R.I.P Sam Shepard.

@ BBC News, 7 hrs. ago

The US government is not seeking a regime change in North Korea, the secretary of state says, amid tensions over Pyongyang's weapons programme. "We're not your enemy," Rex Tillerson said, adding that the US wanted a dialogue at some point [....]

Pyongyang claimed that its latest missile test could hit the US west coast and beyond.

"We do not seek a regime change, we do not seek the collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, we do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel," said Mr Tillerson, referring to the border between the Koreas.

"We're not your enemy, we're not your threat but you're presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond." [....]

Edited in new headline; Former headline: Senators Begin Bipartisan Effort to Bolster Obamacare.

Starting to look like there's more grownups in the Senate than at first glance: The Senate health committee will begin drafting legislation to stabilize and strengthen the individual insurance market, its Republican chairman said

By Robert Pear & Thomas Kaplan @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 1, 4:50 PM

WASHINGTON — Republicans on both sides of the Capitol scrambled Tuesday to defuse President Trump’s threat to cut off critical health insurance payments, moving around the president toward bipartisan legislation to shore up the Affordable Care Act.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the influential chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced on Tuesday that his panel will begin work in early September on legislation to “stabilize and strengthen the individual health insurance market” for 2018.

He publicly urged President Trump to continue paying subsidies to health insurance companies to offset poor customers’ out-of-pocket medical expenses as work proceeds.

Mr. Alexander’s announcement was the first tangible indication of cooperation between the parties since Republican efforts to scrap the Affordable Care Act collapsed in the Senate last week. It was followed just minutes later by a pledge from a bipartisan group of House members to cooperate on health care legislation of their own [....]

By Philip Bump @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 1

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Tuesday morning on a lawsuit filed by a man named Rod Wheeler that makes a remarkable claim: The Trump White House — or President Trump personally — may have been aware of or involved in a discredited Fox News story about the killing of a Democratic National Committee staffer last July.

It’s a complicated story that, we hasten to add, is based on allegations in a lawsuit filed by a person whose quotes in that discredited story were themselves discredited. But the lawsuit includes documentary evidence (like text messages), and Folkenflik was given access to recorded calls that bolster the story as presented. What’s more, the lawsuit is predicated on Wheeler’s assertion that he never said the quotes attributed to him [.....]

But somewhere someone will say there's some truth in it

By Mallory Shelburne @ TheHill.com, July 31

A Republican congressman from Colorado on Monday declared that the Republican Party is “dead,” arguing it “no longer has a vision for a better America.”

In an op-ed for The Denver Post, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said the party that once had “the blood of the people” coursing “through its veins” is not pursing conservative policies [....]

The editorial slammed the tax code, the healthcare market and government spending, with Buck saying the Republican Party needs a vision and a message to unite the nation. He also criticized special interests, echoing the anti-establishment rhetoric that came to characterize the 2016 presidential election [....]

Washington Post headline, published 1 hr. ago, by Ashley Parker, Carol D. Leonnig, Phillip Rucker & Tom Hamburger

President Trump’s personal intervention, described by people with knowledge of the deliberations, is part of a series of actions that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy as Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III continues his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comment: jobs, jobs, jobs! Trumpco is definitely creating them! look at how many reporters it takes to handle the leakers regarding all things Trump! Before the ink is dry on Kelly's firing the The Mooch, four more reporters at WaPo are working on this. And at NYTimes, Politico, The Hill, HuffPo, Atlantic, TPM, New Yorker, New York, Slate, Salon, Axios, Vox, BuzzFeed, Daily Beast......there's more jobs being created to summarize and link to the WaPo story. Then there's the right wing spinners jobs at all the right wing sites. And production aides scouting down elaboration and writing scripts for all the TV news shows....

Circa, a video-heavy site aimed at viewers in their teens and 20s, has attracted attention from other outlets for a series of scoops on the Russian investigation

By Lois Becket for TheGuardian.com, July 30

[....] It’s not Fox News, with its angry anchors and aging audience. It’s Circa, a colorful digital media site aimed at viewers in their teens and 20s.

Circa is owned by the Sinclair Media Broadcast Group, which owns or operates more than 170 television stations across the country and calls itself America’s “leading local news provider”. As Sinclair expands, it has faced speculation that it could become a conservative challenger to Fox News.

For months, Circa has attracted special attention from other news outlets for a series of scoops on the progress of the Russian investigation that many saw as shoring up the administration’s narrative.

The latest scoop came on Thursday, when Circa reported that a high-ranking FBI official, the general counsel James A Baker, was “the top suspect in an ongoing leak investigation”, having allegedly leaked “classified national security information to the media” [....]

@ TheHill.com, July 29

Including video "Want to Rig an Election? There's A Convention in Vegas for That"

President Nicolás Maduro’s plan to create a new assembly is expected to give leftists virtually unlimited authority. By Nicholas Casey @ NYTimes.com, July 29

One by one, the markers of Venezuela’s democracy have been pushed aside.

First, the Supreme Court was packed with loyalists of the president, and several opposition lawmakers were blocked from taking their seats. Then, judges overturned laws that the president opposed, and elections for governors around the country were suddenly suspended.

Next, the court ruled in favor of dissolving the legislature entirely, a move that provoked such an outcry in Venezuela and abroad that the decision was soon reversed.

Now, President Nicolás Maduro is pushing a radical plan to consolidate his leftist movement’s grip over the nation: He is creating a political body with the power to rewrite the country’s Constitution and reshuffle — or dismantle — any branch of government seen as disloyal [....]