Well it seems that 65% of U.S. residents would rather see a special prosecutor handle the "Russian Connection" investigation, while 32% think Congress is capable of handling it.

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/06/politics/trump-approval-rating-russia-poll/index.html

Cheers.

46 maybe closer than you think,

http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/with-friends-like-these-how-republicans-could-destroy-donald-trumps-agenda/news-story/63c363041a9339f092b3107b2bec0225.

Cheers.

McDonald's investigating after official account tweets insult at Trump

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#resist

If the topic is f--- up, then I agree with you.

Trump is going to make us all hungry and poor ...
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/

Arnulfo Solorio’s desperate mission to recruit farmworkers for the Napa Valley took him far from the pastoral vineyards to a raggedy parking lot in Stockton, in the heart of the Central Valley.

Carrying a fat stack of business cards for his company, Silverado Farming, Solorio approached one prospect, a man with only his bottom set of teeth. He told Solorio that farm work in Stockton pays $11 to $12 an hour. Solorio countered: “Look, we are paying $14.50 now, but we are going up to $16.” The man nodded skeptically.

Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Time was short: He needed to find 100 workers to fill his ranks by April 1, when grapevines begin to grow and need constant attention.

Solorio is one of a growing number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow of labor began drying up when President Obama tightened the border. Now President Trump is promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall on the southern border.

That has made California farms a proving ground for the Trump team’s theory that by cutting off the flow of immigrants they will free up more jobs for American-born workers and push up their wages.

So far, the results aren’t encouraging for farmers or domestic workers.

Farmers are being forced to make difficult choices about whether to abandon some of the state’s hallmark fruits and vegetables, move operations abroad, import workers under a special visa or replace them altogether with machines.

Some farmers are even giving laborers benefits normally reserved for white-collar professionals, like 401(k) plans, health insurance, subsidized housing and profit-sharing bonuses. Full-timers at Silverado Farming, for example, get most of those sweeteners, plus 10 paid vacation days, eight paid holidays, and can earn their hourly rate to take English classes.

But the raises and new perks have not tempted native-born Americans to leave their day jobs for the fields. Nine in 10 agriculture workers in California are still foreign born, and more than half are undocumented, according to a federal survey.

Growers who can’t raise wages are losing their employees and dealing with it by mechanizing, downsizing or switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Jeff Klein is doing all of the above. Last year Klein, a fourth-generation Stockton farmer, ran a mental ledger, trying to sort out the pros and cons of persevering in the wine business or quitting. He couldn’t make the math work.

Wineries pay Klein a tiny fraction of what they pony up for the same grape variety grown in Napa, and the rising cost of labor meant he was losing money on his vineyards. So in October, Klein decided to rip out 113,000 Chardonnay grapevines that once blanketed land his family has owned for decades. Now they lay heaped into hundreds of piles, waiting to be taken to the dump.

Five years ago, Klein had a crew of 100 workers pruning, tying and suckering his grapevines. Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.

Last year he could barely get together 45 laborers, and his grapes sold for only $350 per ton. Klein knew his vines were done for when California passed laws raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2023 and requiring overtime for field laborers.

“There’s not enough guys, and everybody is fighting for everybody else’s guys,” he says. “In Napa and Sonoma, they’re getting $2,000 a ton [for grapes]. So, those guys can afford to pay $15. For me, I’m just trying to break even.”

Although Trump earned Klein’s vote, he worries that recent executive orders ratcheting up deportation plans and calling for a wall are putting a chokehold on an already tight pool of workers.

“That’s killing our labor force,” says the 35-year-old grower.

According to the economic theory behind Trump’s immigration crackdown, Americans should be following Martinez’s van into the fields.

“The law of supply and demand doesn’t stop being true just because you’re talking about people,” says George Borjas, a Harvard economist and prominent foe of unfettered immigration. “[Farmers] have had an almost endless supply of low-skill workers for a long time, and now they are finding it difficult to transition to a situation where they don’t.”

Borjas believes the ones who reap the rewards of immigration are employers — not just farmers, but restaurant owners and well-to-do homeowners who hire landscapers and housekeepers. The people who suffer most are American workers, who contend with more competition for jobs and lower pay.

But Silverado, the farm labor contracting company in Napa, has never had a white, American-born person take an entry-level gig, even after the company increased hourly wages to $4 above the minimum. And Silverado is far from unique.

Brad Goehring, a fourth-generation farmer, is re-engineering his vineyards so they can be harvested entirely by machines.

The 52-year-old owns 500 acres of wine grapes in Lodi, near Stockton. He tends another 10,000 or so acres of vineyards that belong to several clients across Northern California.

Being the boss used to be fun for Goehring, but his labor problems are wearying.

In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state’s job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

“We’ve never had one come back after lunch,” he says.

---

Charlotte, North Carolina construction industry suffering, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/17/undocumented-immigrants-charlotte-north-carolina-construction

The influx of immigrants to Charlotte began after Bank of America moved its headquarters to the city in 1992. The corporation hired a Houston-based company to build the corporate office, but had to recruit construction workers from Texas because there weren’t enough local blue-collar workers to get the job done. News of the need for workers penetrated the Latino community on both sides of the border, and local immigration rates soared.

From 2000 to 2015, the Latino proportion of the city’s population grew from 7.4% to 13.5%. The city’s foreign-born population also nearly doubled in that time.

In a survey this year of 1,281 contractors, only 13% said their firm had “no trouble” filling salaried and hourly positions, according to AGC. And 75% of the respondents did not expect this to be alleviated anytime soon, saying that it would continue to be hard, or become harder, “to find and hire” qualified construction workers in the next 12 months

No immigrants, construction will at best be delayed.
edit] also the NC farms, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/15/north-carolina-needed-6500-farm-workers-only-7-americans-stuck-it-out/?utm_term=.c346b52afecc

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Rump sure has a mandate
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/14/470394134/gaming-association-boasts-more-ncaa-brackets-than-votes-for-next-president

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Its bad when the outside can see the cracks and fissures ...
http://www.dw.com/en/what-a-health-care-bills-failure-could-mean-for-the-trump-presidency/a-38122193

The withdrawal of a bill dismantling Obama-era health policy could signal broader fissures within the GOP. Its defeat in the Republican-controlled House is the latest setback threatening tRump’s presidency.

For years, Donald tRump's trademark salesmanship has succeeded in boardrooms, on the set of reality television and most recently on the presidential campaign trail. In the US legislature this week, however, it failed him.

On Friday, the president told House Speaker Paul Ryan to withdraw a Republican health care reform bill moments before a vote was due to take place. The American Health Care Act (AHCA), drafted by House Republican leaders, was the latest attempt to dismantle Former President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act., known as Obamacare.

Ryan pulled the tRump administration's repeal and replace bill after it failed to gather enough support in the majority Republican House.

"We're going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future," the speaker said.

While tRump blamed Democrats for failing to support the bill, he also seemed to acknowledge the role his own inexperience played in the defeat.

"We learned a lot about loyalty,” the president said after the bill was withdrawn. "We learned a lot about the vote-getting process.”

Earlier in the week tRump issued an ultimatum to House Republicans to either vote for the plan, or live with Obamacare. In the process of courting hard-line conservatives opposed to the bill, he alienated moderate Republicans who initially supported it.

Stuart Diamond, a professor who teaches negotiation at the University of Pennsylvania, said tRump’s coercive tactics backfired.

"Threats don't work in general," he said. "They cause damage to relationships. They definitely don't work in a situation with a lot of different stakeholders, where the power is distributed."

The White House is now preparing to steamroll ahead with the next item on its agenda: overhauling the US tax code.

The Washington Post cited almost 50 representatives wary of voting for the AHCA, while The Hill's whip list said 36 Republicans would unequivocally vote no. The lists included veteran members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus; those associated with the more centrist Tuesday Group, and representatives from districts where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won in last year's presidential election.

This unlikely coalition of ideologically and geographically diverse Republican members of Congress is what forced House leaders to pull the bill.

President tRump is leading a very rare, unified government that controls the House, the Senate, and the White House. That Republicans could not reach consensus on health policy beyond just disliking Obamacare after seven years may say more about the party's fractures than the country's health care legislation.

---

It says much more about modern politics than just one party's fractions. :-(

First he divided his nation, now he has divided his political party, what will he divide next?

Cheers.

First he divided his nation, now he has divided his political party, what will he divide next?

Cheers.

They were divided long before he showed up, I left that party over 25 years ago.

---

First he divided his nation, now he has divided his political party, what will he divide next?

Cheers.

They were divided long before he showed up, I left that party over 25 years ago.

Yes they were, but they're even more so now. ;-)

Cheers.

Now even the insiders admit there is no more republican party.
http://luxlibertas.com/bad-excuses-for-republican-fratricide/
Karl Rove wrote:

It has become a tired, familiar act. Members of the House Freedom Caucus say they are the only true conservatives, while other congressional Republicans are RINOs, “Republicans in Name Only.”
...
These are good changes, but they hardly justify denouncing the bill as “ObamaCare Lite.” That falsehood was meant to increase the Freedom Caucus’s leverage and pump up its allies’ fundraising—both at the expense of other Republicans.
...
But other Republicans don’t see the Freedom Caucus as helpful in getting anything important over any finish line.

The only lines crossed during this debacle were breached by the Freedom Caucusers, who committed political libel against their Republican colleagues, stopped the legislative process dead in its tracks, and saved ObamaCare. Congratulations.

---

Isn't this Great?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BSSNAoMAci3/
Yes. Women are very good at arranging flowers and making coffee...
And standing by her husband of course.

Keep making jokes.

Methinks the backlash from this presidential election could be <in Trumps voice>"huge"...

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#resist

So have we worked out yet who #46 will be?

If not then it's time to get someone as their time is coming up fast. ;-)

Cheers.

The way things are starting to go it may be Pence by this time next year, trading a dishonest traitor for a religious ideologue.

---

So have we worked out yet who #46 will be?
If not then it's time to get someone as their time is coming up fast. ;-)
Cheers.

If Trump has to resign during his term doesn't that mean that VP Mike Pence will take the helm?
Is that better?
I don't like men with brown lipstick...

The way things are starting to go it may be Pence by this time next year, trading a dishonest traitor for a religious ideologue.

Better get #47 ready then.

Cheers.