Little Donnie 8 years old
by digby
He’s tweeting from the G-20 Summit of world leaders:
I don’t know who might have mentioned this to him. Seems odd though, that any world leaders is following this story in that kind of detail.
So, of course, the truth is that some random person mentioned it, probably him, and he’s lying. Because that’s what he does. Blatantly and without shame or even self-awareness.
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Skimpier health care? Freedom!
by Tom Sullivan
The July 4th recess in Washington and Donald Trump’s trip to the G20 summit has back-burnered reporting of some of the protests of the Senate health care bill. But they are still out there. Liz Plank writes at Vox:
Worried about the proposed cuts to Medicaid in the Senate Republicans’ version of the health care bill, several activists with disabilities staged a sit-in at the Phoenix office of Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) on Wednesday. One protester, Anastasia Bacigalupo, live-streamed her arrest on Facebook as she and two other women being arrested shouted, “I’d rather go to jail than die without Medicaid.” According to AZ Central, four other people were arrested for trespassing.
It matters. Turning Medicaid into block grants to states and capping its growth could easily place cash-strapped states in the position of severely restricting aid to people with disabilities whose freedom to live and work as part of their communities, rather than as outcasts, was a long time coming. Freedom is a popular shibboleth on among conservatives, but amorphous and somewhat Darwinian in practice.
“We fought so hard to have our right to live in the community recognized, and now … we’re still fighting for our freedom from incarceration in institutions,” Gabrielle Ficchi, one of the protestors at Sen. Flake’s office, told Vox. “Home and community services are what allow us to do our jobs, live our lives, and raise our families,” she continued.
Amanda Marcotte highlights this morning how McConnell’s plan strips the essential health care benefits in Obamacare as a way to lower premiums. Citing Timothy Jost, a health care expert from the Washington and Lee University School of Law, Marcotte writes, it is “a back-door way to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, limit important and life-saving health services.” Marcotte explains:
Under various versions of the Republican plan, states would be able to apply for waivers to exempt plans sold in their state from this mandated list of essential health care benefits. Republicans have repeatedly insisted that their bill bars discrimination against patients with pre-existing conditions. But as Jost explained, ending essential health care benefits creates a mechanism that allows insurance companies to deny coverage of those pre-existing conditions. You’d be allowed to buy insurance, but it might not pay for the things you really need it for.
“So you got a mental health problem, sorry, we’re happy to insure you, but we don’t cover mental health problems,” Jost said, describing the logic. “You’ve got cancer? We’re happy to insure you. We don’t cover any chemotherapy drugs or we don’t cover radiation therapy.”
Plus, Obamacare prohibits insurers from placing lifetime or annual caps on care covered under essential benefits. Repealing that brings back the threat of bankruptcy for a single illness or accident. Obamcare attempted to circumvent that.
As more people get wind of what is and is not in the Republican plan, the heat is rising on Republican lawmakers to reject it even as fractures in the Republican caucus make that more likely. Mike Lee of Utah and Texas Senator Ted Cruz believe in freedom, just a different kind from one that would help Gabrielle Ficchi. They are promoting including a Consumer Freedom Option in the bill that would allow insurers to offer plans with the full suite of Obamacare’s essential benefits as well as “skimpier plans” with less coverage. (The Club for Growth backs the plan, just so you know.) But such provisions would surely alienate Susan Collins of Maine who heard nothing but healthcare from constituents on July 4th. “I don’t want to see insurance that’s not really insurance,” Collins said.
Over the break, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is warning of the consequences of the Senate bill failing. Republicans may have to work with Democrats to stabilize insurance markets, he told supporters in Kentucky, reinforcing the Trump narrative that Obamacare is collapsing:
“If my side is unable to agree on an adequate replacement, then some kind of action with regard to the private health insurance market must occur,” McConnell said at a Rotary Club lunch in this deep-red rural area of southern Kentucky. He made the comment after being asked if he envisioned needing bipartisan cooperation to replace Obama’s law.
“No action is not an alternative,” McConnell said. “We’ve got the insurance markets imploding all over the country, including in this state.”
McConnell will try to keep up pressure on his caucus and twist arms. The scare tactics might still work. We thought the most unpopular piece of legislation in two decades was dead months ago and it’s back again. A Morning Consult/Politico poll released this week shows what Republicans might be hearing while at home:
Overall, 44% said that the US healthcare system would be worse off under the GOP legislation, while 28% said it would improve.
Forty-five percent of people believed the Republican healthcare plan would increase their personal costs, while only 21% thought it would decrease costs. Republicans have touted the ability of the plan to bring costs down, but it doesn’t appear to be resonating with voters.
What resonates with Republicans in Congress will be the threat of losing their seats, and then more to primary challenges than to general election losses. The fate of the Better Care Reconciliation Act will depend not on how much pressure McConnell exerts, but on how much voters do.
Projection on a small scale
by digby
Apparently the left isn’t doing enough on its own to show how deeply it believes in the destruction of America so the right feels it’s necessary to help them:
A supporter of President Trump in Connecticut says he wrote threatening anti-Trump graffiti on elementary school equipment hoping to frame Democrats because he believes they are “disrespectful to our government.”
Stephen Marks, 32, wrote “Kill Trump,” “Left is the best,” “Bernie Sanders2020″ and “Death to Trump” on playground equipment at Hartford’s Morley Elementary School last month, according to the Hartford Courant.
Marks has been ordered by a judge to stay away from the school and has a court date next month.He told the newspaper that he was was taking his dog to the park on a bicycle when he found a green marker and “had the dumb idea to vandalize the school with what would seem to be liberal hate speech.”
A surveillance camera caught the vandalism, and police posted footage showing him riding around on his bike and then writing on the equipment. Marks said he turned himself in after seeing the footage on the news.
He was charged with third-degree criminal mischief and breach of peace, according to the Courant.Marks apologized for the incident, saying he knows his actions were “stupid” and “illegal,” adding he would “never harm the president or any member of government.”
Marks told police he vandalized the equipment “out of anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws every day and being disrespectful towards our government,” the Courant reported.
This was no big deal. Just a little prank. But he clearly believes what that NRA ad is spewing. And that’s …. not good.
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What to expect from the Trump-Putin meeting
by digby
Nobody knows what will happen, of course. But Spencer Ackerman asked some former spies and investigators with longtime experience dealing with the KGB and its successor the FSB, which trained President Putin, to speculate. Here’s a little bit of what they said:
Ahead of meeting the U.S. president in Hamburg, [Putin’s] foreign ministry has said the agenda will concern everything from Syria to Ukraine to returning two intelligence complexes on U.S. soil – even to gay rights in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Trump national security adviser H.R. McMaster has said there won’t be a “specific agenda” for discussion, beyond “whatever the president wants to talk about.” There is confusion on the U.S. side about whether McMaster’s Russia chief, the Putin skeptic Fiona Hill, will attend the meeting.
Putin, former spies say, is well-positioned to dominate the meeting. Whether he wants commitments from Trump on specific things or simply a grip-and-grin photo op, Putin stands a good chance of getting his way – provided he tells Trump to ignore the losers and the critics and portrays what Putin wants as how Trump gets the drop on them yet again.
“Trump is just about a sociopathic narcissist,” said Glenn Carle, a retired CIA interrogator and analyst. “That’s not to denounce him, just an assessment of the guy…. Fulsome praise, full of garbage, is a small price to pay to get what you want.”
To cultivate Trump, Carle said, “you praise and piss him off at the same time. You want to push his buttons to get him to do something reflexive.” That is, point Trump’s fury in the direction of what Putin can portray as a mutual enemy – even if it’s a traditional U.S. ally.
“What do they want? Say it’s eastern Ukraine. You continue to undermine the U.S. commitment and the need for NATO, and you do that by talking about what he thinks he understands: money and trade. You build upon the spurious line that Germany and NATO are free riders, bilking Americans out of money. ‘Why should Americans die for some Krauts?’ That plays in the Peoria that is Trump’s mind.”
“The truly scary part is Putin only has to say to Trump ‘you are right and the haters are wrong’ to manipulate him,” adds Naveed Jamali, a former undercover FBI double agent. The Russians, Jamali added, are “devious motherfuckers,” skilled at manipulating others into doing their bidding without recognizing it.
The last time Trump met with Russian dignitaries, he shared with them intelligence on the so-called Islamic State provided to the U.S. by Israel. This time, Trump’s briefers in the CIA may be more likely to obscure their sources of information while providing Trump with what he needs to know ahead of the economic summit, said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst – something which, in turn, may impact Putin’s goals for their meeting.
“I’d not look at it as an opportunity to squeeze secrets out of Trump but rather to [maneuver] U.S. policy,” Pillar said, whether on Ukraine, lifting Obama-era sanctions on Russia, or Syria. For that, Putin is likely to rely on “techniques of flattery.”
A test case for Russia came in Saudi Arabia, Jamali said. There, the Saudis threw Trump a massive party for the president’s first foreign trip, replete with nonstop flattery, a dance involving swords and a photo with a mysterious orb that garnered worldwide publicity. Weeks later, with Saudi Arabia in a massive regional dispute with Qatar, Trump openly backed the Saudi sideeven as his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called for an end to the conflict.
The Saudi Arabia visit might also provide a template for Russia for a different reason.
With Russia at the center of the scandal overhanging the Trump administration, no one interviewed for this story expected the Putin-Trump meeting to yield immediate deliverables or anything else that Trump’s critics can portray as a favor for Putin. But late Wednesday, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, floated a possible expansion of U.S.-Russian cooperation on Syria, creating the possibility that the G20 meetup will yield a shifted course for the U.S. on terms favorable to Russia.
In the absence of a clear Russia policy from the young administration, Putin’s goal for the meeting is to maneuver that emerging policy in his favor – or, failing that, encourage the chaos that tends to characterize Trump’s foreign policies.
“Putin’s minimum objective will be to demonstrate that Russia is a co-equal power, which he can achieve with a simple handshake-and-smile photo,” said Evelyn Farkas, the Pentagon’s top Russia policy official in the Obama administration. Beyond that is for Trump to give a “verbal commitment to work toward returning the intelligence [facilities] shut down by Obama” or a similar pledge to “work to modify or eliminate sanctions on Russia.”
In Moscow, all this appears as the U.S. finally giving Russia its due.
Maybe Trump will surprise us. But I doubt it. The most likely scenario is that he’ll say that he and Vlad have ushered in a new era of cooperation and good will because he will have been flattered into thinking that’s the case. And that will buy him many plaudits from blind partisans who were Russia hawks just six months ago, right-wingers who just love a strongman no matter where he’s from and lefties who want to believe that Trump is a serious peacemaker intent upon taking down the neoliberals who allegedly want permanent war with Russia.
We’ll have to see. But Trump is a fool and Putin is not so I’m going to guess that Russia will likely come out of this meeting feeling strengthened. And maybe that’s fine. Good feelings are good. It all depends on what comes next.
Update: It looks like the inexperienced oilman Rex Tillersonwill be the only one in the room with Trump, Putin and his very experienced foreign minister.
There will likely only be six people in the room when President Trump meets President Putin on Friday at the sidelines of the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.
According to an official familiar with the meeting’s planning, it will be Trump, Putin, the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, and translators.
What it’s like to be on their radar
by digby
This first person account of the “Pizzagate” assault is just an uplifting account of the community rallying around a victim of right wing bullshit. It’s also a very scary account of the effects of right wing propaganda:
Of all the bizarre turns in the 2016 presidential race, few top Pizzagate. The conspiracy theory, spread across alt-right media, centered on the idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, one of her top aides, were running a secret child-trafficking ring out of a pizza place, Comet Ping Pong, in Washington, D.C. The story was ludicrous, but for Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, the nightmare was real and terrifying–from the first virulent posts online to the day a gunman stormed the pizzeria. –As told to Burt Helm
It was about 9:30 or 10 on the night of November 5 when I saw I had a voice mail from Will Sommer, a reporter at the Washington City Paper: “Do you know about this online conspiracy theory that you’re running a child-slavery ring out of Comet with Hillary Clinton?”
It was right before the election. A lot of crazy things were happening. A lot of talk about conspiracies was being thrown around, and John Podesta’s emails had been hacked and were being leaked. Over the years, I had had email exchanges with Podesta about cooking for fundraisers. At first, I was like, “Oh, this is so funny. I’m in WikiLeaks.” We started getting weird comments on Comet’s Facebook and Instagram posts and on my personal accounts. I just deleted them and set my account to private.
When Donald Trump won, I thought, now, finally, at least this crazy conspiracy theory will go away. But the opposite happened. It grew and grew and became more and more focused on Comet. I got a call from a friend who works at MIT’s Media Lab. He told me, this thing is out of control.
Messages and comments poured in. At one point, I was getting about 75 personal messages on social media a day. My response was to shut everything down–delete the comments, try not to respond. I thought, obviously this has to end eventually.
But it only kept escalating. Many of the messages were violent–“I have a gun. I want you to die”–and gory–“I pray that someone comes in with an assault rifle and kills everyone inside Comet. I want to cut open your guts and watch them spill out on the floor.” I’d just shut my laptop and go on with my day.
It got scary when users started performing what I’ll call “citizen’s investigations.” Users sifted through my social media profiles and started messaging everyone who’d ever liked or commented on a post of mine. I started getting calls from friends, family, and customers who said they were getting harassed online as well.
The phone started ringing all day long. You can’t ignore phone calls when it’s part of your business. People call the pizza place to ask, “How busy is it? Can we get a table? We want to order food.” Now my staff was hearing “We know what’s going on! You should turn James in! You’re going to go to jail too if you don’t.” Or screaming “You’re sick!” Some people I knew were like, “This is stupid.” Others were terrified. I had to learn how to get these posts taken down, the steps you can take to reclaim your privacy. Mostly, there’s nothing you can do.
The stress does weird things to your body. I was exhausted every day but never tired. I was on full alert, full of adrenaline. It was very intense. Then I’d go to the restaurant, and everything was normal. I’d feel fear, but there’d be all these families and kids happily eating. It was like a parallel universe.
Later, Cecilia Kang, a reporter for The New York Times, asked to write a piece about what was happening. At the time, I’d been denying media requests. Once the Times piece came out, it wasn’t a dirty secret–everyone knew about Pizzagate. Employees and I talked every day about how to field questions from customers.
The community really rallied around us. Online, a movement started–“We’ll all go to Comet at 6 p.m. Sunday to show our support!” It was like, thanks, people, but can’t you just come in several waves–400 people showed up at once. The managers were saying, “We are going to be hugged to death!” From that point on, every day was like our busiest day of the year.
The gunman arrived on the afternoon of December 4. I wasn’t in. I was at a church fair when I got the call from one of my managers. She was crying and said, “A guy came in with an assault rifle.”
The man with the gun, Edgar Welch, had decided to “self-investigate” Comet. He rushed in through the front door and walked toward the back, and shot open the only locked door in the restaurant, a closet, damaging computer systems inside. My manager told me everyone was safe and evacuated to a firehouse across the street. When I got there, the police had locked down the block. That night, we went back. It was so weird. The tables were empty, but you could see full beers and half-eaten pizza on the table–the moment when time stopped.
At that point, I was ready to close temporarily. The next day, the phone never stopped ringing–“When are you open? Are you open tonight?” Basically, the community said, “We’re coming. Open your doors.” From Sunday until Tuesday evening, I did everything I could to get security in order. And we opened. The way people came out to support us, it was incredible, an overwhelming sensation.
From that point on, though, I was fearful. I was still receiving death threats. I started wearing a hat and sunglasses to leave the house. And the security people were like, “Yeah. You’re in danger.”
There’s more. Read the whole thing.
All political violence is wrong, no matter who does it. And paranoid weirdos come in all partisan stripes. The man who shot Republicans at a baseball game was obviously politically motivated and became violent. But this is something else. It’s a full-blown lunatic conspiracy theory flogged by people with relationships to the highest levels of the Trump campaign.
The loon didn’t kill anyone, thank God. But there are major right wing organizations who are portraying millions of mainstream liberals as violent traitors who are destroying the nation. It’s only a matter of time.
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Let’s hope they can keep the matches away from the toddler
by digby
It’s hard to believe but the big question surrounding the Trump Putin summit is whether Trump will allow any adult supervision of the talks:
Internally, administration and White House officials are fretting about the prospect of a Trump-Putin meeting that bears any resemblance to the president’s May gathering in the Oval Office with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, and Sergey Kislyak, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington.
During that meeting, Trump divulged sensitive details of Israeli intelligence surrounding planned ISIS terrorist attacks in the U.S. and Europe. Russian government photos from the meeting—American photographers were barred from the event—portrayed what seemed to be a friendly, even lighthearted, meeting between the president and Russia’s top diplomats.
A Wednesday report from the New York Times detailed concerns both within and outside of the administration that Trump and Putin might emerge looking like allies and friends, a sentiment that officials also relayed to The Daily Beast.
“Yeah, it’s a concern,” a third White House official, citing fallout over Trump’s May meeting, said of those potential pitfalls. “After Lavrov, it’s always a concern.”
Part of the concern stems from Trump’s tendency to shoot from the hip in tweets and public statements that frequently contradict statements from his own aides. That habit ensnared National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his deputy Dina Powell in the aftermath of the Lavrov meeting, when they all-but-denied that Trump had divulged sensitive intelligence to the Russians, only to have the president tacitly confirm that he did hours later.
McMaster and Powell were both in the room for that meeting. And senior aides are pushing for Powell to join Hill during the president’s Putin pow-wow as well, according to administration sources. As of Wednesday, the list for those participating in the meeting had not yet been finalized.
But aides have been pushing to stack the meeting with officials who might help nudge Trump in the right direction—or at least present a more politically palatable front.
“The idea is to get as many adults in the room as humanly possible,” one senior administration official said.
Jesus. He’s already said contradictory things about Russia, an anodyne American speech about respecting borders and blah, blah, blah and then telling a reporter that sure, Russia meddled in the election, well, maybe, we don’t really know, and anyway other countries did it too.
Clearly, he’s fine with it. They helped him and he’s grateful for it. There is no other way to interpret his behavior. Whether he knew about it, or ok’d the help, either tacitly or implicitly, is still unknown. But he knows now and he’s obviously happy they did it.
It’s fair to wonder why he isn’t saying anything “stronger” (his favorite word) at this late date. I have hesitated to speculate about blackmail but it’s getting harder to discount the possibility. There is no reason why he should still be hedging about this unless he’s afraid of something.
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I wrote about what the Republicans are facing for Salon this morning:
It’s weeks like this when Democrats need to remind themselves that with Donald Trump in the White House and a Republican majority in Congress, they not only have to walk and chew gum at the same time, they have to do it blindfolded on a tightrope. They’re looking at a potential nuclear event on the Korean peninsula, a historic meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin in which anything could happen, a global confab with 20 world leaders and the necessity to prevent the legislative atrocity of the GOP health care bill.
All that is on top of the ongoing trickle of news about the Russia investigation and the various horrors emanating from the executive agencies that would normally inspire headlines and protests of their own. The news media will flit from one thing to another, and is especially drawn to its own ongoing war with the White House, which is somewhat understandable.
It’s a lot to keep up with. Indeed, the assault from every angle, while haphazard and chaotic, may succeed in some areas simply because it’s impossible to defend against all of it.
But let’s not forget that the Republicans are also facing a monster agenda that is even more unpopular than their president, who consistently hovers around a 35-to-40 percent approval rating. First of all, they have been getting an earful from their constituents over the July 4 break. And it hasn’t been pretty. In town hall after town hall, Republicans have had to try to explain to angry and terrified citizens why they are considering voting for a plan that, according to polling by USA Today, finds approval from only 12 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, we have newly anointed health care experts Ted Cruz and Rand Paul offering “alternatives.” Paul, with an assist from the wily right-winger with a smile, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, wants to just pull the plug on Obamacare tomorrow and then think about something different sometime in the future. Maybe. He confidently assures us that those people who depend upon it will be happy that the Republicans granted them freedom from life-saving health care. Cruz, on the other hand, seems to be attempting to unconvincingly morph from a radical obstructionist to a conciliatory mediator with a “compromise” that everyone knows will still amount to vast numbers of uninsured people accompanied by pain, suffering and financial catastrophe. (So naturally conservatives on Capitol Hill are warming to it.)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has undoubtedly been losing some sleep over the past few days. He’s facing an unpalatable choice. He’s going to have to try to pass something among the awful plans on offer, making his vulnerable 2018 senators even more vulnerable — or he’s going to fail to pass something among the awful plans on offer, making his vulnerable 2018 senators even more vulnerable. And there is nothing more important to McConnell than keeping control of the Senate in 2018.
Then there’s the House, the moderate members of which held their noses and voted for their version of this health care monstrosity with the promise that they were going to “fix it in the Senate.” That didn’t happen. Indeed, in some ways the Senate bill is even worse. But the House Freedom Caucus has already put the leadership on notice that the Senate bill is unacceptably generous and they’re demanding more cruelty or they are out.
That doesn’t mean Republicans won’t pass the health care bill in the end, of course. Enough members could easily conclude that they are in a lose-lose situation so they might as well get their tax cuts. But lets just say that it’s not getting any easier.
But that’s not the GOP leadership’s only problem, however. The longer the health care bill takes, the further back they have to push the other important items on their agenda, including the 2018 budget resolution and the conservative holy grail: tax reform.
According to Stan Collender in Forbes, unlike in previous years when the budget was pushed back with continuing resolutions, Republicans face disaster if they don’t pass a budget this year.
Unless they decide to change the procedures, the entire Trump/GOP legislative strategy relies on Congress adopting a 2018 budget resolution that includes reconciliation instructions to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees to do tax reform.
A budget resolution will also provide the Senate with the legally required guidelines on how much it can appropriate next year. Without that it will have trouble moving forward.
You see, Republican leaders had a plan, but it hinged on pushing their health care reform bill quick and dirty through the House and then the Senate so they could immediately jump to the budget and set the table for tax reform. The problem now is that House Republicans are at each other’s throats over spending priorities, to the point that the House Budget Committee had to cancel its planned mark-up session. The Senate hasn’t even scheduled one yet.
And then there’s the debt ceiling, which comes up again in August — although most people think there will be enough money to fund the government until October. As Collender notes in his piece for Forbes, the problem is that nobody trusts Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s numbers, or anyone else’s coming from the Trump administration, and the required “clean” debt ceiling vote will be a tough lift, even with the GOP in full charge of the government. According to Niv Ellis at The Hill, only 16 current GOP House members backed the last such debt ceiling vote and not many will commit to doing it again. Democrats certainly have no reason to bail them out after the way Republicans behaved the last time this came up under President Obama.
Needless to say, nobody knows what kind of a mess Trump and his minions will create in the middle of all this. Recall that during the campaign, Trump said the country should just default on the debt and then “renegotiate,” the same way he used to refuse to pay vendors, then offer them a pittance and tell them to sue him if they didn’t like it. It’s conceivable Trump might even veto his own party’s debt-ceiling legislation.
All these votes ahead, and there will be many of them, will be misery for the GOP Congress and its leadership in particular. They only have themselves to blame for that. Republicans have spent years building a majority full of extremists and obstructionists and they just helped elect a man who has no idea how government works and seems to have no capacity to learn. What did they expect?
Surely it’s only the uneducated…
by digby
This is a problem with the lower order, amirite? Surely, it isn’t manifested among educated elites …
From the Harvard Crimson:
The Fox Club will not allow the nine women who had enjoyed “provisional” status in the group to become full members, effectively expelling the women and marking the club’s return to all-male status almost two years after it first became co-ed.
The move, detailed in internal correspondence between recent Fox graduates, ends the club’s experiment in co-ed membership, which began in October 2015 when undergraduates admitted a group of upperclassmen women as members. That decision deeply divided the club, pitting graduate and undergraduate members against each other as Harvard administrators pressured final clubs to go gender-neutral.
Ultimately, the club’s graduate leadership allowed the women to stay on as “provisional” members—a designation that many male members also adopted at the time in a show of support for their female peers. But the club did not invite any more women to join the club, accepting an all-male class of membership last fall.
The Fox Club will not allow the nine women who had enjoyed ‘provisional’ status in the group to become full members, marking the club’s return to all-male status.
It’s only 2017. What’s the hurry? And anyway, it’s not as if elite clubs at Ivy league universities provide any special professional networking possibilities.
Oh, and look here. The ultimate elite organization:
Trumpcare for kids
by Tom Sullivan
Source: Georgetown University
If policymakers are not focusing on quick fixes, they are fixating on the the wrong problems. Politico this morning examines how the focus on lowering insurance premiums misses the still-growing overall cost of health care: prescription drugs, hospital stays, deductibles, co-pays, etc. Even if Republicans were to somehow rein in premiums, the overall costs are going to pop out somewhere else, like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury from a broken thermometer.
Growing premiums made a tight, sound-bite issue to run on last fall:
“Too many in the GOP confuse adjustments in how insurance premiums are regulated with bringing competitive pressures to bear on the costs of medical services,” the American Enterprise Institute’s James Capretta wrote in a recent commentary for Real Clear Health. “They say they want lower premiums for consumers, but their supposed solution would simply shift premium payments from one set of consumers to another.”
Republicans claim their plans for replacing Obamacare will cut the federal government’s health care expenditures — $800 billion less on Medicaid over a decade. But that will only shift the burden elsewhere.
Many Republicans predict that limiting federal payments to states would force Medicaid to be more efficient. Democrats says the GOP bill would basically thrust those costs onto the states and onto Medicaid beneficiaries themselves, who are too poor, by definition, to get their care — often including nursing homes — without government assistance.
The CBO gave a mixed assessment of what would happen to premiums under the GOP proposals. They’d rise before they’d fall — and they wouldn’t fall for everyone. Older and sicker people could well end up paying more, and government subsidies would be smaller, meaning that even if the sticker price of insurance comes down, many people at the lower end of the income scale wouldn’t be able to afford it.
The Kaiser Family Foundation believes it is the overall cost of health care the public feels more than premiums.
The Los Angeles Times considers what $800 billion less spent on Medicaid will mean to children in rural areas such as Fayette County, West Virginia where voters overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. Five percent of children nationwide are without health coverage today, down from 14 percent two decades ago. Cutting Medicaid puts them at renewed risk:
“There is just no way to cut Medicaid on the scale that they are talking about and avoid hitting kids,” said Dr. Traci Acklin, who grew up in Fayette County and now runs the only pediatrician’s practice in Montgomery, out of the first floor of a community hospital founded a century ago to care for sick miners.
“Without the health insurance, kids aren’t going to get the immunizations and the checkups. There are going to be more lost days of school. More trips to the emergency room…. It would be food or healthcare for a lot of these families.”
Medicaid expenditures for children yield improved health, reading scores, and reduced dropout rates as well as higher future earnings according to research cited by the Times:
Overall, the Senate GOP legislation would slash more than a third of federal Medicaid funds over the next 20 years and nearly double the ranks of the uninsured by 2026, according to recent analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Budget analysts and many state governors, including some Republicans, predict such a retrenchment will have a devastating impact, including on children, as some 45 million low-income children rely on Medicaid and CHIP nationally.
The vast majority of counties where those children on Medicaid or CHIP reside — 622 of the 780 counties — have populations under 50,000, the report continues. “Most of the counties are overwhelmingly white, with the exception of predominantly African American counties in the Mississippi Delta and heavily Latino counties in New Mexico and along the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.” In Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, a majority of children in three-quarters of the counties count on two or more taxpayer-supported plans.
If the current Republican plan(s) for Obamacare reform pass, more is at stake for adults as well, writes Anna Maria Barry-Jester at FiveThirtyEight:
There’s little doubt that reducing the program’s federal funding by $772 billion over the next 10 years would alter who Medicaid covers and what services enrollees can receive. Medicaid covers more people than any other entitlement program in the country, so any changes would affect a lot of people. The program is responsible for 62 percent of nursing home residents in the U.S. and covers nearly half of all births. It also insures people who are in particularly dire need of health care: children with complicated, chronic conditions and people with HIV, for example. And that costs a lot of money. Medicaid is one of the federal government’s largest expenses, after Social Security, defense and Medicare. It’s the second-largest expense to states, after education.
What a shame the richest country in the world can no longer afford Americans. It will shed blood to defend them, but it won’t spend money to heal them.
Well. The holiday is over. Time to get back (myself included) to making sure our electeds don’t get an extended one.
Update: NC Senators faxed.
He’s with the Nazis
by digby
How many of these loons are there anyway?
A video posted by Representative Clay Higgins from inside a former gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau on Saturday sparked outrage from officials, who took him to task for politicizing a space where around 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were exterminated. Rather than pausing to reflect in silence as signs request, Higgins, who serves on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, chose the somber setting as the backdrop for a call to arms in his home country.
“This is why homeland security must be squared away, why our military must be invincible,” Higgins says in the video, over a violin solo from Holocaust drama Schindler’s List. “The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II. The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this. It’s hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment — unwavering commitment — to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”
I’m not sure who this Republican congressman is identifying with here. It appears that most people think he’s taking the side of the victims of the Holocaust even though his call for a strong military and Homeland Security doesn’t exactly scan unless he thinks that Americans are in danger of being shipped off to concentration camps in other countries. Or something.
In fact, if you look at his other writings it’s not entirely clear that he isn’t taking the side of the perpetrators:
Higgins’ enthusiasm for Trump and the policies he has ushered in extends beyond homeland security videos filmed in former gas chambers. In a Facebook post last month, the former sheriff’s department spokesman declared that “all of Christendom…is at war with Islamic horror” and called for all Muslims suspected of being “radicalized” to be killed.
“Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter,” Higgins wrote. “Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”
He’s an extremely stupid person with no idea about what happened in WWII, obviously. So, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to the Holocaust. But his rants about Muslims certainly show him to be a violent, sadistic man — just the type that ran the death camps. They said “kill them all” too. And they got 6 million of them.
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