Category Archives: Politics

05.04.17
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High Risk Pools: Not Solving a Self-Created Problem

 

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High-risk pools are never good

 

I am far from an expert on (or even super knowledgeable about) health care, so I’m not exactly speaking ex cathedra here, but this to me seems like the perfect example of idiotic and deeply cruel Republican non-governance.

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders planned to hold a showdown vote Thursday on their bill to repeal and replace large portions of the Affordable Care Act after adding $8 billion to the measure to help cover insurance costs for people with pre-existing conditions…

Democrats and health care groups tried to slow that momentum. The liberal health advocacy group Families USA said another $8 billion would do little to improve the “high-risk pools” that could be set up by states to provide coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions who could not find affordable insurance in the open market.

The American Medical Association and 10 organizations representing patients, including the American Heart Association and the advocacy arm of the American Cancer Society, reiterated their opposition to the House Republican bill on Wednesday, as did the retirees’ lobby AARP…

Mr. Upton and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said they believed that the money in the bill would be adequate. “It’s our understanding that the $8 billion over the five years will more than cover those that might be impacted and, as a consequence, keeps our pledge for those that, in fact, would be otherwise denied because of pre-existing illnesses,” Mr. Upton said at the White House.

So, essentially, millions of Americans are counting on the math skills of Sean Spicer.

Continue reading →

05.02.17
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The Ivanka Irritation in Two NYTimes Articles

 

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“Female empowerment is more than a slogan for me–it’s a brand!”

 

I actually don’t really want to focus on Ivanka Trump, but it is also sort of weird not to, in a way that reflects the grotesque weirdness of our current political moment. I keep thinking, ugh, just ignore her, she’s a self-empowerment facade, a rich kid with smooth PR, a platitudinous ghost-person who is just some barely-earned dignity above any other fake celebrity. Famous for being famous. Before 2016, I doubt I spent more than four total minutes of my life thinking about Ivanka Trump.

But then, this person is a top advisor to the President of the United States. Ignoring her because she’s a political nobody is to ignore the central problem of America at the moment: we’re being run by reality show idiots. Our country has fully empowered our idol worship, celebrity obsession, and anti-intellectual pitchforking. And while Ivanka may be pretty and say nice things, she’s as much to blame as anyone else, and in her own way as much an embodiment of what is happening to us.

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04.27.17
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“The Education of Donald Trump”: Politico Accidentally Shows Why Everything is Scary. (Bonus! The Most Newt Gingrich Quote Ever)

 

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“They might even impeach him! Who’s ever heard of such a thing!”

 

I don’t really have time to get into the fullness of how depressing and terrifying and bitterly funny this Politico article, “The Education of Donald Trump”, really is. It’s about how none of them knew that being President would be hard, and how it is especially hard because Trump doesn’t take the job seriously. It isn’t so much his education as how the people around him are learning how to manipulate him. I’ll just put in a few choice quotes.

He turned to his relationships with world leaders. “I have a terrific relationship with Xi,” he said, referring to the Chinese president, who Trump recently invited for a weekend visit at his Mar-a-Lago resort.

By all reports, they got along fine. Which is to be expected; only for Trump is not insulting a foreign leader the mark of a great relationship. But he won’t shut up about it. He mentions his great relationship with Xi once a day.  It’s like how he constantly brags about getting a Supreme Court nominee on the bench, when he has an open seat and a Senate majority. That’s literally the least you can do, you idiot.

Trump remains reliant as ever on his children and longtime friends for counsel. White House staff have learned to cater to the president’s image obsession by presenting decisions in terms of how they’ll play in the press. Among his first reads in the morning is still the New York Post.

I bet he still cuts out pages where he’s mentioned and sends them to friends, circling his name with his childlike hands. “They wrote about me again, Reince! I’m on the cover. Are you?”

As president, Trump has repeatedly reminded his audiences, both public and private, about his longshot electoral victory. That unexpected win gave him and his closest advisers the false sense that governing would be as easy to master as running a successful campaign turned out to be. It was a rookie mistake.

It’s not a rookie mistake; it’s an idiot mistake. Who would ever think that? How could any human think that?

As he sat in the Oval Office last week, Trump seemed to concede that even having risen to fame through real estate and entertainment, the presidency represented something very different.

Like with healthcare being complicated, this is something that no one knew.

Between Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence, who once served in House leadership, Trump thought he had the experts he needed and wouldn’t have to worry about Congress that much. But Priebus is a political insider, not a congressional one. And Pence, who was governor of Indiana before joining Trump’s ticket, has been absent from the Hill during the rise of the House Freedom Caucus, the ideological hardliners who delivered Trump the most stinging defeat of his young presidency.

Hey, not to belabor it, but these are things people knew in advance. Like, did you not know that Priebus has never had office? Leadership!

As Trump is beginning to better understand the challenges—and the limits—of the presidency, his aides are understanding better how to manage perhaps the most improvisational and free-wheeling president in history. “If you’re an adviser to him, your job is to help him at the margins,” said one Trump confidante. “To talk him out of doing crazy things.”

Maybe you shouldn’t have helped get a guy who does crazy things elected! That was something you cold have done that was a little nobler, Mr. Confidante. Or Mrs. This might actually be Ivanka.

But they’re learning. One key development: White House aides have figured out that it’s best not to present Trump with too many competing options when it comes to matters of policy or strategy. Instead, the way to win Trump over, they say, is to present him a single preferred course of action and then walk him through what the outcome could be – and especially how it will play in the press.

“You don’t walk in with a traditional presentation, like a binder or a PowerPoint. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t consume information that way,” said one senior administration official. “You go in and tell him the pros and cons, and what the media coverage is going to be like.”

This is literally saying that the President is a child who can’t handle making decisions, but if you tell him something will make Steve Doocey happy, he’ll do it. “He doesn’t consume information that way” is the polite way of saying “The President is a vastly unqualified idiot, and I mean that in every sense: there is nothing to qualify or ameliorate his idiocy, and he should not be President, and every day I work for him I am complicit in this disaster.” Granted, that’s a mouthful, but it is the whole story.

But the really prize isn’t really anything to do with Donald Trump. It is how Newt Gingrich, sycophant to the stars, justifies Trump having problems.

“I think he’s much more aware how complicated the world is,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who serves as an informal administration adviser. “This will all be more uphill than he thought it would be because I think he had the old-fashioned American idea that you run for office, you win, then people behave as though you won.”

Now, obviously, I didn’t hear Newt say this, but you can hear it. It’s a sneer against the liberals. He is obviously being sarcastic about “old-fashioned American idea”, and how it really shouldn’t be old-fashioned, but should be respected. Trump won, and the Democrats aren’t letting him do so. What happened to decency?

Newt Gingrich is saying this. Newt Gingrich. About Donald Trump. Donald Trump, whose political career started by literally saying for five years that Barack Obama wasn’t a US citizen and so an illegitimate President. And it wasn’t just Trump: Gingrich said this about him in 2010: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?…This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.” 

I guess he is saying that Obama was President, but it isn’t exactly behaving as though he won.

He’s saying this after the GOP did everything they could to obstruct the Obama administration, even nullifying his Constitutional duty to appoint a Supreme Court justice.

And, holy god, Newt Gingrich is talking about how no one is showing respect to the election results. Newt Gingrich impeached Bill Clinton over an affair. He shut down the government to try to force Clinton to do what he wanted. He had Congress investigate everything the Clintons had ever done. Again, just to be clear, he impeached a twice-elected President over an affair.

But listen to how aggrieved he is. How unfair the whole thing is. How victimized the Trump administration is by Democrats not recognizing his enormous mandate. There is no one, not even Ted Cruz, who is as self-righteously hypocritical and deeply unprincipled as Newt Gingrich. Mitch McConnell is cynical, but Newt actually believes this. He can say that and feel good about it.

This quote should be on Newt’s tombstone.

04.18.17
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Need a Reason To Support Jon Ossoff? He’s Pro-CDC, Which I Guess is Controversial

 

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Turning this blue would be pretty cool…

 

Today’s special election in Georgia’s 6th is being widely touted as a “bellwether”, which is one of those fun words that political journalists like to say, and is rarely used in any other context. I’m guessing most pundits aren’t versed on its etymology, as it refers originally to a castrated male sheep with a bell around its neck that the rest of the flock follows.

I’m not criticizing pundits for not knowing the word’s history; it’s been used as a metaphor for about 700 years, which is really pretty cool. But it still fits in this scenario: these are the sort of elections that everyone decides mean something, and because of that, they actually do. If no one paid much attention to GA-6, as normally happens, it wouldn’t be seen as anything except a dreary local election focused entirely on local concerns. But because we are paying attention, the stakes are raised, and it matters. The main candidates have decided to run on more explicitly national themeseEveryone is moving in the same direction, following the bell.

If no one paid much attention to GA-6, as normally happens, it wouldn’t be seen as anything except a dreary local election focused entirely on local concerns. But because we are paying attention, the stakes are raised, and it matters. The main candidates have decided to run on more explicitly national themes, which of course means pro-or-anti-Trump. Lines are drawn, and in our tribalized times you have to choose. Everyone is moving in the same direction, following the bell.

I can’t claim to be any expert on GA-6, but smart money is that young Democrat Jon Ossoff won’t get quite enough to avoid a runoff, which is too bad. An outright win today would, by dint of consensus, send a clear signal that Trump isn’t popular, and that his voters are turning away. Whether or not this is true, I don’t know. It could just be that his voters are his alone, and aren’t interested in the midterms.

I do know that it is important to support Jon Ossoff (and it isn’t too late to make phone calls!), if for no other reason than it will drive Trump crazy. But any indication of wobble could make nervous Republicans slightly more reluctant to attach their fates and their sacred honor to the President, which is a good thing.

But it is also just good to get more liberals, or at least, more people who aren’t conservative Republicans who might, against all odds, let Ryanism happen. Proof of this? Something that caught my eye when I was getting the volunteer link.

CHAMBLEE, GA –  Joined by former CDC director Dr. Jeffrey Koplan at a press conference this morning, Congressional candidate Jon Ossoff called on the other 17 candidates in the Sixth District race to unify in opposition to a provision of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) that would gut the health security infrastructure necessary to detect and fight infectious disease outbreaks like Ebola and Zika.

The provision would slash funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), devastating efforts to protect Georgians and the nation from deadly pandemics. The massive cuts would eliminate the Prevention and Public Health fund, which is critical to preventing outbreaks of dangerous diseases like Ebola and Zika.

For more info, read this Vox explainer linked in the blurb about Republican opposition to funding public health research, including work on heart disease, vaccines, and efforts to reduce deadly infections people catch at hospitals. This includes cuts to the CDC of nearly 10%.

Anyone who is worried about a pandemic, which would be anyone possessed of more consciousness and public spirit than a castrated sheep, should be on the side of this. If you want to know why Jon Ossoff should win–if you want to know why the madness of the current GOP needs to be fought–you don’t have to go much further than slashing funding for the CDC. Seriously, these people…

04.14.17
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Trump Signs Bill Defunding Planned Parenthood; Is a Republican (Or: Why Ivanka Trump Is A Terrible Person)

 

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“We care about people!”

 

The Hill

President Trump on Thursday signed a bill to nix an Obama-era rule that blocked states from defunding healthcare providers for political reasons.

The bill, which Democrats say is really an effort to defund Planned Parenthood, passed the Senate last month after Vice President Pence had to cast a tie-breaking vote.

Trump signed the measure behind closed doors in the Oval Office without media present.

When Donald Trump bombed Syria last week, after Ivanka convinced him that some Syrians were people (though not refugees), we got another spate of “Is Ivanka the moderating influence?” stories. This, combined with her hubby Jared seemingly pushing out Steven Bannon, or at least gaining the upper hand in their battle for influence, (all while already being absurdly powerful) led a lot of people to wonder if the admin was going to get more “moderate”.

Now, granting that, politically, Trump had to sign this or face a total revolt, we still have to accept that one of these things:

  1. Jared and Ivanka aren’t actually moderate;
  2. Jared and Ivanka aren’t actually powerful, or;
  3. Jared and Ivanka have zero positions except to help Trump succeed in building the family name/brand, whether that means sometimes acting like a normal Republican or sometimes acting like a loon, but taking care to protect their image.

Is there actually any question here?

The thing about Ivanka and Jared is that, regardless of how much they don’t hate gays, are aiding and abetting the most far-right administration in American history. Where was their power when pops nominated Jeff Sessions, an open white nationalist who is bringing white backlash back to power? Or Scott Pruitt, who has pledged to destroy the environment? Or when he signed the Muslim ban, got his ass handed to him, and signed another one? Or when he superempowered ICE and CBP?

No, these pampered self-serving idiots don’t get to have it both ways. Helping Donald Trump get elected damns them, no matter how much they claim to slow down his worst impulses Because, really: what have they done that has been any good? You got a Republican elected, and no matter how many “We Are Relatable Millennial” ads you photoshopped, we have a xenophobic reactionary world-eating government with your unstable sexual-assaulting childish dolt of a father in control. That’s your legacy.

I’m not terribly interested in Ivanka, but her CBS interview did make me realize, fully and finally, that she is her father, only prettier and more polished.

Ivanka Trump: I speak up frequently. And my father agrees with me on so many issues. And where he doesn’t, he knows where I stand. But–

Gayle King: Can you give us–

Ivanka Trump: –it’s not my administration–

Gayle King: — an example of something that you disagree with him on and that you think that by speaking up to him it made him change his position or soften his position? Are you comfortable with that?

Ivanka Trump: I think that for me this isn’t about promoting my viewpoints. I wasn’t elected by the American people to be president. My father is gonna do a tremendous job. And I wanna help him do that. But I don’t think that it will make me a more effective advocate to constantly articulate every issue publicly where I disagree. … And that’s okay. That means that I’ll take hits from some critics who say that I should take to the street. And then other people will in the long-term respect where I get to. But I think most of the impact I have, over time most people will not actually know about.

It’s not just that there isn’t an answer here (I don’t blame her for not saying “I disagree about XYZ”). It’s that she spins her lack of any impact as a virtue, telling us, despite all evidence to the contrary–despite her father’s administration being an absolute horrorshow for issues she pretends to care about–that she’s doing a lot. So much. You’ll see.

Believe me.

04.06.17
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With Mitch McConnell, You Can Never Be Cynical Enough

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We haven’t had much to say about the grinding inevitability of Neil Gorsuch, other than to argue that the doomed filibuster was the right thing to do. We should never forget that Mitch&co (especially the sanctimonious Orrin Hatch), nullified the 2012 election while speaking self-righteously about preserving voter rights to determine a Supreme Court justice. It was nauseating, and could be seen as a death-blow to democracy.

The Gorsuch hearings have been an exercise in craven cynicism, with Republicans outraged that Dems even dare question Neil Gorsuch, as if he floated down from Judicial Heaven, untouched be petty partisan politics, and not been someone involved in the far-right since he was born. And they were even more cynically outraged that the Democrats might dare try to question Presidential prerogative. It was as if they all knew that they had no case, but if they shouted loudly enough with enough constitutional offense warbling their vocal cords we would forget how laughable it was.

This wasn’t hard to predict. In fact, right after the election, the Times ran a ludicrous story titled “Hard Choice For Mitch McConnell: End the Filibuster or Preserve Tradition”.

We said then:

Let me answer that for you: he’s going to end the filibuster.

The Times describes him as someone who believes strongly in traditions, somehow managing to reconcile that with his immediately blocking the President’s right to choose a Supreme Court justice, and also the completely unprecedented obstruction of Barack Obama’s entire Presidency. It also talks about how he was dismayed at Reid dismantling the judicial filibuster after their (again) unprecedented obstructions, as if it was a matter of principle, and not, say, petulance at not being able to continue their (again) unprecedented obstruction of the President’s rights.

So yeah, I think there is going to be one filibuster of bill or maybe when Trump nominates Michele Bachmann for the Supreme Court, and Mitch will appear on TV, and say that it with sadness that he has to do this, but the Democrats have no respect for Presidential prerogative, and are ignoring “President Trump’s overwhelming victory, and the will of the American people” (never mind that Trump lost that metric). And then the filibuster will be gone, and the media will say “well, the Democrats should have reached across the aisle!”

And again: all this was easy to predict, which is what makes it even more depressing. Still, I was wrong about one thing. I thought Mitch would do fake sadness, and not fake anger. I wasn’t cynical enough. Here’s what he actually said.

“This is the latest escalation in the left’s never-ending judicial war, the most audacious yet,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after describing Democratic opposition in the past to Judge Robert H. Bork and Justice Clarence Thomas. “And it cannot and it will not stand. There cannot be two sets of standards: one for the nominees of the Democratic president and another for the nominee of a Republican president.”

What are you supposed to do? How do you respond to that? It’s impossible. You’re left sputtering, and somehow you look like you’re on an equal level of childishness. It’s insane, and it is what is running the country.

Although I admit I may have misspoke when I said that he was faking anger. I think their cognitive dissonance is so fine-tuned that they actually believe that a foredoomed filibuster is somehow an escalation over not even meeting with the nominee, much less giving him a hearing. Like the kid on The Simpson’s who doesn’t know if he is being sarcastic anymore, they don’t know if they are legitmately angry or just a mobious strip o cynicism.

04.04.17
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Jared Kushner Is The Whole Absurdity

 

Pictured: Take Your Boss’s Daughter’s Husband to a War Zone Day.

 

It’s sometimes hard to really put your finger on what is the most absurd and nonsensical part of the Trump Administration, but then you hear about how Jared Kushner flew to Iraq, and you realize: this is it. The flgarant third-world absurdity, the little petty crime family nonsense, the reliance on pseudo-toughguy “loyalty” over even the most basic competence: it’s everything that’s cheap and flim-flammy about Trumpism in a skinny well-married package.

(Note: this isn’t about what’s cruel and evil in the Administration; that’s virtually everything else. The two are intertwined, but we’re just focusing on absurdity right now.)

This isn’t to say that Kushner isn’t, like, smart. He’s not the dopey son who is suddenly made Lord High General of the People’s Glorious Armed Forces. But, relative to the insane position he’s been given, it isn’t too far off. Kushner, as Daniel Drezner points out, is in charge of:

  • Relations with Mexico, which are a diplomatic minefield, considering his boss/father-in-law based his entire campaign around demonizing Mexico and saying he’d make them pay for his idiot wall.
  • Relations with Canada, which, ok.
  • Peace in the Middle East. This means Israel/Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and the whole Sunni v Shia thing. It’s pretty complex!
  • Solving the opioid crisis, because I’m sure he really gets the white working class. He’s relatable.
  • Fixing the VA. I don’t know, maybe a good businessman can do something good. I doubt that he has the chops for it, but I’ll cut him some slack.
  • Improving the way the government works, which means turning it into a business, which: stupid, and not innovative. People have been saying that for centuries.

This whole thing is madness. Even if he is smart, there’s no way one person could do any of this, much less all of it. Especially because he hasn’t been able to build a staff, mostly because Trump doesn’t want too many people involved. It’s a family business.

And that’s the heart of how malignantly stupid this administration is. The thinking here literally boiled down to “Hey, that kid who married my daughter is bright, and he’s stuck by me. He can probably fix the world by himself.”

Politico on Saturday ran a long piece about how resentful senior White House staff are of Kushner, equal parts annoyance and jealousy. He’s prone to popping into every meeting, acting as Trump’s eyes and ear and hatchet man, and running things like…well, like Trump would. But one wants to ask these staffers: what did you expect? It’s a White House run by Donald Trump, reality show idiot.

But not all is well, as these amazing parts demonstrate.

Kushner’s boosters see him as “a visionary” who is bringing to government a disruptive Silicon Valley mindset that helped him succeed in the technology and real estate industries, as well as on Trump’s unconventional presidential campaign.

It’s always important to remember that “disruptive Silicon Valley mindset” is what dumb people say when they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Others are more concerned about what Kushner hasn’t done. One pro-Israel operative who works with the administration said “there were high hopes” that Kushner — an Orthodox Jew and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, whose only picture in his office is of his grandparents — “was a guy who really understood our community” when Trump tapped him as a point person on the Middle East.

What? Why would you think that? Because he’s Jewish? Maybe he “understands your community”, but so do tens of thousands of people, very few of whom have any capability at running a government or, you know, bringing peace to the Middle East.

But, the operative said, those hopes mostly have been supplanted by “deep concern that Jared is not the person we thought he was — that this guy who is supposed to be good at everything is totally out of his depth.”

Why was he supposed to be good at everything? Because he was born rich and got richer? Who are these people?

But if you really want the straight hit on how gross and stupid these people are, get a load of these two paragraphs.

Influential Jewish Republicans including the mega-donor casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson lobbied Kushner to convince Trump to appoint prominent neoconservative foreign policy hand Elliott Abrams as the No. 2 official in Foggy Bottom and to remove Michael Ratney, a State Department official who previously served as U.S. consul in Jerusalem under Obama, from his role handling Middle East affairs.

Kushner was non-committal about Ratney, according to two sources familiar with the lobbying. But Kushner did go to bat for Abrams, only to have Trump veto the appointment because Abrams had criticized Trump during the campaign and was opposed by Bannon. Nonetheless, Adelson, who has spoken repeatedly by phone with Kushner, was disappointed with Kushner’s inability or unwillingness to deliver on the personnel recommendations, as well as the stasis on the embassy, said three Jewish Republicans active in Israel causes.

This is amazing and beautiful and perfect. A terrible, terrible person tried to get Kushner to install a horrible war criminal in State, but was stopped by a bitter white supranationalist on the grounds that the war criminal wasn’t loyal enough. Does anything demonstrate the twisted web of America’s worst people any better?

Well, maybe: Diamond Mark Perrone tipped me off to a long piece on Jeff Zucker, which included this perfect morsel.

Zucker had breakfast with Kushner a few weeks later in Manhattan. Kushner wanted to know why CNN still hadn’t fired anti-Trump commentators like (Van) Jones and Ana Navarro, who said on CNN in October that every Republican would have to answer the question of what they did the day they saw a tape of “this man boasting about grabbing a woman’s pussy.”… Zucker tried to explain that even though Trump won, the network still needed what he described as “a diversity of opinion.”

So enough of the “Kushner is the moderate” or “Kushner is the voice of reason”. He’s a very small cosseted rich dude who married into an even richer family and rode a tide of white nationalism into power. He uses that to try to silence “enemies”, because he thinks that some wealthy simulacrum of omerta is proof of character. They are playacting as a competent administration, playacting as tough guys, and playacting at solving problems.

Kushner is no different. His portfolio is the biggest joke of all. He’s as bad as his odious father-in-law, thinking that being born rich means you can do anything. It’s the idea that if you just leave it to us, it’ll be solved. That’s our government right now. Whatever isn’t truly evil and cruel about is absurd. That the absurdity has real consequences for people who aren’t them only sharpens the cruelty.

 

03.24.17
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Trump Healthcare Ultimatum Is Equal Parts Stupid and Cruel; or: The Quintessence of Trumpism

 

Donald Trump sits in a truck, pretends to be big man.

Tough guy.

I’ve never read The Art of the Deal. With all due respect to his ghostwriter on the project, who turned out to be a real standup dude, there are maybe five books in the entire universe I’d enjoy reading less. The self-aggrandizing money-worship of an overfed huckster in celebration of our gaudiest decade? The vast majority of cereal boxes have more insight on the human condition, and probably more wit.

That said, from having had to pay attention to this man for decades, I know a little about how he operates, and it is from false machismo, the not-tough toughguyness of rich men in suits with lawyers. His main plank is to be willing to walk away, so that the other guy, nervous about sunk cost, gives away the store.

The other plank is that the deal is the thing, no matter how terrible it turns out to be, so long as there is short term gain. Both of these are on display with what the President is offering the Republican Party right now.

WASHINGTON — President Trump issued an ultimatum on Thursday to recalcitrant Republicans to fall in line behind a broad health insurance overhaul or see their opportunity to repeal the Affordable Care Act vanish, demanding a Friday vote on a bill that appeared to lack a majority to pass.

A couple of things. First of all, that shouldn’t, strictly, be true. There is nothing that says “one and done” with health care. It might make it more difficult to pass later on, but in theory, they could try to come up with a better bill. But this is Trump’s dumbbell toughshow on full display. You pass this bill, or else, hoping that will clarify their minds. It shows that he has no idea how government works, and thinks his shtick can pass for actual knowledge or skill (to be fair, it has his entire life, which says a lot about our culture).

And it might work! The Republicans might be terrified of this failure, and hope that they can make a widely despised piece of legislation come to life, or at least have the Senate somehow fix it. So this might come to pass (Politico still says too close to call), and if it does, might ghostwalk through the Senate, though there are a lot of institutional and electoral obstacles to doing so.

But let’s look at what we have. In the last few days, Trump and Ryan have given away the store to the far, far, far right members of the House Freedom Caucus, making their already unfathomably cruel and reckless bill even worse. It’ll cost more, and insure fewer people. The latest horror was stripping away the 10 essentials that health care should cover, on the extremely Republican idea that if you aren’t going to get pregnant, your money shouldn’t cover other people’s pregnancies.

(It could be pointed out that that’s how all insurance works, but at least they are ideologically consistent: no help for anyone, and pull the ladder up after you.)

So, basically, because Trump only wants to make deals, and has his whole phony image based on being great at negotiating and closing, is going to make life worse for nearly everyone, including the people who voted for him, so that he can get this quick little victory and show off how good he is at twisting arms. It’s stupid and cruel, which is really the essence of the man.

Please don’t take this as any sympathy for Paul Ryan or the Republicans. This is their fault, and not just because they acquiesced to Trump. They’ve spent seven years salivating over the idea of kicking people off insurance rolls, gutting Medicare, block-granting Medicaid, and most of all, shoveling money upward. They couldn’t wait! They rushed this through to maximize pain, and were suddenly stunned when it turned out that people didn’t equate dying in poverty with freedom.

So maybe this is their last shot. Maybe they recognize that the whole edifice of Republican governance is crumbling. It’s crumbling because of Trump, of course, his Russian connections, his inability to do anything that isn’t directly tied to his ego, and the fact that the sleaze with which he’s lived his life is an inescapable part of his administration.

But it is also crumbling because a party who thinks that self-government is Communism and that there is no such thing as the common good can’t govern when their plans are brought to light. For eight years, the cruelest and most Randian elements of the right wing had been percolating, able to tear at Obama, but still hidden by his shadow. Their guttersniping worked while they weren’t in charge, but now that their plans have seen the light of day, much of the country is reacting in horror. They can’t govern because they don’t believe in it, and that comes from their one core belief: you’re on your own, sucker.

So yes, they want to push through this bill while they still can. It’s cruel and insane, and it comes from their ideology, and it comes from the man who thinks that any deal is good so long as he isn’t holding the bag. It’s Trumpism, which is really just a flamboyant way of saying it’s the modern GOP.

03.21.17
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Reminder: Call Your Senator And Tell Them To Vote No On Justice Gorsuch

 

Image result for old fashioned phone switchboard

Seriously, get on the horn

 

One way or the other, Neil Gorsuch will be the next Supreme Court justice. If the Democrats try to filibuster, Mitch McConnell will, with “deep sadness at this unprecedented assault on Presidential prerogative”, get rid of the filibuster. Or, knowing this, and knowing that Gorsuch is generally popular, will keep their powder dry, and maybe have some protest votes against him, but will largely let him pass through.

But they shouldn’t. The answer to Gorsuch should be the what Michael Corleone offered to Senator Geary: nothing. Gorsuch should not get one single Democratic vote.

This is partly a matter of politics (we have to fight everything about Trumpism to make sure that none of this is normalized and to get out the vote in midterms and local elections), but also, mostly, principle. It’s not just that this seat belongs to Merrick Garland. It’s that, in denying President Obama his right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, the Republican overturned the 2012 election.

There’s no other word for it: they nullified the election, trampled on the will of voters in the biggest display of contempt for the union since Wallace, or possibly the Civil War. In 2012, by a wide margin, voters elected Barack Obama to a four-year term. Everyone votes knowing that there is always the chance of a Supreme Court seat opening up. Mitch McConnell saw that he had a chance to overthrow the election and literally reduce Obama’s term to three years, and he took it. This wasn’t legally treason, but it was a moral assault on our democracy.

And they won, thanks to the slave-state empowerment of the Electoral College. And now they get to put on an extremely, overwhelmingly conservative justice, against the will of the majority of voters in two straight elections. And they will do so, and the nation will suffer.

Over at Slate, the incomparable Dahlia Lithwick talks about teeth-breaking GOP hypocrisy during the hearings, insulted as they are that anyone would even question Gorsuch. (“GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch lectured the Judiciary Committee about the fact that the Senate ‘owes the president deference over his judicial nominees.’ Hearing this, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont about fell out of his chair.”)

We have to expect their cynicism. We have to be willing to stand up to their calculated outrage (which probably isn’t “phony”, per se; cognitive dissonance rules all). We have to let our Senators know that they aren’t in a hearing for Gorsuch, as we normally understand it. They are in a hearing for Merrick Garland’s seat, which was stolen through a subversion of democracy.

So call your Senator. Tell them you support them voting NO on Gorsuch, and not because of any reprehensible position of the other. That’s important, but in a way incidental, because a right-wing Scalia-y Justice is the outcome of the crime, not the crime itself. Give our Senators the strength and backing to protest this outrage against our very democracy.

A hard right court can destroy environmental pushback, end labor, and annihilate civil rights. Our country will be changed in ways it is hard to imagine. But it already has: the idea of a Presidential term was suddenly subject to a political gamble. That hits at the basis of our country. Tell your Senator to fight back against it. We might not win, but it’s how the fight can start.

03.06.17
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A Reminder about Obama and Russia

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This week’s must-read story is The New Yorker’s exhaustive piece on Russian propaganda machine and how it influences elections around the world. The article, a joint production by Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa, filters the rise of Putinism through the first post-Soviet decade the Putin’s personal need to avenge slights against Russia. They demonstrate how Russia has been trying to reshape the world, in an asymmetric way, for most of last decade, culminating in working to elect Donald Trump (something they didn’t think would actually work).

It’s a great read on its own, but one thing that is highlights is what the Obama Administration knew, and why they didn’t act on it.

Remarkably, the Obama Administration learned of the hacking operation only in early summer—nine months after the F.B.I. first contacted the D.N.C. about the intrusion—and then was reluctant to act too strongly, for fear of being seen as partisan. Leaders of the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies met during the summer, but their focus was on how to safeguard state election commissions and electoral systems against a hack on Election Day.

That caution has embittered Clinton’s inner circle. “We understand the bind they were in,” one of Clinton’s senior advisers said. “But what if Barack Obama had gone to the Oval Office, or the East Room of the White House, and said, ‘I’m speaking to you tonight to inform you that the United States is under attack. The Russian government at the highest levels is trying to influence our most precious asset, our democracy, and I’m not going to let it happen.’ A large majority of Americans would have sat up and taken notice. My attitude is that we don’t have the right to lay blame for the results of this election at anybody’s feet, but, to me, it is bewildering—it is baffling—it is hard to make sense of why this was not a five-alarm fire in the White House.”

The Obama circle, which criticizes Clinton’s team for failing to lock down seemingly solid states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, insists that the White House acted appropriately. “What could we have done?” Benjamin Rhodes said. “We said they were doing it, so everybody had the basis to know that all the WikiLeaks material and the fake news were tied to Russia. There was no action we could have taken to stop the e-mails or the fake news from being propagated. . . . All we could do was expose it.”

Remember this when right-wing friends talk about how Obama “illegally wiretapped Trump!” When presented with unassailable (and not even covered up!) Russian interference in the election, they played it as close to the vest as possible. You have to believe that they would do this, in order not to be seen as partisan, but at the same time personally engineer a massive criminal scheme, and at the same time not do anything afterwards. It’s insane.

(It’s also a reminder that Putin hated Obama because he thought Obama interfered too much in Russian greatness, which might be accurate. And if anything, he hated Hillary more. Remember that when people say Obama and Hillary were weak on Russia.)