Reddit Politics Summary Friday Dec 29th 17

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This is a digest of the top posts on reddit/r/politics over the last 24 hours.
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Trump fires all members of HIV/AIDS council without explanation

(36743) (comments)

• At PACHA’s last meeting in August, the Council urged the Administration to affirm the National HIV/AIDS Strategy through 2020.
• "It is fully understandable why a president would not want people who oppose his policies and might be happy to see him impeached serving as his HIV advisors. "Now they need to find bonafide community people with appropriate expertise and the ability to adapt to the changed political circumstances," Driscoll said.
• "It is common for appointees to be terminated and for folks to kind of want their own people in," Maldonado said.

Donald Trump still ‘definitely involved’ in business empire despite US President' s assurances, says senior employee

(21096) (comments)

Trump’s ‘No collusion!’ cry is getting increasingly desperate

(6087) (comments)

• As we’ve almost come to expect by now, when Trump speaks at length without a script, he skitters back and forth along the line that divides the comical from the terrifying, telling one obvious lie after another, making endless digressions that devolve into incomprehensible word salad, and generally sounding like someone with only the most tenuous grip on his faculties.
• And Trump’s claim that Democrats were the ones colluding with Russia is simply nonsensical, likely plucked from an attempt Republicans and the conservative media made a couple of months ago to execute an "I know you are but what am I" strategy on this scandal that was so ludicrous it isn’t worth revisiting in any detail .
• This is one of those moments when you are reminded that the president has the majestic resources of the U.S. government at his disposal, yet prefers to learn the truth of what’s going on in the world from the trio manning the couch on "Fox & Friends." So perhaps it’s unsurprising that he thinks he can convince America of his innocence by merely repeating the words "There was no collusion" again and again.

There must be consequences in the partisan crusade against Mueller

(5306) (comments)

• Mueller, in contrast to Starr, of course, is a man who was seemingly designed in a lab to assuage any legitimate concerns about his impartiality or qualifications.
• Yet, now that Mueller is closing in on the White House, the same right-wing figures who zealously defended Starr at every turn have begun to turn on the investigation.
• Their distortion du jour focuses on the fact that Mueller uncovered evidence that one of his investigators sent private text messages that may have created the appearance of a conflict of interest, and then dismissed the investigator long before the public learned of those messages. Of course, this is actually a testament to Mueller’s extreme caution and commitment to fairness, but put through the right-wing distortion machine it becomes a partisan conspiracy within the FBI.

Trump brings up "collusion" 16 times in 30 minutes in 'New York Times' interview

(4145) (comments)

• In November, former national security adviser Michael Flynn became the latest target of the probe. After Flynn agreed to cooperate with the investigation, many legal experts speculated that he could have crucial intel on a top Trump official—or even Trump himself.

Interior Department Tapped Wildfire Preparedness Funds For Ryan Zinke Helicopter Tour

(4078) (comments)

• Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the group Democracy Forward and shared with Newsweek show that on July 10, Swift emailed a group of colleagues, saying, "I think we should get the Secretary to a fire line in Nevada while he is there. The BLM is point on a couple fires out there.
• Nonetheless, shortly afterward another planner emailed that "it looks like BLM will be able to pay for the helicopter out of the national fire office in Boise," and organizers cited a specific billing code. In a July 17 exchange, a staffer said Zinke would probably not be able to get to a Nevada fire line because his schedule wouldn’t allow it.
• This July, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, 9,000 fires burned more than 2.6 million acres around the country. That ratio of more than 295 acres burned per fire was the fourth highest on record, the agency reported.

Sen. Rubio backs Mueller, wants probe to continue

(3117) (comments)

Planned Parenthood unveils 'My Body, My Choice' license plate

(2473) (comments)

Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline

(2331) (comments)

• Other people were unkind enough to point out that the interview was brokered by one Christopher Ruddy, a Trump intimate and the CEO of NewsMax, and that Ruddy made his bones as a political "journalist" by peddling the fiction that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered, one of the more distasteful slanders that got a shameful public airing during the Clinton frenzy of the 1990’s.
• Not long afterwards, I was interviewing a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher for a book I was doing, and he said, "I saw the look on his face that I see every day in my clinic." In the transcript of this interview, I hear in the president*’s words my late aunt’s story about how we all walked home from church in the snow one Christmas morning, an event I don’t recall, but that she remembered so vividly that she told the story every time I saw her for the last three years of her life.
• I’ve always suspected he was propped up by a lot of people who a) didn’t trust vice-president George H.W. Bush, b) found it convenient to have a forgetful president when the subpoenas began to fly, and c) found it helpful to have a "detached" president when they started running their own agendas – like, say, selling missiles to mullahs.

Friday Fun Off-Topic Megathread

(89) (comments)

• Please keep in mind that civility rules are still in place, and that meta discussion should be saved for modmail or our monthly meta thread.
• And if you're like me and suck at making plans, know that many areas have "free ride home" programs - whether through AAA , public transit, emergency services, local businesses, or community organizations.
• I already did Italy, and I felt I had a taste of real European culture, I felt it was time to go for a Middle Eastern country, and Turkey is the best one.