Month: March 2017

The “Leni Reifenstahl of the Tea Party” is lying. Surprised?

by digby

Everyone’s talking about this article in the Wall St Journal about Steve Bannon’s populist epiphany in 2008 when he watched his poor old dad worry about losing everything in the financial crisis. Bannon had worked in international finance for decades but came to realize that the sharks and the vampire squids of Wall Street had taken away the American Dream and he decided then and there to do something about it. Populists of both right and left are calling it “profound.”

I don’t know what Steve Bannon really thinks about anything. He seems to like somebody who made a bunch of money and then got bored and discovered politics. He’s a lot like his benefactor Robert Mercer in that way. And Ben Carson. These are people whose political development is at the level of an undergraduate but they are powerful and rich so everyone pays attention to them.

Anyway, Bannon is selling himself as a populist these days. But back in 2011, he made a film called “Occupy Unmasked” which told a different story than the one he’s telling today.

I’ll let Rick Perlstein describe it for you:

The film begins silently, an innocuous epigraph filling the screen—

July 2011
Following the historic tea party victory in 2010
The nation is in a heated debate
On raising the debt ceiling.
President Obama’s approval rating
Sinks to an all-time low:
39%

—then comes a windshield’s eye view of a gorgeous California coastline. An unpromising overture for a political thriller.

Until—a car plunges over a cliff, followed by a frenzy of images: worried politicians, newsmen narrating the looming fiscal crisis, a bank machine sorting bills, blindfolded children boxing (and then Senator Barbara Boxer, her voice horrifically distorted); sheets of hundred dollar bills rolling off a printing press, then piling to the sky—the car arcs downward—a racing clock, hundred dollar bills behind a beeping EKG, a man on his hospital deathbed, a little girl batting a piñata, Where is the leadership of this White House to guide the country out of the debt mess we’re in?—Then piles more money and a cardiologist’s paddles on a heaving chest, a racing “debt clock” and credit cards, and a braying Chris Matthews and panic and panic and more panic. The American people are going to pay the price and the EKG flatlines and the car hits the rocks and bursts into flames and Anderson Cooper announces the downgrading of the nation’s credit.

Which resolves into an image of Barack Hussein Obama in the Oval Office to render plain the reason for the frenzy: “An organizer,” words begins spooling “must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent. . .”—and then the letters S-A-U-L and A-L-I-N-S-K-Y emerge, with the “A” in the villain’s last name filled in when the familiar red anarchist-A in a circle stamps itself onto the screen.

Andrew Breitbart appears, explaining, “The battle for the soul of America took an interesting turn in September of 2011, when out of the blue, according to the mainstream media, one finds a group called ‘Occupy’ occupying town squares, city halls, and Zuccotti Park. Who were these people?” [The screen shows a foul dreadlocked, doo-ragged white guy with an “Occupy” fist pinned to his coat.] “Are they just college students that matter-of-factly just show up in Zuccotti Park?” [A ragged tent city, pocked by garbage bags, from which a woman pulls out a shoe.]

“Are these just mom and pa, coming like they did at the Tea Parties?”

“No, no. No, no. This is the organized left.” [The camera lingers on a sign reading “Workers World Party.”] “The Occupy movement is the organized left.”

The plot that follows defies summation. We learn how in August and September, 2011, thanks to the Republicans, the nation was finally verging toward fiscal sanity until the Occupiers appeared just in time to sabotage the whole thing. We learn how the conspiracy was planned in a 2011 email chain that included an MSNBC personality and the political editor of Rolling Stone, where “kids learned how they could orchestrate a movement from scratch,” tutored to be “as amorphous as humanly possible,” the better to “draw in as many naïve people as humanly possible.” But also that it was orchestrated a year earlier “by the SEIU.”

But also that the conspiracy was planned in 2008, at the Republican National Convention.

What American citizens know about Trump will be determined by a campaign of White House disinformation to rival Joseph Goebbels.

And, yet more diabolically, in the ruins of New Orleans in 2005: “To most people Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster,” one of the film’s stars explains. “But to the far left, Hurricane Katrina was about the occupation of the Ninth Ward. It was the first time all of these different groups came together under one banner to work together. You had the eco-terrorism group under Scott Crow; the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts. . . . You had Code Pink; you had the Black Panther Party. . . . You had different movements from around the world coming in. They saw it as a means to work together, finally, for the revolution. . . because people were mad at the U.S. government.”

“And from that, those same people, those same dollars, those same funders, those same leaders—they started the Occupy Movement.”

The insults to linear logic only enhance the film’s effect: this is sense-rape, meant to disarm critical faculties. But if the storyline is, well, as amorphous as humanly possible, the characters are etched sharply. For that is what this game is all about.

There are bad guys, like a man in a bank in a suit. “He’s texting,” one of the story’s narrators explains footage of a scene where filthy marauders invade a Bank of America. “I say, ‘Do you work for the bank?’ And he says, ‘No, I work for the United Autoworkers.’ So the unions are choreographing things, and they’re obviously texting back and making sure it’s going right. But who ends up getting arrested are the students.”

The students: those useful idiots. A fellow holds a sign reading “THROW ME A BONE, PAY MY TUITION.” He’s asked by a Breitbartian why he believes himself to be exploited by elites. “We get taxed more than they do,” he answers. “That’s not true,” the interviewer comes back, matter of factly. The kids responds, incredulous: “That’s not true?”

The faceless, pillaging marauders—some in Guy Fawkes masks, the movie’s main visual motif, others wearing black hoodies, or bandanas over their faces, staving in windows, assaulting cops, dancing by the light of the flames.

The media, some of whom are Occupy puppet masters in disguise—like a writer named Natasha Lennard, who covered the movement freelance for The New York Times, then got radicalized and noisily quit the straight media, but whom under Steve Bannon’s directorial gaze is rendered both a walking, talking embodiment of the Gray Lady herself, sent out to pull the strings of the media’s useful-idiot contingent, like Bill Maher, shown enthusing “Everyone was extraordinarily well-behaved” over an image of a man shitting on a car.

President Obama, that most useful of idiots. (He delivers what the film calls his “Occupy State of the Union” in 2012, his voice distorted like a zombie: “No American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. . . . Restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot.” You thought these words were innocent. You are so, so naïve.)

The good guys are the film’s narrators: former members in good standing of the left, who’ve seen the conspiracy from the inside and have emerged to tell the tale.

There is a young man named Lee Stranahan, identified as “Former Writer, Huffington Post, Daily Kos.” He explains, “I actually trace some of the roots of Occupy back to Saul Alinsky and the 1930s . . . his mentor was Frank Nitty, the enforcer of the Capone gang. . . What had happened was, Prohibition had ended, so the mob needed a new way of making money. So what they did was, they moved into—labor. They moved into the unions. So the BSEU was one of the unions they were involved with, and that became the SEIU.” [Cue picket sign: “HEALTHCARE WORKERS / WE’RE PART OF THE 99%”] “The thing that ties in the anarchist movement, and the Obama administration, are the unions.”

A woman named Pam Key, who has been to hell and back: “I was there with them, getting fed some poached salmon, when I was with some anarchists doing ’shrooms discussing whether they were going to assassinate people and when that might happen.” She explains that “They are holding back violence until it is going to work at its maximum capacity,” and that—onscreen, Oakland occupiers take over a vacant warehouse: coming soon to a suburb near you—“that’s the next step, to occupy properties, and homes.”

Brandon Darby, who infiltrated the 2008 RNC protests for the FBI: “. . . the same old far left players who are part of what happened in New Orleans, the same old far-left players who are part of what happened in Seattle . . . arson . . . terroristic acts . .  . Gaza flotillas . . . the convergence of all these disparate groups, let’s attack the United States strength through environmental policies, let’s attack the United States law enforcement, let’s attack the criminal justice system—everything came together for Occupy.”

Anita MonCrief, an African American woman who used to work for ACORN, explains why this list does not, yet, include any black people: “Because they’re being readied for part two. And that is race warfare.”

Now you, my dear fellow member of the Reality Based Community, remember what Occupy actually was: a lightning strike, a miracle, and a tragedy—the kind of uprising the left had been dreaming about for years after the banking system crashed itself then got the government to rescue it (that was why Bannon was able to collect so much footage of left-wing leaders saying Occupy-like things before the event); but which soon spent its promise by fetishizing the absence of organization and the controlling of public space as a perverse end in itself. Which was what allowed some of the encampments to become crime-riddled shit piles, a process hastened, in New York’s Zuccotti Park, when police began directing homeless people to camp there.

Ah, but that’s what they wanted you to believe. Here’s David Horowitz, the New Left leader turned right-winger. The left, he explains, “wants to create chaos. Because out of chaos, they can get power.”

Thus does the film palpitate toward its frenetic conclusion: Epileptic cross-cuts between the chaos of the late-stage Occupy marches and encampments and the violence in cities like Oakland, alternating with images of Stalin, Che, Fidel, and Mao; riots in, perhaps, South America; and the Black Panthers braying that it is “time to pick up the gun,” followed by a screaming 1960s SDSer: “We gotta build a strong base, and some day we’re gonna knock those motherfuckers who control this thing right on their ass.”

Then comes Horowitz again to explain how it is all going exactly according to plan. “The left learned one thing from the 1960s—from its failures in the ‘60s. And that is: don’t telegraph your goals. Don’t tell people that you want to overthrow the government, that you have been working to overthrow American civilization for 40 years. You pretend to be interested in issues. . . . Your goal has always been the same: to destroy a society that you’re alienated from, that you basically hate.”

The film ends with the testimony of a small businessman, “barely making ends meet,” who had the bad luck to get in the revolution’s way. You’re next.

To read it on the page in front of you, it can only seem perfectly ridiculous. You have to fill in the violent chaos of images in a way that—well, as Orwell did when he described the televised “Two Minutes Hate” in 1984.

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier. Who seems to be advancing, huge and terrible, his submachine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen . . .

That movie ended with the words:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

This one ended with Andrew Breitbart crying with heroic earnestness to the riffraff all around him, “Stop the raping! Stop the raping!”

Andrew Breitbart is dead now: long live Andrew Breitbart. Donald Trump is Lord, and Steve Bannon is his prophet—with the U.S. Treasury at his disposal to tell fairy tales like this about anyone who dares cross him.

That’s Bannon’s “profound populism.”

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The dog that caught the car

by digby

In case you haven’t been following the ins and outs of  how we got to this place on health care, I thought David Leonhardt at the New York Times had a good take on it:

How did the party’s leaders put themselves in this position? The short answer is that they began believing their own hype and set out to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Obamacare obviously has flaws. Most important, some of its insurance markets — created to sell coverage to the uninsured — aren’t functioning well enough. Alas, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are not trying to fix that problem. They’re trying to fix a fictional one: saving America from a partisan, socialistic big-government takeover of health care.

To understand why that description is wrong, it helps to recall some history. Democratic attempts to cover the uninsured stretch back almost a century. But opposition to universal government-provided insurance was always too strong. Even Lyndon Johnson, with big congressional majorities, could pass programs only for the elderly and the poor — over intense opposition that equated Medicare with the death of capitalism.

So Democrats slowly moved their proposals to the right, relying more on private insurance rather than government programs. As they shifted, though, Republicans shifted even farther right. Bill Clinton’s plan was quite moderate but still couldn’t pass.

When Barack Obama ran for president, he faced a choice. He could continue moving the party to the center or tack back to the left. The second option would have focused on government programs, like expanding Medicare to start at age 55. But Obama and his team thought a plan that mixed government and markets — farther to the right of Clinton’s — could cover millions of people and had a realistic chance of passing.

They embarked on a bipartisan approach. They borrowed from Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts, gave a big role to a bipartisan Senate working group, incorporated conservative ideas and won initial support from some Republicans. The bill also won over groups that had long blocked reform, like the American Medical Association.

But congressional Republicans ultimately decided that opposing any bill, regardless of its substance, was in their political interest. The consultant Frank Luntz wrote an influential memo in 2009 advising Republicans to talk positively about “reform” while also opposing actual solutions. McConnell, the Senate leader, persuaded his colleagues that they could make Obama look bad by denying him bipartisan cover.

At that point, Obama faced a second choice – between forging ahead with a substantively bipartisan bill and forgetting about covering the uninsured. The kumbaya plan for which pundits now wax nostalgic was not an option.

The reason is simple enough: Obamacare is the bipartisan version of health reform. It accomplishes a liberal end through conservative means and is much closer to the plan conservatives favored a few decades ago than the one liberals did. “It was the ultimate troll,” as Michael Anne Kyle of Harvard Business School put it, “for Obama to pass Republican health reform.”

Today’s Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it no longer supports any plan that covers the uninsured. Of course, Republican leaders are not willing to say as much, because they know how unpopular that position is. Having run out of political ground, Ryan, McConnell and Trump have had to invent the notion of a socialistic Obamacare that they will repeal and replace with … something great! This morning they were also left to pretend that the Budget Office report was something less than a disaster.

Their approach to Obamacare has worked quite nicely for them, until now. Lying can be an effective political tactic. Believing your own alternative facts, however, is usually not so smart.

He leaves out the part about the centrist and right wing Democrats who sabotaged efforts to make this plan a lot better and a lot stronger. Joe Lieberman even did it out of sheer pique when he backed off the excellent plan to allow 55-65 year old to buy into Medicare in order to punish the left. There is plenty for the Democrats to answer for in all this too.

But basically, he’s right. Obamacare is a bipartisan, hybrid health insurance plan that covers a lot more people than were covered before and had the framework built in to improve it in substantial ways in the future if the Republicans would ever sober up and join the modern world. Other countries have such hybrid plans and are able to cover everyone without bankrupting the country or the individual citizens.

But no, we have an antediluvian, throwback bunch of know-nothings populating one of our two major parties and instead of being chastised by the people they’ve been rewarded and now some previously unknown weirdo like Steve Bannon is in a position to pretty much destroy the world. In a polarized political world, it only takes a little luck and good timing to shift everything the other way. That’s where we are.

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There’s no escaping these headlines


by digby

Anniston Alabama:

Peoria, Illinois:

Tucson, Arizona

Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

Fr. Wayne, Indiana

That’s just a random sample of headlines across the country this morning. And I’d be willing to bet the local news featured the same story at the top of the broadcast.

There are a lot of people who only watch Fox, read Breitbart and live in their own Facebook bubbles. But these headlines are hard to escape. At least a few of the people who voted for Trump may be more concerned with whether they will live or die than their tribal delusions. I don’t know how many, but there are probably enough to give congressional Republicans some heartburn.

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Silver linings in the CBO!

by digby

Joan McCarter has the skinny:

Talk about your good news, bad news scenarios!

So, uh, not to be morbid, but why does the CBO project that Social Security outlays would fall by $3 billion? https://t.co/nE4Vq3Z5LG

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) March 13, 2017

There it is, as Fuller later tweets, on page 33 of the report, footnote f. Which maybe should garner a little bit more focus than just a footnote, yes?

Because, yes, people could die because of Trumpcare.
Approximately 17,000 people could die in 2018 who otherwise would have lived if a House Republican health proposal endorsed by the Trump administration becomes law. By 2026, the number of people killed by Trumpcare could grow to approximately 29,000 in that year alone.

That’s based on calculations ThinkProgress has done using the numbers in the CBO report plugged into a study that estimates the change in Massachusetts mortality rates after that state enacted the health law that Obamacare was largely modeled after. It found that one death was prevented for every 830 adults aged 20-64 who was covered. From there the math is straightforward: “Fourteen million divided by 830 equals 16,867 people potentially sentenced to die by Trumpcare. By 2026, if the CBO’s estimate is correct, that number could rise to 28,916 deaths in one year.”

Of course, these are people who think that freedom requires that toddlers and schizophrenics be allowed to have access to guns so I’m going to take a wild guess that they are not going to be moved by this.

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QOTD: Steve Benen

by digby

“The CBO isn’t perfect, but a Republican war on empiricism does incalculable damage to the discourse & policymaking”

Most of all, trust Trump. He promised he would never lie to them. 

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The latest GOP US Attorney scandal. They just can’t help themselves

by digby

I wrote about the latest Republican US Attorney scandal for Salon this morning:

You would think that 40 years after Watergate, Republicans would be careful not to appear overtly political when it comes to the Justice Department. But apparently they can’t help themselves. The last GOP Justice Department under George W. Bush created a huge scandal when its leaders abruptly fired a number of federal prosecutors for political purposes. These prosecutors were let go for such reasons as not succumbing to political pressure to indict Democrats in the final days before an election, and refusing to bring bogus voter fraud cases. One was fired simply because Karl Rove wanted to place a crony in the job. Most of them were loyal Republicans so it caused more of a stir than usual.

But perhaps the worst of all the reasons for some of those firings was because prosecutors had brought charges against corrupt Republicans. That was a warning sign to all the federal prosecutors in the country who were still on the job: stay away from Republicans if you know what’s good for you. That scandal eventually led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, even if lying to Congress about NSA surveillance was the final straw.

President Donald Trump has taken all this to a new level. He has already fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his Muslim travel ban, an executive order that was greeted with shock by legal experts and courts around the nation, leading his lawyers to try to draft a new one that could pass legal muster. Yates was right, and Trump’s insulting dismissal letter will long be remembered for its petulance.

On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly demanded the resignations all 46 U.S. attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. It’s not unprecedented for a new A.G. to ask for resignations, although the obvious partisanship in only removing the Obama appointees can leave no doubt about the the motives. But the way in which this was done has been crude, in typical Trump fashion, and it’s left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

When Janet Reno, attorney general during the Clinton administration, asked for the resignations of all the U.S. attorneys, they were allowed to leave gradually, finish up some important cases and wait for their replacements to be confirmed. Trump wanted these people out immediately, which raises some questions about why.

Sessions gave no indication that he planned a large-scale purge when he spoke to all the prosecutors in the middle of last week about his criminal justice agenda. But on Friday they suddenly brought the hammer down. There is some speculation that this was the result of a paranoid rant by Sean Hannity on his Fox News show Thursday night, when he exhorted Trump to begin purging the “deep state” of all those who are disloyal:

Deep-state Obama holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump. It’s time for the Trump administration to purge these saboteurs …

He even quoted the notorious Rep. Steve King saying, “Donald Trump needs to purge leftists from the executive branch before disloyal, illegal and treasonous acts sink us,” to which Hannity added, “It’s important that the president begins to hear this and act now.”

The next day he did just that. The U.S. attorney most surprised by this was Preet Bharara of the Southern District of New York, who had been personally assured by Trump and Sessions last November that he would be staying on. Trump tried to get Bharara on the phone last week and he refused to take the call, telling Sessions it was inappropriate for the president to be contacting U.S. attorneys, “particularly ones that have jurisdictions over important matters,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

There was quite a bit of drama on social media when Bharara tweeted that he was refusing to resign and then shortly followed with a note that he’d officially been fired. But it was this tweet that really raised eyebrows:

By the way, now I know what the Moreland Commission must have felt like.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) March 12, 2017

The Moreland Commission was set up in 2013 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York to investigate political corruption. After passing a few minor ethics reforms, he shut it down in 2014. Bharara decided to investigate why Cuomo did that and ended up indicting the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly along with Cuomo’s own aides. In other words, there was plenty of corruption in New York and the governor had papered it over.

Clearly, Bharara was implying with his tweet that he’d been shut down by Trump for similar reasons. As the man whose jurisdiction includes Trump Tower and many banks and other financial operations, it makes you wonder what he might have been looking at.

We do know that one of the cases Bharara was overseeing was the case against Fox News and Roger Ailes over illegal payments to settle sexual harassment complaints. The New York Times reported on Monday evening that a grand jury had just been convened in the case. The Times article references a favor done by Trump in the recent past:

In 2014, Mr. Trump intervened in a dispute between Mr. Ailes and a former aide who said he had damaging information about Mr. Ailes and the network. 

Mr. Trump negotiated a settlement on behalf of Mr. Ailes, and later boasted of his work, telling the journalist Gabriel Sherman, “When Roger was having problems, he didn’t call 97 people, he called me.”

There’s no word on whether Ailes gave the president a call this week or whether Trump’s call to Bharara might have been another attempt to “negotiate a settlement” for his friend. Trump doesn’t believe he is capable of having a conflict of interest or an inappropriate contact, so it’s not impossible to imagine that he might intervene once again on behalf of his good friend Roger.

As it happens, a lawyer at the top of the short list to replace Bharara happens to be Marc Mukasey, one of Roger Ailes’ personal attorneys. Mukasey’s firm handles real estate matters for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and one of Mukasey’s partners is Rudy Giuliani, who made his name as the U.S. attorney for New York himself. Not only that, Marc Mukasey’s father, Michael Mukasey, is the man who succeeded Alberto Gonzales as attorney general after he resigned in disgrace over the firing of U.S. attorneys for political reasons. What a coincidence.

For such an outsider, Trump certainly has a small circle of familiar Republican friends.

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No room for people
by Tom Sullivan

What’s missing from the Trump-Ryan health care plan is people.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. House Speaker Paul Ryan loves numbers. And freedom. People? Not so much.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) concludes (emphasis mine):

CBO and JCT estimate that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under the legislation than under current law. Most of that increase would stem from repealing the penalties associated with the individual mandate. Some of those people would choose not to have insurance because they chose to be covered by insurance under current law only to avoid paying the penalties, and some people would forgo insurance in response to higher premiums.

Later, following additional changes to subsidies for insurance purchased in the nongroup market and to the Medicaid program, the increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number under current law would rise to 21 million in 2020 and then to
24 million in 2026. The reductions in insurance coverage between 2018 and 2026 would stem in large part from changes in Medicaid enrollment—because some states would discontinue their expansion of eligibility, some states that would have expanded eligibility in the future would choose not to do so, and per-enrollee spending in the program would be capped. In 2026, an estimated 52 million people would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law.

That is, more Americans will lose coverage than received it under the Affordable Care Act. Americans will be worse off than if Obama’s Affordable Care Act was never passed. As much as the White House has worked in recent days to undermine the expected bad press about the Republican replacement bill from the CBO, Politico reports that a White House estimate is even bleaker. That estimate of Americans losing coverage is 26 million:

White House officials late Monday night disputed that the document is an analysis of the bill’s coverage effects. Instead, they say it was an attempt by the Office of Management and Budget to predict what CBO’s scorekeepers would conclude about the GOP repeal plan.

Big BUT, says Paul Ryan, premiums will come down 10 percent for those who are left. The Wisconsin Republican tells Fox News:

“Of course they’re going to say if we stop forcing people to buy something they don’t want to buy they’re not going to buy it,” Ryan said. “That’s why you have these uninsured numbers, which we all expected.”

According to Ryan, the key numbers in the analysis would come once the bill’s reforms took effect in 2020.

“It will lower premiums 10 percent. It stabilizes the market. It’s a $1.2 trillion spending cut, and $883 billion tax cut and $337 billion in deficit reduction,” Ryan said. “So, this compared to the status quo is far better.”

Ryan forgot to mention the CBO projects that cutting funding to Planned Parenthood for a year would result in “several thousand” additional births which, if they are the right kind of babies, will make Iowa Rep. Steve King happy.

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) March 12, 2017

Slate’s Jonathan Weissmann writes of the CBO analysis analysis:

There are lots of losers under the Republican plan to replace Obamacare, but perhaps nobody would suffer as badly as older Americans who live just above or around the poverty line. According to the new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, that group could see its insurance premiums rise by 750 percent within a decade years under the House GOP’s American Health Care Act, compared to what they’d pay under current law for more comprehensive coverage.

That’s not a typo, he repeats: 750 percent.

There will be a lot of numbers bandied about as Republicans and the Trump White House try to control the narrative surrounding the AHCA. Ryan argues that the CBO scoring fails to take into account that this is only Phase 1 of the GOP’s three phase plan for repealing and replacing Obamacare. The twin miracles of choice and competition don’t kick in until later, Market willing.

What’s lost among the political abstractions and ideology is people. The numbers leave little room for human beings seeing a doctor when they get sick. But freedom, ya know? And deficit reduction. And corporate tax cuts. “Far better” for treating your child’s cancer, or your own.

Don't worry, getting rid of state lines, which will promote competition, will be in phase 2 & 3 of healthcare rollout. @foxandfriends— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017

Believe him. But maybe a little more detail is needed in Phase 2.

Dear Professor Stanger

by tristero

Dear Professor Stanger,

I have, in fact, read The Bell Curve, the book Charles Murray co-authored with Richard Herrnstein (who died before publication).As I recall, the book appeared to me to be little more than a spectacularly pathetic attempt to boost the low self-esteem of the authors by claiming that blacks in general had inherently lower IQs than their own ethnic groups. My heart went out to Murray and I hoped he would find a good therapist that would instill some some self-confidence in him.

But even more so, my heart went out to the people who would be surely harmed by his terrible book. I knew that The Bell Curve would be mistaken as being super-serious intellectual research (it’s got charts and things!) when it was nothing of the sort.

Here’s where you come in.

Murray is a hero to racists with pretensions to intellectuality, like college-age right-wingers. But having regular access to the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed pages (I’ve also read many of Murray’s op-eds and they’re as unserious as The Bell Curve) makes it difficult for Murray to complain that someone’s trying to suppress his freedom of speech. For that, he needs useful idiots who are prepared to invite him not to fawning right wing think tanks or Klan meetings, but to places where the people who his writings actually harm can confront him.

Make no mistake about it: the racism that Murray empowers is as inexcusable and irresponsible as the injuries you suffered. I’m extremely sorry that you were hurt, but I’m also extremely sorry that Murray was provided an excuse to claim the high road. Both are utterly disgraceful outcomes of this unfortunate set of circumstances.

Love,

tristero

Faces of regret

by digby

Yes, he said all these things. But he’s an ignorant fool and had no idea what he was saying. Unfortunately a lot of people believed in him. 

They must be so proud

by digby

CBO report is out and it’s as ugly as we anticipated:

The House Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would cause 24 million people to lose health insurance within a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Monday.

Republicans had been bracing for what was almost certain to be a bleak accounting of the legislation’s projected effects. The American Health Care Act, as Republicans call their bill, was already facing widespread criticism from providers of health care, some conservatives, and a united Democratic Party. The numbers released Monday will only make it more difficult for Republicans to explain why their legislation would bring positive change to the country’s health care system.

In recent days, Democrats had criticized Republicans for pushing the health care bill through two House committees last week before the Congressional Budget Office had weighed in, saying it was irresponsible to begin considering legislation without a firm grip on its potential costs and ramifications.

“Republicans are racing their disastrous health bill forward before the C.B.O. can expose its consequences to the American people, but they can’t hide from the facts forever,” the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said last week.

The C.B.O. produces a variety of budget and economic analyses, including deficit projections, legislative options for lawmakers confronting the nation’s most vexing problems, and cost estimates for legislation. Its director, Keith Hall, was appointed in 2015 by congressional Republicans, and it has maintained respect for its objective analysis.

But with an unfavorable analysis expected, Republicans from the White House to Capitol Hill began to undermine the credibility of the budget office’s numbers last week and kept it up through the weekend.

“If the C.B.O. was right about Obamacare to begin with, there’d be 8 million more people on Obamacare today than there actually are,” President Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” He added, “Sometimes we ask them to do stuff they’re not capable of doing.”

The number of people who have signed up for insurance through the health law’s exchanges is lower than expected, in part because employers did not drop coverage to the extent that had been anticipated. In addition, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not be compelled to expand Medicaid — and many Republican-led states opted not to do so.

That’s right. He actually said that the CBO numbers were wrong without mentioning that the reason fewer people are covered is because the Republicans challenged the Medicaid expansion and GOP governors decided they’d rather have poor people die than take federal money to cover them. That’s how blatantly dishonest they are.

It’s bad. Middle class and lower income older people in particular are totally screwed. But hey, we’re just taking up space anyway so whatever, right?

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