What else is there to say?
My general rule is people in the end recognize their self interest.
Nope
The GOP agenda in incredibly unpopular. Nobody wants tax cuts for the rich. No on wants these idiotic GOP healthcare ideas.
It’s all so funny.
schadenfreude – noun- pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.
Trump backers saying he's really not responsible re: AHCA are, in effect, saying he's a dope taken in by evil Svengali Paul Ryan. Ridiculous
— Brit Hume (@brithume) March 24, 2017
Normally Planned Parenthood doesn't recommend withdrawal. But in the case of this bill…
— Rob Cottingham (@RobCottingham) March 25, 2017
Today's summit on vasectomies and early detection of prostate cancer. pic.twitter.com/bqXDTPSV4Z
— Kirsty Webeck (@KirstyWebeck) March 24, 2017
My last post. The hope is the Tea Party reaction is to give up – to see themselves as having been played.
I can't get over this quote from @RepJoeBarton after the #AHCA failed. pic.twitter.com/TuUyAEyAbU
— Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) March 24, 2017
Last one – this is pretty sweet:
Omg Obama White House Photographer just posted this, read the caption. pic.twitter.com/P8vGtM6KJ8
— Yashar (@yashar) March 24, 2017
don’t know how to embed the original picture. it generated some good comments.
How do you embed tweets in the html here? The “embed tweet” button isn’t available on mobile/the app.
I’m finding an embed menu [right click] after I copy the tweet, but I’m on a desktop -didn’t see how to embed the picture to which the tweet replies, just the text.
not going to mind being chained to the desk this weekend though.
Poor Donnie — a judge shot down his first “great travel ban.” He whined and vowed to take it to the Supreme Court. Then pivoted to dismiss that order as merely good — he didn’t like some things in it — and his next one would be great. Does anybody know where this stands after the second great one was shot down?
He used the same playbook on this. Whined and downgraded the failed bill from great to merely good (maybe very good) and promised that the next one will be great.
Hasn’t burst his little invincibility bubble yet — but a few more major defeats and he’ll lose it soon enough.
How a huckster changes the goalposts:
Uri Geller — I never said that I could bend spoons right here and now. Only when and where the conditions are right will the spoons bend.
Trump only said, “repeal and replace” along with variations that it would be done quickly at least sixty-eight times (that his tweets and reporters preserved it when they weren’t too bored to file the same report).
It seems like quickly in Washington means “maybe a century”. When will the Cold War be over? Next Century? For politicians like Putin and Clinton, the answer is “never”. When will the Obama end the Middle East wars and justify his Peace Prize?
Repeal and replace was a laugh. Adulterate and continue was what they meant.
My comment was only to illustrate how a huckster operates. Trump is so naive and ignorant that he expected that a President could snap his fingers and his will would be done. Not that he can define his will beyond the level of cheap campaign rhetoric.
wrt to fast or slow in DC that’s sort of willy nilly. Sometimes glacially slow when it needs some speed and sometimes lightening fast when it should have been glacially slow. An example of the latter is the Commodity Futures ‘Modernization’ Act. Changed and passed in the dead of night without any oversight. Should have been repealed as quickly when Obama took office because there’s nothing modern about returning to the 19th century.
IUSE=”debug ipv6 livecd make-symlinks math mdev pam selinux sep-usr static syslog systemd”
The rich want tax cuts for the rich and they want their lapdogs from BOTH parties to pay for them.
And SOME dog in the manager people want the Obamacare cuts. Believers that all the poor are loafers want Medicaid to disappear. Single men don’t want to pay for maternity or women’s health. Some women don’t want to pay for Viagra. People not eligible for the subsidies want the subsidies gone. Insurance companies want the coverage requirements and profit limits gone. It’s a national case of “Screw you, Jack. I’ve got mine.”
Meanwhile an e-mail from NARFE informs me that bill to retroactively take away FEHB coverage from retirees is advancing unnoticed under the guise of “Postal Reform”.
I’ll contribute to a legal fund if that ex post facto passes. Are any of those Republicans, lawyers? Or do they only believe in
Shariya LawCanon Law?Apparently that was still in the cut and paste buffer. It’s from a reply on a technical forum that i was following at the same time.
It must have been bewildering.
yes, it was.
Sorry.
The whole post:
He thinks this is hard? Just wait for how hard tax reform is. And now with this failed health care bill, they don’t have the baseline to pass tax cuts they wanted to and will need to settle for less or sunset them.
The debt ceiling is coming up. They won’t have the votes. Watch. Just like they won’t have the votes for his ridiculous “budget”.
Now what will Democrats do about it? Send Bernie Sanders over there: “Mr. Trump, we have a great bill, a beautiful bill. Everyone says so.” Push drug negotiation. Push Medicaid expansion in states that didn’t take it. Push Medicare buy in. Push Pete Stark’s “Americare”.
nice!
More likely they will say they can live with half the proposed cuts then tell the voters what a great victory they achieved.
As I commented on fladem’s diary several weeks ago with respect to Trump’s budget: there will be terrible and inexcusable cuts if they pass a budget rather than continuing resolutions. That’s to be expected: they control Congress. What should they do? Not give any votes unless there are zero cuts? We know that won’t work. Didn’t you say we shouldn’t be trying to get concessions for votes for the debt ceiling? What makes the budget any different?
Photoshop Drumpf on the side of the airship and add a road sign, Atlantic City 50 miles and Bedminster 50 miles, and it will work for all the Drumpf fails to come.
The Hill – Trump angry Kushner, Ivanka went skiing during health debate
Yeah sure, two more know-nothings about health care and how Congress operates would have made all the difference.
A real tough guy whining that his kid and hubby weren’t around to bail him out. (I’m personally whining about the 100 Secret Service agents required to keep the Trumplets safe in Aspen.)
NY Post – Ivanka and Kushner’s new DC neighbors are already sick of them.
Adds to the difficulties others are being subjected to by the FLOTUS and kid in NYC and DT’s Palm Beach weekend getaway. (And the huge taxpayer cost of the expanded first family Secret Service details.) From Truman on, voters have favored candidates with small families. Perhaps intuiting that they rack up fewer costs. Imagine the outrage if Michelle Obama had stayed put in Chicago and Obama installed his sister and brother-in-law as senior WH aides.
photo of participants in summit on vasectomies laughing very well placed under the hindenburg photo
was the multiple hours long meeting the February Health Care Summit? that was wonderful, great videos of it. (hope the T admin didn’t remove them from .gov website)
And the Baltimore meeting with House Republicans at which Obama told them they were painting themselves into a corner with absolute opposition to Obamacare.
Larry Summers did his blind-squirrel-finds-a-nut moment: Obamacare is the most conservative passable form of universal health care. The implication is that only GOP sabotage actually prevented it from being universal.
That says nothing about costs or other values at play in the political discussion.
And Democrats dodged the bullet of an assertive Trump forcing a single-payer corporate subsidy system on the GOP as a political end run (Nixon goes to China) move.
single payer corporate subsidy -what does that mean? [i.e. it’s not medicare for all]
Trump’s “big idea” for replacement when he was on the campaign trail was health savings accounts. IOW — a stupid idea masquerading as a solution.
Another “big idea” from the Trump campaign was allowing insurance companies to sell policies across state lines, which is also, in your well-turned phrase, a “stupid idea masquerading as a solution.”
Ditto for “tort reform.” Trump advocates for that anti-consumer boilerplate GOP position out as well.
The meeting where Obama and Pence were photographed together was actually the Republican Caucus retreat earlier in the same month. Whenever I need a political pick-me-up, two videos I return to most frequently are the 2012 Vice Presidential debate and this glowing performance by President Obama:
The sanctimonious lies and propagandizing from Pence and Ryan, and the President’s sharp schooling of them in his responses, are all very revealing. But the part that most captures my memory is a crucial part of Barack’s response to Rep. Blackburn, which in whole starts during the video’s 32nd minute:
“…let me say this about the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues…if you were to listen to the debate, and frankly how some of you went after this bill, you’d think this thing is some Bolshevik plot! That’s how you guys presented it. So I’m thinking to myself, ‘How is it that a plan that is pretty centrist…’ (crowd murmurs)…look, I mean I’m just saying I know you guys disagree, but if you look at the facts of this bill, most independent observers would say that this is actually what many Republicans, it’s similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton when he was doing his debate on health care.
So all I’m saying is we ought to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting we’re gonna agree on everything whether it’s energy or health care or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.
I mean, the fact of the matter is many of you, if you voted with the Administration on something, (you) are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own Party. You’ve given yourself very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you’ve been telling your constituents is ‘This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s gonna destroy America.’ I would just say we have to think about tone, it’s not just on your side, by the way, it’s on our side as well, this is part of what’s happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much so when it comes down to getting things done, it becomes tough to do.”
President Obama identified that day what Josh Marshall has since labeled the Hate and Nonsense Debt. As the President noted, it makes it impossible to govern when you are forever tied to false narratives based on political partisanship. As we saw in the ACA repeal/replace debacle, when your claims that the ACA is a “disaster” are met by the stories of informed, desperate, angry, determined Americans who have been helped by the Law, and your claims that your ACHA replacement is “much better” are destroyed by government and non-government analyses, you just can’t govern successfully.
thanks for posting this!
You bet.
great watching, thanks again.
I bet John Boehner is saying “Ha Ha Ha” tonight. Last month at a Healthcare conference, Boehner addressed the Repubs’ repeal and replacement of Obamacare.
“Earlier in the panel discussion, Boehner said he ‘started laughing’ when Republicans started talking about moving lightning fast on repeal and then coming up with an alternative.
‘In the 25 years that I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time agreed on what a health care proposal should look like. Not once’, Boehner said.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/john-boehner-obamacare-republicans-235303
Best schadenfreude of all: Trump blaming failure on Democrats. That’s how bad Ryan’s bill was. No cover for Republican failure at all. I don’t think the leadership of the House had to work up much of a sweat whipping the vote on this one.
Trump, however, resorted to the maximum threat — “I’m gonna leave Obamacare in place if you don’t vote for this bill.” Watch for this to be just another Trump promise. The Art of the Deal indeed. Nice ghostwriting it was.
But the Koch Bros were offering cash to Republicans that voted against it. Recall the Koch’s never got on board with Trump. (One of them hinted that Clinton wasn’t an unthinkable option.) And Trump himself doesn’t control much in the way of election funding streams compared with authentic billionaires such as he Kochs.
Heh. “Authentic billionaires.” Solid burn.
Yes, no way to verify Trump’s wealth. He’s probably a billionaire, but his share in his identifiable properties is unknown and how much those properties are worth (net of debts against them) based on standard evaluation methods. If the method is other than operating income and cash flow, the worth is a guesstimate until it’s actually sold. And in Trump’s case, he’s not providing an after tax valuation.
Not much guesswork involved for Forbes estimate the worth of individuals such a Gates and Buffet. Their holdings in publicly traded companies is public information as are dividends and salaries (if they’re still active in the company). As other holdings — stocks, private investments, real estate, and toys/art/jewels — are comparative chump change, no need to do more than a back of the envelope calculation.
Evaluations based on privately held businesses and assets are more difficult. The Koch bros less so than others because they own it all and much of it is visible. Forbes estimates that the Cargill-McMillan family is worth $49 billion (divided among 14 of the clan). Their corporate financial statements are top secret.
And how many country’s GDP is that $49 billion more than? Disgusting. No one can sped that much or spend the interest on that much, even at today’s rates. It’s only good for gaining undemocratic power.
Spending is generally the province of second and third generations to the origin of the wealth. Sometimes more and sometimes less. Plenty of substantial fortunes have dissipated/disappeared with second and third generations. Those that initially created the wealth can rarely spend it all, even if they are big spenders which many have been, because most of it is held in ongoing operations and not in cash.
The source of the wealth and its continuing longevity is one factor in its preservation. How much of the source is owned by the family/dynasty and the continuance of family/dynasty in controlling the source are others. Then there is the divvying up of the wealth for each generation and some of that family tree gets pruned early on as in the case of Cargill. Through W. W. Cargill’s fourth generation (at least for the men), McMillans and Cargills have been active in the company and relying on profit to fund expansion and not selling off portions of their ownership stake through stock offerings or operating assets. The Kochs have been using similar model. The Waltons have used the Rockefeller model.