he just announced he is considering leaving well ahead of his term being up. Him leaving and running for Governor and campaigning for a year makes sense only if he served out his term.
Quote:
After his announcement Wednesday that he will not seek re-election in 2018, Rep. Jason Chaffetz told Fox 13 he is considering leaving Congress before the end of his term.
“When I contemplate another 200 nights away from home, it is just too much,” Chaffetz told Fox 13 News Anchor Bob Evans.
Instead now he is saying he's going to quit potentially immediately. That really only leaves several options of why he is quitting early
Something big is going to happen soon on the Trump-Russia scandal and Chaffetz, while completely innocent of wrongdoing, thinks his prior decision to not investigate Trump was so politically toxic that he has to disappear from the national stage for awhile
There is evidence of some sort of wrongdoing, on his part, related to the Trump-Russia scandal and he is trying to evade the investigations by making himself a lower priority target
Chaffetz himself is completely compromised with some sort of Russian blackmail, as you suggest, that he is ending his career on his own terms before the Kompromat gets released
He is sick and tired dealing with anger from his constituents over the handling of the Trump-Russia scandal and other committee activities
Last edited by FlameOn; 04-20-2017 at 02:12 PM.
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So Republicans’ strategy, right now, is to replace a law that’s more popular than they are with a bill that was polling at 17 percent before it went down in flames. And their approach to doing that isn’t a new campaign where they persuade the public that the AHCA is a good idea, nor is it a new proposal that fixes the problems that made the old bill so unpopular.
Instead, it’s a backroom deal that changes the AHCA so it’s easier for insurance companies to charge sick people more for coverage. Is that really what Republicans think the public disliked about the original bill? That it made it too hard for insurers to turn away former cancer patients?
Quote:
The real problem Republicans face is how to write a bill that people actually like. One way to do that would be to write a bill that addresses their longstanding public criticisms of Obamacare: that it covers too few people, and that its insurance costs too much and has overly high deductibles and copays.
But Republicans want a bill that does the opposite — they want to cover fewer people with insurance that has higher copays and deductibles — and they have neither tried to persuade the public that their vision is correct nor come up with a way to resolve the tension. Instead, they’re spending their time endlessly tweaking the AHCA as a way to feel like they’re making progress on health care even while they ignore the chasm that has opened between them and the country.
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said this week he was amazed that a judge in Hawaii could block President Donald Trump's executive order halting immigration from several majority Muslim countries.
Sessions made the comments in an interview with "The Mark Levin Show" Tuesday evening that was put online Wednesday.
"We've got cases moving in the very, very liberal Ninth Circuit, who, they've been hostile to the order," Sessions said. "We won a case in Virginia recently that was a nicely-written order that just demolished, I thought, all the arguments that some of the other people have been making. We are confident that the President will prevail on appeal and particularly in the Supreme Court, if not the Ninth Circuit. So this is a huge matter. I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power."