Quote:Roger Ailes' last wish before he died was for his allies to create a conservative network to the right of Fox News, Axios reported on Wednesday.  Ailes was reportedly upset with the more moderate tilt to Fox News under the leadership of Rupert Murdoch's two sons, James and Lachlan. Axios reported that in the days before his death, Ailes reached out to White House chief strategist Steve Bannon about teaming up to form a new conservative media machine in the mold of Fox News. Bannon reportedly had "no desire to leave the White House." Prior to assuming his position in the White House and on Trump's campaign, Bannon spearheaded the right-wing website Breitbart News.

Quote:American health care is complicated. This AHCA debate is complicated. Yet it’s these complicated details that determine the cost and quality of care for our bodies. So when nonpartisan analysts say that a bill will cause 23 million to lose insurance in 10 years and make costs skyrocket for older and poorer Americans, it should clarify our political opinions. But Fox News has taken advantage of television as a medium to try to convince its viewers that “23 million” is a partisan tool, not an evidence-based projection.

It’s basing its rhetoric on personality, on partisanship, on tribalism, and insisting that people trust them, not the mainstream media or the nonpartisan analysts who are desperate to take down Donald Trump. Let’s put it this way: When our satellites tell us a powerful hurricane is headed toward us, it’s irresponsible not to tell everyone to get out of the way. But convincing the people that the tools are malfunctioning, that the hurricane isn’t coming their way, that the rest of the news reports are wrong? That’s cruel.

Quote:President Donald Trump is promising billions to help Texas rebuild from Hurricane Harvey, but his Republican allies in the House are looking at cutting almost $1 billion from disaster accounts to help finance the president’s border wall. The pending reduction to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief account is part of a spending bill that the House is scheduled to consider next week when Congress returns from its August recess. The $876 million cut, part of the 1,305-page measure’s homeland security section, pays for roughly half the cost of Trump’s down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall. It seems sure that GOP leaders will move to reverse the disaster aid cut next week. The optics are politically bad and there’s only $2.3 billion remaining in disaster coffers.

Quote:In a Facebook post published Wednesday, Missouri Rep. Warren Love ® expressed hope that the people responsible for vandalizing a Confederate monument in Springfield National Cemetery will be found and lynched. “This is totally against the law,” Love wrote while sharing an article about how paint was thrown on a statute of Confederate Major General Sterling Price. “I hope they are found & hung from a tall free with a long rope.”

Quote:House Republicans are looking at cutting almost $1 billion from disaster accounts to help finance the president's border wall The $876 million cut would cover roughly half the cost of Trump's down payment on a U.S.-Mexico border wall About $2.3 billion would remain in disaster coffers

Quote:In 2014, one moderate Republican senator made a strong stand against the Tea Party, which he believed was pushing the GOP off a cliff. “Somebody, somewhere, had better up their game, because our country is going in the wrong direction. And if it’s not me, who’s it going to be?” That senator was Lindsey Graham, who went on to comfortably win re-election in the midterms that year.

Last week, that very same senator rolled out the Graham-Cassidy bill, the GOP’s last-ditch effort to repeal Obamacare. The legislation has been condemned as the most destructive repeal effort yet. It would eliminate Obamacare’s Medicaid expansions and subsidies, replacing them with state-run block grants. It would reverse the individual mandate, while those with pre-existing conditions would not be guaranteed coverage. Millions of people would lose their insurance, although the exact number remains unknown because the Senate is rushing ahead without time for a full CBO score.

The legislation is about as extreme as it gets, and not only because of the immense damage it would cause. It is also extreme in its nihilism, a bill that has no function, no reason to exist, except to fend off right-wing primary challengers who could pummel incumbents if they fail to vanquish that great partisan bogeyman, Obamacare. It is evidence that no legislator is immune to the pull of extremism in the modern GOP—certainly not Lindsey Graham.

Quote:Moore has long expressed deeply conservative and sometimes conspiracy-aligned beliefs on issues including homosexuality, race, Islam, and terrorism.

Along with Trump, Moore has consistently cast doubt on former President Barack Obama's US citizenship and promoted the "birther" conspiracy as recently as December 2016. In 2005, the former judge said that "homosexual conduct" should be illegal, calling it "immoral." Moore voiced the same position 10 years later. Moore has also acted on his virulently anti-gay beliefs. After he was reelected as chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Moore was again removed from the position in 2016 after he directed probate judges to enforce the state's ban on same-sex marriages despite the Supreme Court's decision to overturn it.

Last February, Moore suggested that the 9/11 terror attacks were a punishment from God for Americans' declining religiosity.  "Because you have despised His word and trust in perverseness and oppression, and say thereon ... therefore this iniquity will be to you as a breach ready to fall, swell out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instance,'" Moore said, quoting the Bible. He added, "Sounds a little bit like the Pentagon, whose breaking came suddenly at an instance, doesn't it?" He later claimed that God may be angry with the US because "we legitimize sodomy" and "legitimize abortion." "You know, we've suffered a lot in this country, maybe, just maybe, because we've distanced ourselves from the one that has it within his hands to heal this land," he said.

Moore called Islam a "false religion" in July in response to an Alabama resident's question about how he would deal with alleged Muslim influence on US law. Moore has fanned the flames of unsubstantiated concerns that Sharia law is influencing the rule of law in some American communities. Right-wing leaders and politicians have long claimed that Sharia law poses an "existential threat" to the United States, a position critics argue stokes Islamophobic sentiment. "There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country," Moore told a Vox reporter in August. Up in Illinois. Christian communities; I don't know if they may be Muslim communities."

Quote:White House chief of staff John Kelly reportedly told other members of the Trump administration that he would ideally admit between zero and one refugees into the US each year if the decision was up to him.
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Kelly made the comment while the administration debated lowering the cap on the number of refugees allowed into the country.

President Trump eventually decided to lower the refugee cap to 45,000, the lowest levels since the Reagan administration, when the Refugee Act was passed. Officials said at the time that this number represents the maximum number of refugees possible under the administration's new vetting standards.

Quote:Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is working hard to destroy hedge fund titan Paul Singer, according to a report from Axios. Bannon told President Donald Trump during a phone call Friday night that he was going "off the chain" to destroy Singer. Singer is a major Republican donor and the head of Elliott Management, a hedge fund with more than $30 billion in assets under management. This follows reports that a Singer-backed conservative website — The Washington Free Beacon — hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump. Since The Times' story broke, Bannon's Breitbart News has been attacking Singer, calling him a globalist and attacking politicians who have taken donations from Singer.

Quote:Maine voters approved a measure to expand Medicaid in the state by 59% to 41%. Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who has repeatedly blocked attempts to expand the program, said Wednesday he would not allow the measure to become law until the legislature determines that it would be paid for in full. The expansion would allow around 80,000 low-income Mainers access to health insurance.

Quote:Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore once ruled in a divorce case in the 1990s that a woman who had a lesbian affair was not permitted to see her children without supervision, CNN reported Thursday. In the decision, Moore — who served as a circuit judge before joining the state's Supreme Court — said the "minor children will be detrimentally affected" by the mother's "present lifestyle" and was eventually taken off the case, according to CNN's KFile.

Quote:GOP officials from Alabama have been offering startling and occasionally bizarre responses when asked by reporters about the allegations that Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for Alabama senator, had sexual encounters with underaged girls nearly 40 years ago. Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale contacted numerous GOP officials from the state, many of which either outright denied the claims, or accused the accusers of being Democratic operatives. "It was 40 years ago," Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall reportedly said to Dale. "I really don't see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She's not saying that anything happened other than they kissed." "There’s nothing wrong with a 30-year-old single male asking a 19-year-old, a 17-year-old, or a 16-year-old out on a date," Hall continued. According to The Post report, a woman named Leigh Corfman said that in 1979, Moore, then a 32-year-old district attorney, approached her in an Alabama courtroom and got her number. He later called the 14-year-old and drove her to his house, where, according to the report, he removed her clothes and touched her through her bra and underwear. Corfman also said that, in one interaction, Moore gave her alcohol. 

"It does not really surprise me," Alabama Mobile County GOP chairman John Skipper said. "I think it is a typical Democratic - Democrat - ploy to discredit Judge Moore, a sincere, honest, trustworthy individual." In one particularly strange instance, Alabama Covington County GOP Chairman William Blocker told Dale that he thought Democrats convinced the women in the report to lie about Moore. When Dale pointed out that Corfman was a Trump supporter, he said that's the "typical background" of someone Democrats would use for such a gambit.

Quote:Paul Reynolds, the Republican National Committeeman from Alabama, told The Hill that something about the timing of the accusation and the Post’s role breaking the story “doesn’t smell right.” “My gosh, it's The Washington Post. If I’ve got a choice of putting my welfare into the hands of Putin or The Washington Post, Putin wins every time,” he said.