It would appear Mitch McConnell, and the larger congress, just lit the fuse on “the big ugly“.  Winter is coming.

• President Trump has requested all Republican Senators to attend a White House luncheon, held entirely in their honor, tomorrow.  • President Trump has also announced a MAGA rally to be held in Youngstown Ohio, next week.   • Not coincidentally this rally announcement comes on the same day Ohio governor John Kasich writes an op-ed in the New York Times gleefully celebrating the defeat of the senate healthcare reform and  ObamaCare repeal. • HHS Secretary Tom Price is NOT HAPPY.
Oh yeah, the Big Ugly is coming.  President Trump is not a politician.

The failure of congress to pass Obamacare reform means the tax reform agenda for the middle class is now far less likely.  The UniParty Congress know this.  The UniParty Congress is doing the bidding of the lobbyists.
The escalating costs of ObamaCare, specifically because of the Medicaid expansion, means increased tax revenues are needed to pay for the program.  John Kasich, and his crew of like-minded governors (there are eleven) demand their state get more federal dollars.  This means more income tax revenues are needed.  This means no middle-class tax relief.
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Many years ago we accepted the UniParty.  Shortly thereafter CTH broke away from political identity framed around arguments of party and personality; we chose to focus on policy and outcomes.  Washington DC is a singular party, a UniParty. We have been explaining, countering and fighting “The Big Club” in DC for years; always following the money.
President Trump is the first political entity in our lifetime that not only comprehends the faces of the false arguments (the personalities of false choice and controlled opposition), but more importantly sees the architects behind the Potemkin villages represented by those faces. When it comes to domestic economic policy, the architects are the BIG CLUB.
So, what is “The Big Club“?  …What “Deep State” is to intelligence, military intervention and foreign policy – the “BIG CLUB” is to matters of domestic economics…
Politicians do not write laws. Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer do not sit in their offices writing out scripts of laws and legislation; no politician does. Politicians are the faces who sell legislation that unseen hands create. The Big Club represents the hands that actually create legislation; lobbyist hands.
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Various senators deliver remarks following the collapse of their ability to reform and replace ObamaCare with any alternative.  Beginning with the controlled opposition position of Rand Paul and continuing with Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP leadership (at 15:00 of video).

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What these insufferable politicians well understand is that any substantive tax reform will necessarily also be compromised by the flawed dynamics inside ObamaCare. That will have a negative downstream impact on any hope for economic growth. However, they are not stupid – they know this – that is their unified UniParty goal.
The increasing taxpayer costs to keep big government ObamaCare operational, for non-taxpaying medicaid recipients, means the middle-class is once again sacrificed at the altar of the Big Club.
American workers on the individual market will not only see increased insurance rates, but their income tax rates will also be higher as the need to subsidize the lower-income non-working group (medicaid) remains.
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President Donald Trump expresses strong “disappointment” in the GOP healthcare bill failure:

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As we have said since before last year, the senate will not vote on a ‘repeal only’ bill because: A.) repeal takes 60 votes, and B) there are not even 50 republican votes for a repeal.
Again, as we have said from the beginning, changing the senate rules to a 51 vote threshold for legislative passage is not workable because: A.) it takes 67 senators to agree to change the rule (eliminate the Byrd Rule), and B.) The senate doesn’t want to change the rules.
The GOP have never voted to repeal Obamacare because the GOP doesn’t want to repeal Obamacare.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced the senate version of the ObamaCare repeal and replace bill is no longer viable due to party conflicts.
Instead the Senate will vote on the House Bill with a primary Senate amendment for a full repeal of ObamaCare with a two year delay providing time to construct the replacement.

I’m not sure what McConnell’s strategy is here because a “repeal only” amendment on the bill would need 60 votes for passage.  It is beyond doubtful that eight democrats are going to vote for a “repeal only” bill.  Correction, I just noticed McConnell’s trickery, the 2015 bill was a defunding bill, not a repeal.  McConnell is just tricking people into thinking this was going in the direction of a repeal. It’s not.
The GOP have never, ever, voted for a repeal. That would take 60 votes. They voted in 2015 to defund it using the 51 vote threshold of ‘reconciliation’.  They’ve never once had a repeal vote on Obamacare.
Therefore, if this actually goes to a vote, this appears to be constructed simply as an exercise to prove a vote was taken.  ObamaCare remains and the implosion continues.  McConnell’s political calculation here is trickery.  Nothing more. O-Care remains.
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A strange and sketchy story out of Minnesota as a 40-year-old Australian woman named Justine Damond called police for a disturbance behind her home.  She met the police around 11:30pm in her pajamas.  While talking to the two responding officers one of them, Mohamed Noor, a 31-year-old officer from Somalia, shot and killed her.  Details sketchy.

(New York Post) […] Three sources with knowledge of the incident said that when they arrived, the officers pulled around back and were immediately confronted by Damond, who was in her pajamas.
As she attempted to speak to the cop in the driver’s seat, the other officer apparently unholstered his gun and started blasting — striking her through the driver’s-side door, the sources said.

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President Trump created a stir amid his political opposition when he was reported to have told French first-lady Brigitte Macron: “you’re in such great shape“.   Apparently, according to the ever-pliable rules of the virtue signaling political left, it is “sexist” to compliment a woman on her physical appearance.
Of course it didn’t take more than a news cycle for yet another corporate entity to jump head-first into the opportunity to attach their own brand-image to anti-Trumpism.  [Adidas is the parent company of Reebok]  The hypocrisy behind this opportunistic marketing endeavor/virtue-signaling is stunning.  Here’s the tweet from Reebok:

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As you can see, Adidas/Reebok have made a political decision.  Virtue signaling your superiority in defining what is/isn’t appropriate is never a good look.
You would think the loss of brand value for companies who previously did this (Macys, Starbucks etc) would be enough to stop any reasonable corporate marketing head with a fiduciary responsibility. Alas, the allure of scoring cheap political points finds another victim.
However, when contrast against the actual marketing image of Reebok, the outcome is even worse. (more…)

CTH made a statement last year, and repeated again earlier this year: against the backdrop of mountains of evidence showcasing the absolute verifiable manipulative intention of media polling it provides no value to continually deconstruct their ideological efforts.
Seriously, any media outfit that does not present raw data, honest transparency, and accurate methodology should just be ignored.  Accept the intents and purposes of the construct the same way you would accept the opinion punditry of the hosts presenting it.
Today’s Washington Post / ABC poll is no different.  Actually it’s yet another prime example of a case study in creative narrative engineering and complete “gaslighting” to advance a political and ideological agenda. PERIOD.
Here’s the basis of their own methodology.  That is – who they say they polled to generate what they’re selling:
Here’s the actual national party affiliation as reported by state election registrars and validated by independent confirmation of Gallup.  As of June 2017:

Republicans 26%, Independents 42%, Democrats 30%. (verify here)

The process of oversampling the group that will give media pollsters the outcome desired is as old as the history of polling itself.  [There’s buckets of examples below]
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Watching the national U.S. media push the Russia, Russia, Russia: “Planet Earth Taken Over by Russians” conspiracy, reminded us of August 25th 2016 when the Hillary Clinton campaign first unveiled the theory. –Reminder Here–  It’s not necessarily a new gig; they’ve actually been beating this horse for eleven months.
Earlier today, Nigel Farage Discusses:

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This evening with Judge Jeanine Pirro, Dr. Sebastian Gorka Discusses:
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Last week former President Obama’s classmate, Hawaii Judge Derrick Watson, once again blocked the implementation of the travel and visa restrictions put into place by President Trump and the Department of Homeland Security.
At the heart of the matter activist Judge Watson is demanding that Homeland Security permit as many foreign terrorists as possible be granted entry into the U.S.  According to the world-view that all occupants of planet earth are inherently future citizens of the United States, Judge Watson claims everyone should be allowed entry into the U.S. regardless of national security concerns.
It should be noted that Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, and other GCC nations have initiated a total Muslim travel ban with Qatar…. meanwhile a U.S. judge frames the limited scope of President Trump’s ‘temporary travel restrictions‘ as overreach. Go figure.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court has asked the State of Hawaii to respond by Tuesday at noon to President Donald Trump’s motion to block a judge’s ruling that prevented his travel ban from being applied to grandparents of U.S. citizens and refugees already being processed by resettlement agencies, the court’s public information office said on Saturday.

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