Four For the Fourth 2025: As Usual, What the Hell Republicans?

(This is the first of four articles I write on this blog in honor of the 4th of July, although this 2025 trumpian dystopia is going to make it hard to be a pleasant Fourth)

I once noticed how presidential candidate Mitt Romney had "massive tax cuts for the rich" as his "ever-fixed mark," the one campaign pledge he never flipped against. I should have noted how that massive tax cut was a core belief of the modern (Reagan Era) Republican Party, because even after 2012 the goddamn GOP kept pursuing their massive tax cut plans in order to placate their overlords at the Club For Greed and other SuperPACs.

When the Republicans held control of the federal government back in 2017, one of the few agenda items they were able to pull off was that massive tax cut for the rich, alongside shifting the tax burden more onto lower income brackets to "balance" the shifts in revenue. Even then, it didn't work: Deficits went up and the national debt went up. But the Republican congresscritters didn't care because - under the sway of the minority power of the uber-rich billionaires and mega corps - they honestly don't represent their congressional and state interests anymore.

Which is why this week - again in control of the federal government this 2025 - Congress went and passed an even bigger tax cut for the rich at the expense of the rest of America (via Elena Moore, Claudia Grisales, and Deirdre Walsh at NPR):

President Trump's massive spending and tax cut bill is on the way to his desk for a signature. The bill passed Thursday after Republican leaders in the House of Representatives convinced holdouts in their own party to get in line behind the controversial legislation.

House Republicans passed the bill by a vote of 218 to 214, nearly entirely along party lines. All 212 Democrats voted in unison against the bill, and they were joined by two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. Leaders were forced to work all night to win the votes necessary to pass the bill and meet Trump's demand to sign the bill by July 4.

All so donald trump can hold a photo op signing event on the 4th of July, hijacking the symbolism of independence for "independence from taxes" even though that's not going to happen for most Americans. Our taxes - yes my bracket is affected - are going to go up (via David Morgan at Reuters):

Several independent analyses conclude that the bill now before the Senate would effectively transfer money from poor Americans to the rich.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, for example, found it would reduce after-tax income by $1,500 for families earning less than $22,000 per year, and boost income by $104,000 for those earning more than $5.2 million. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reached a similar conclusion...

House Republicans say the bill would provide the typical family with a $1,300 tax cut and that business tax breaks would lead to higher wages for workers.

Which is a lie: All the previous massive tax cuts for businesses NEVER turned into higher wages for employees. Tax cuts for the wealthy never balanced budgets and never improved the middle or lower classes. Those families with $5.2 million annual income don't NEED $104k extra pocket change, but that family (or individual) on $22,000 a year WILL NEED that $1,500 for bills, bills, and staying out of massive debt.

And those massive tax cuts are not what a sizable plurality of this nation are asking for, if this Pew Research 2025 report from Andy Cerda and Andrew Daniller is accurate: 

Far more Americans oppose the legislation than favor it. Nearly half (49%) oppose it, while 29% favor it. Another 21% are not sure.

A narrow majority says the legislation would have a negative impact on the country. While 54% say it would have a mostly negative effect on the country in the coming years, 30% say it would have a mostly positive effect. Another 12% think it would not have much of an impact.

About half (51%) expect the bill to increase the budget deficit. Just 18% of Americans say the bill would cut the deficit, and 27% say it would not have much of an effect...

You would think congressional Republicans would be intelligent enough - or at least aware of the polling - to understand their budget bill is going to hurt their support back home. And you'd be right: A number of GOP congresscritters were begging everyone else to stop them (via Bill Scher at Washington Monthly):

Soon after Senator Lisa Murkowski coughed up the 50th vote for the Senate version of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, she told reporters what was wrong with it. 

“I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country, when you look to Medicaid and SNAP,” she said, referring to the bill’s deep cuts to health care and food assistance. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill’s onerous provisions would directly strip health coverage from 11.8 million people by 2034, and the omission of any extension for Joe Biden-era health-care tax credits would deny coverage for another 5.1 million, for a total of 16.9 million. And according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities,  “more than 5 million people—about 1 in 8 SNAP participants…would be at risk of losing at least some of their food assistance”  because of the Republican “red-tape-laden, ineffective work requirement. ” For its part, the Congressional Budget Office predicts 2 million people will lose SNAP benefits altogether because of the work requirement...

And yet, Murkowski, you fucking voted for it. You had the power and ability to say NO for the benefit of your constituents of Alaska - and the nation - and yet...

Opinions differ regarding the potential consequences of historically high post-World War II federal debt levels, and whatever those consequences are, they won’t be felt by households as immediately and acutely as the loss of Medicaid and SNAP coverage will be felt. Many Republicans agree with Senator Johnson that our debt level should be declining. Yet, they continue to support legislation that piles on more debt by cutting taxes far more deeply than cutting spending, and in the process, rewarding high-income households and punishing low-income households. Johnson is one of them. He told NPR that Trump “satisfied my requirement, which was a commitment to a reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending and a process to achieve and maintain it.” A hollower commitment would be impossible to make...

The modern Republican Party is caught in a fantasy of their own making: Pushed by deep-pocket campaign funders who want to keep their greed expanding at the expense of everyone else (damn you, Citizens United ruling), pressured by anti-government ideologues who want to starve the federal government and drown it in Grover's bathtub, and convinced that their incumbent - and gerrymandered - status makes them protected from voter outrage; the Far Right keep buying into the lie of trickle-down in order to justify their cruelty and disdain towards the lower classes.

The Republicans - with trump hosting his horrific photo op today - are going to be celebrating a bill they know is destructive and harmful to the national well-being - especially the Medicaid cuts that will force far too many rural hospitals and nursing homes even in deep Republican Red states to close - but they hope won't affect their re-election hopes for 2026 and 2028.

If trump lets us have fair elections any more, that is.

Goddamn these Far Right bastards.

The Killing

Respectable little murders pay/
They get more respectable every day
-- "Sunset Grill," Don Henley

With all of the drama and madness in this Darkest Timeline, with all the gun violence our nation witnesses on a daily basis, it's telling that the shooting of a single person only matters when that person was the uber-rich CEO of a healthcare corporation (via Jake Offenhartz, Michael Balsamo, and Michael R. Sisak at AP News):

New clues emerged Thursday in the hunt for the masked gunman who stalked and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, including possible leads about his travel before the shooting and a message scrawled on ammunition found at the crime scene.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Investigators also now believe the suspect may have traveled to New York last month on a bus that originated in Atlanta, one of the law enforcement officials said...

One of the interesting developments in this story is how quickly social media jumped on the story... by satirizing (if not brutally mocking) the victim's status as an allegedly corrupt corporate boss of a major health care insurer with a known history of massive profits at the expense of denying millions of Americans any affordable health care. As Troy Farah over at Salon notes:

Violence is a strategy that never warrants celebration because it is crude, brutal and ineffective, not to mention immoral. There’s always a better way, even if it’s not as easy or as dramatic. Nonetheless, it’s not bizarre or surprising to see that Reddit is being flooded with memes mocking the murder, or that many on social media are seemingly trying (or failing) to suppress their glee. There’s now even a rush to cash in with merch, such as a ballcap using the company’s logo next to crosshairs and the phrase “We aim to please.” A chart from valuepenguin.com displaying the percentage of claim denial rates by insurance companies, with UnitedHealthcare topping the list, has gone super viral, with one user on Threads captioning it, “To paraphrase Chris Rock ‘... but I understand.’”

The overall justification for this celebration — the New York Times described it as a “torrent of hate” — lies in the widely understood the fact that health care companies inflict violence on thousands of people in this country, if not millions, every single day. Take the announcement this week from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which couldn’t have had better or worse timing, depending on one’s perspective. That company proposed that its health insurance plans in Connecticut, New York and Missouri would no longer cover anesthesia care if a surgery or operation extends beyond an arbitrary time limit. That seems to have outraged the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has called on Anthem to immediately reverse this proposal.

On Thursday, Anthem did just that, but the shock remains. If that’s not violence, what is? Whether you’re in an alley or on an operating table, if someone has a knife to you and demands your money, it’s violence. Or consider the innumerable examples that aren’t just proposals but routine policy: the tidal wave of denied or delayed claims, the noose of restrictive networks, costly deductibles, prescription refusals and on and on. There is also convincing evidence this walled garden especially excludes and discriminates against people of color, queer people and women, making this systemic violence not just prevalent, but also disproportionate...

Thompson's murder is not different from the many times a wingnut gunman went storming into a Planned Parenthood clinic to shoot at "baby killers," so celebrating the act would be monstrous hypocrisy for those us angered by Far Right violence towards women and the health care providers they need. If there is any difference, it's that most of those gunmen are pumped up on lies from Far Right media, whereas this gunman can well be acting out direct vengeance. Nearly every observer's comments/viewpoints on "motive" - something the police haven't confirmed yet, because there's a good chance of misdirection - are going by the things Farah highlighted about our nation's broken health care system: This shooter could well have lost a loved one to a fatal illness that Thompson's United HealthCare corporation refused to help.

That is of course pure speculation on my - and a lot of other people's - part. For all we know, the killer could have been a hired hitman: Thompson was under investigation for insider trading, for example.

Ah, as Farah noted: "...But I understand."

This killing brought to the fore news coverage of how hundreds - if not millions - of Americans are rightly angered by how our health care companies routinely deny any affordable health care. Just to share from Selena Simmons-Duffin's report at NPR:

Yolonda Wilson is one of many people who shared painful stories about health insurance gone wrong on social media this week.

Her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, denied coverage for a surgery about two days before it was scheduled, back in January. She finally got it approved, in the nick of time, with a lot of unnecessary stress and tears. "I did not know until Wednesday afternoon whether I would be able to have surgery Thursday morning," she told NPR.

Wilson, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University in Missouri, noted that she was telling her personal story, not speaking on behalf of the university.

The shocking, targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday struck a nerve on social media, triggering an outpouring of negative experiences with the tangled health care system in the U.S.

Many people shared searing stories of health care denials from health insurers. One person said his mom's scan to check on her stage IV lung cancer was recently denied. In another post, a dad shared the letter UHC sent him denying a wheelchair for his son with cerebral palsy.

"A lot of people are in deep pain, and maybe didn't have anywhere to put that pain," Wilson says.

UnitedHealthcare is the biggest private health insurer in the U.S., with an outsized market share in both the commercial insurance and Medicare Advantage markets. UnitedHealth Group reported $371.6 billion in revenue last year and faces an antitrust lawsuit to block its $3.3 billion acquisition of a rival home health and hospice service.

Americans generally say they're pretty happy with their health insurance, according to survey data from health policy research organization KFF — unless they're sick. Those with "fair" or "poor" health are nearly twice as likely to be displeased with their insurance compared to those with "good" health.

The sick thing about getting sick in America is that the moment you do, those insurers who'd been taking your money all those years suddenly refuse to pay any of it back to you. God forbid they cut into those billions of revenues.

Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan who studies administrative burdens involved in accessing government services, says barriers to health care access are especially painful.

"It's one thing to be frustrated at the DMV because you have a ton of paperwork to fill out or you have to spend an hour in line," she says. "It's a whole other thing to face those barriers when they are the difference between whether you're going to get life-saving care or not."

Herd's research shows how barriers in the health care system can affect people's actual health — whether it's calling several times to just get an appointment or trying to find an in-network specialist or fighting to get a procedure covered...

For all the Far Right and Libertarian types out there who whine about the federal bureaucracy, the DMV ain't got shit on UnitedHealthcare or the other for-profit corporations out there that work to delay, defend, and deny any help to the people at all. Dealing with the stress of jumping through hoop after hoop and running into brick wall after brick wall is just as sickening as getting a life-threatening-yet-treatable illness.

One of the more shocking stories going public is how UHC under Thompson's reign implemented an AI-based automated process that generated 90 percent error rates while denying their clients the financial help they were supposed to get. That was originally a report from 2023, but only now are people really reading it.

Again: "...But I understand."

As of right now, the other CEOs of large corporations - not just in the insurance business - are hiring more bodyguards and clearing their names off the company websites to avoid getting on anybody's Naughty Lists. They are - obviously - not interested in responding to the growing public outrage towards their ravenous greed: They have, after all, just bought off the 2024 election cycle to guarantee trump and the Republican Party will grant them the massive tax cuts and deregulations they desire to add to the billions they already possess.

The CEOs - the true class-driven elite, the robber barons of the 21st Century - are mourning the death of one of their fellow greedheads while overlooking the body count of thousands of Americans who die because they didn't get their health care approved or covered in time, or worse the thousands who die because they can't get any insurance coverage at all.

THAT is why a lot of people suspect the assassin was acting out of vengeance. 

And yeah, we understand.

Which murders - the shooting of a CEO or the deaths of families and loved ones - get more respectable in the end?

trumpian Denial of COVID-19 Is Dooming, Will Doom Us

I saw this on Twitter this morning.

I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is

— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020

Going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that “stuff” because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real. Yes. This really happens. And

— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020

I can’t stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn’t going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.

— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020

This is not only happening in South Dakota but also North Dakota, and Montana, and Iowa, and Wisconsin, and Illinois, and Ohio, and Florida, and...

It's happening in every state, at some level, where there's enough trump-worshipping denialists who've been told by their media overlords that COVID-19 is a Chinese-backed Socialist plot, that it's a hoax pushed by libruls to take our freedoms, that oh heavens if they do get it there's a miracle cure that trump himself took that's readily available at some rural underfunded clinic instead of a high-tech military hospital.

It doesn't occur to the trumpian "true believers" that trump intentionally refuses to take an active effort to control the pandemic's spread, they don't hear you when you point out how trump himself openly declared "I'm not taking any responsibility at all" to mandate nationwide health guides and public safety rules.

And because of trump's failures at leadership - his active avoidance of it - we are now facing a massive upward spike of COVID positive infections across the entire nation, here have John Cole at Balloon Juice share a few words ("What the Fuck Is WRONG With People") on this (complete with links to charts):

We’re gonna blast past 200k (cases daily) before we even get to Thanksgiving. If I were God emperor, I would lock everyone down, issue mask mandates, and mount speakers every 100 yards playing this nonstop until people didn’t want to leave the fucking house...

I laugh-cried at the “if people don’t learn” part. The most American thing in the world is NEVER FUCKING LEARNING ANYTHING EVER.

The worst thing about this is that Trump’s followers are literally a cult. Anything he says or does they mindlessly repeat and replicate. If that motherfucker would just have asked his followers to wear a fucking mask we wouldn’t be in half the mess we are in right now.

We're well past the point of hospitals being overwhelmed. Our health care workers - nurses especially - are threatening national strikes to force the government to do SOMETHING to put the nation back on lockdown like we did in March-April. But we're running into the seasonal holidays - when people want to gather families for Thanksgiving, when they feel the need to go Christmas shopping in-person because GODDAMMIT that's what Black Fridays are for - the most God-awful worst time to try and impose any lockdown at all.

trump meanwhile is sulking and throwing hissy fits about Biden's popular vote and Electoral College win, still screaming about it being stolen even as his lawyers keep failing to prove ANY kind of voter fraud happened at all. trump will refuse to do anything to help a nation he's likely viewing as having betrayed him. The Pandemic Response team that's supposed to be run by VP Pence hasn't even done anything in two weeks.

We are literally facing a winter of chaos and calamity, and while we may have a calmer future promised to us with Biden entering the Presidency in January, between then and now we are doomed to suffer at trump's whims.

Gods help us.

We're Not Safe Yet: Easter Sunday 2020 Edition

Remember a while back, trump was insisting that the COVID-19 / Coronavirus emergency would be over by Easter weekend and he wanted to see churches packed with people... and ultimately let the matter drop because enough experts were warning him that the United States won't be safe enough for large crowds by today. (Never mind the fact a lot of governors left church gathering exceptions in their Stay-At-Home orders, exposing hundreds to COVID anyway)

However, trump is STILL calling for "a return to normalcy" in order to "get America back to work" by opening stores and restaurants and schools and a lot of other places while the exposure rates show no signs of slowing down. Even as these are things not entirely under his control, via Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to “reopen” the economy, but it’s not clear exactly what this means, or what he can do about it. Governors and mayors have issued the orders shutting down public spaces. Trump can’t overrule those, though if he wants to pry them open, he does have some tools: He can urge his supporters to resist, or use federal resources to pressure states and localities that resist his advice.

Public-health experts have argued that social-distancing measures can only be relaxed after several benchmarks are reached. Community spread has to be contained, and the government needs to have the capacity to conduct mass testing and to be able to trace the contacts of anybody who tests positive. This is not just some liberal-weenie precaution. The conservative American Enterprise Institute made this case in March, and CDC director Robert Redfield confirms it in a new NPR interview.

The notion that we’re going to be ready to do this within a few weeks seems utterly fanciful. At a recent press briefing, reporters tried to drill down on how much testing Trump planned to have available to accommodate the reopening. Trump simply denied the premise that testing to scale was even necessary. “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes. We’re talking 325 million people. That’s not going to happen, as you can imagine,” he said at one point. Asked about the number of tests his former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said would be needed, Trump scoffed, “I don’t like using the word needed, because I don’t think it’s needed...”

No matter how the scientists and doctors are trying to talk trump through this crisis, he's seemingly trying to push the federal government towards forcing the governors of all 50 states into this path he wants:

Rather than ramping up a massive national testing regime, the federal government has been signaling to states that they’re soon going to be on their own. And as for contact tracing — like a cell-phone app, or an army of public-health officials, to track down every contact of a person who tests positive — well, there’s simply no sign whatsoever that either project is even in the works, let alone ready for an early May rollout. And if the government doesn’t have the capacity to quickly identify and isolate new cases, relaxing social distancing will simply lead to renewed outbreaks.

So, given the government’s utter unreadiness to transition away from social distancing, what does Trump have in mind when he talks about reopening? The answer seems to be retreating into denial...

Lumped into all of this - something Chait covers in one paragraph - is how trump and his Fox Not-News cohorts have been trumpeting miracle cures - in particular a lupus/malaria drug that doesn't have confirmed medical studies proving it works on COVID - as though said cure is a home run for him to claim victory if it works. Even though that drug in the wrong dosage is lethal, it carries serious side effects, and there's again no actual confirmation from multiple trials - necessary for ANY drug treatment - that it will work.

trump, in short, wants this crisis to be over.

Partly because it's something he knows deep down he's not in control of (and trump is an obsessive control freak), partly because his own attention span can't handle anything taking more than a week to resolve (and COVID is something that will be with us for months), and mostly because he knows the longer this crisis takes the likelier he's not going to resolve it and tie it all up in a pretty bow before November's Election Day. Back to Chait:

It is irrational for Trump to believe he can restart the economy without first putting into place a robust public-health apparatus to contain new outbreaks. But it is not irrational for Trump to worry about his reelection. The state of public opinion may be even grimmer than even the top-line numbers would indicate. The public believes Trump was unprepared to deal with the virus by overwhelming margins — 63 percent to 22 percent, according to YouGov, and 71 percent to 29 percent, per CBS. YouGov also asks if Trump could have reduced the damage had he acted sooner, and 40 percent say “a lot,” while 25 percent say “somewhat.”

Two-thirds of the country believes Trump bungled the early stages of the crisis and subjected the country to unnecessary pain. So, on what everybody expects to be the single question that decides the election, Trump has lost the entire premise. Trump is already losing, and the current course seems far more likely to widen the gap than to shrink it. Whatever slim benefit of the doubt the public was willing to cede as he tackles the crisis is quickly expiring, and he stands (justifiably) to be blamed for the hardships that will follow.

We're already looking at April-May unemployment numbers for roughly 30 percent of the available workforce in America. Given how long it takes for businesses shut down to re-open, even if we resolve COVID-19 with widespread testing - which we can't, we still don't have enough tests - there's a slow slog towards rehiring. Businesses that furloughed workers could arguably bring them back, but again that takes time (and other resources). The economic contraction that happened with the pandemic just for the United States took a huge chuck out of the money needed to rebuild anyway.

Schools are likely not reopening until September, meaning a lost spring for students - high school seniors in particular struggling towards college enrollment - across the board. Universities may have to delay enrollments.

And we're not even looking at the emotional impact this pandemic is leaving on millions of Americans: The loss of loved ones and friends at the scale of thousands, the social isolation that's been causing "cabin fever" issues for people, a lot of personal turmoil that won't be resolved any time soon. There's a dour mood across the landscape... and trump and his Republican allies have to know they're going to be the targets of that mood.

But what trump hopes to do to avert that blame - pushing for re-opening everything before our nation is even safe to do so - is going to re-trigger all the problems that led to us self-isolating and closed down in the first place. Places like Singapore and South Korea are reporting their infection numbers going back up after easing up their extensive isolation policies that had earlier kept their rates "flattened". Until there's a vaccine in place - and that could be September at the earliest - we are not going back to normal.

But trump wants that "normal" - where the stock markets went up, where his tariffs were "winning", where business was booming while millions of workers were NOT - in place before November.

Otherwise, he and his buddies are going to have to cheat harder to steal the 2020 election.

And you know how trump HATES to do more work.

Gods help us.

P.S. Happy Easter Sunday to my Christian peeps. I took care of my Unitarian obligations this morning with a scrambled egg sacrifice (I burned the toast, so be it O Lord).

The trumpian Failure at Presidential Accountability

(update 3/16/20: dammit as always when I least expect it, Batocchio adds me as a link to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sigh. I DID NOT HAVE CAKE OR PIE READY... nevermind, just hope you enjoy the site, please leave valid and life-affirming comments, and learn the Vulcan greeting salute because handshakes are no longer safe)

Still dealing with a number of real-life issues - things are changing at work, not to mention how my work at a public library is going to get affected by the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic - to where the best I can blog about right now is WHAT THE EVERLOVING F-CK DID trump SAY NOW???

This past week we witnessed trump's White House try to control the messaging on the likely spread of COVID-19 while doing little to nothing about pressing for more testing kits and isolation policies to reduce the risk of that spread. He performed a televised speech to allay fears... during which he ad-libbed falsehoods that caused more panic than calm.

By trying to play to the concerns of Wall Street, trump actually caused two of the greatest stock market crashes in financial history within three days of each other. And as this all went on, most Americans went on a panic run at the grocery store buying up all the hand sanitizer (they should have bought more soap, that helps better) and toilet paper on the shelves (to be fair, if you end up stuck at home for more than two weeks if a quarantine becomes necessary, you'd want the security of reliable bathroom trips too).

So for this Friday, in order to present himself as in charge and in control, trump scheduled a big televised press conference, timed exactly just as the stock markets were closing... just so he could end up showing how little control he had and even worse openly admit he was in charge of nothing.

Think I'm exaggerating? Here's the ABC News clip about it:

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all." Doesn't matter what he's avoiding responsibility for, the fact that he's AVOIDING responsibility ought to anger every American living and past.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, RESPONSIBILITY FOR SERVING AND PROTECTING THIS NATION IS IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION.

Let's look back at all the Presidents confronted with the demands of responsibility.

Harry S. Truman, a personal fave, famously had a desk sign:


This photo of Harry S. Truman Library and Museum is courtesy of Tripadvisor

"The BUCK STOPS HERE!" This is now a required meme for anyone sitting in the Oval Office (except of course for the cowardly current occupant who dares not utter it).

Here's somebody that trump won't like to hear from: President Barack Obama taking responsibility for intelligence failures back in 2010. Via Josh Gerstein at Politico:

President Barack Obama on Thursday accepted responsibility for intelligence shortcomings that led to a failed Christmas Day bombing plot on a Detroit-bound airliner, saying, “Ultimately, the buck stops with me.

“As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility,” Obama said...

Obama’s buck-stops-here message marks a change in tone from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch-listing system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar AbdulMatallab, was put in place under the Bush administration.

But while Obama promised to bring more accountability into the counterterrorism system, he indicated he had no plans to fire anyone involved in the missteps prior to Christmas.

“It appears this incident was not the fault of a single individual or organization but rather a systemic failure across organizations and agencies. … I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer,” Obama said...

Want more?

While this isn't a quote that happened during his Presidency, Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower spoke of responsibility serving as the Allied Commander overseeing the Western European theater. For the Normandy Invasion he wrote two letters. The First Letter congratulated the Allied troops and exhorted them to victory. The Second Letter was in case the landings failed (given the harsh weather and stout German defenses, this was a legitimate concern):

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops... My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

The letter wasn't needed: D-Day was a bloody but successful landing and led to the Liberation of France within months. Less than a year later, the Nazis fell between the pincers of Ike's forces in the West and the Soviets to the East. However, that letter highlighted character of the man: Eisenhower accepted the responsibility of leadership... and the people knew it. That's one reason "I Like Ike" worked as a slogan, that's a reason why Americans elected him President.

So here comes trump, facing a global pandemic health care crisis that requires bold thinking, getting out ahead of the problem, staying in touch with all players to make sure things get done properly and to the good of all.

Unfortunately, trump's spent the last three years dismantling the government systems, understaffing agencies if not outright sabotaging them. Redirecting efforts towards projects that won't help in this crisis or any other. He oversaw the dismantling of a National Security panel tasked with coordinating pandemic responses, which left much of the federal and state agencies in the dark on who was in charge during the first months of this crisis (starting back in December 2019).

trump's response to all of this? Shifting blame on Obama instead of admitting his own involvement. Arguing that it's Obama's fault there's not enough test kits for this crisis when it should have been something trump's administration ordered done the minute it became clear - mid-January - that the coronavirus was going global. Like Obama would have known back in 2016 this particular virus was going to erupt three years after he left office.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

This isn't even the first time trump has shifted blame in his life. He avoided accountability for his many bankruptcies, he avoided accountability by settling out of his many fraud trials, he avoided accountability for his destruction of a sports league, he avoided accountability for every broken promise and every theft made. And these were all before he ran for the Presidency.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

Here's the one thing required by law in the Constitution, written out as the Oath one must take when entering the Oval Office:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Those words REQUIRE the oath-taker to execute the office of the Presidency, to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States which means ensuring the safety of the People - all of US - who keep that Constitution standing. These are words, this is an Oath that REQUIRES responsibility out of the person who swears to it.

trump won't take that responsibility. he's openly admitting to it now, something a lot of us knew for years and we saw this moment coming.

We're in a major crisis this month and the person most responsible to lead us through it won't be responsible at all.

We are so very royally extremely sickeningly fucked.

We Are Facing a Pandemic Catastrophe

Granted not on the scale of Captain Tripps, but one that Randall Flagg is sure to enjoy. With a current update (as of March 2, 2020) via CNN:

Six people have died in Washington state as the United States grapples with more than 100 cases of the disease caused by the novel Coronavirus.

Four of the people who died were residents at the Life Care Center nursing care facility in Kirkland, in suburban Seattle, King County health officer Jeffrey Duchin said Monday. Four other Coronavirus cases are also linked to the Life Care Center.

"Current residents and associates continue to be monitored closely, specifically for an elevated temperature, cough and/or shortness of breath," officials said in a statement on the Life Care website. "Any resident displaying these symptoms is placed in isolation. Associates are screened prior to beginning work and upon leaving..."

There are 102 cases reported nationwide, according to the federal and state health officials, including:
* 45 former passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the site of a recent outbreak and quarantine
* 3 Americans recently repatriated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak
* 17 people believed to have contracted the virus through travel
* 37 people who got sick from another person in the United States, including some who don't know who the source was...

This is a problem that had been building up ever since the Coronavirus popped up in China a few months back. Given the global reach our transportation can get now - by airplane, by boat, by train - the spread of this new flu variance isn't a question of "when" it will spread, it's more "how fast will it spread?" This was something our nation should have been preparing for since the news first broke back in December 2019.

This is a problem for the United States because donald trump had been using the three years of his tenure demolishing the civil service under the White House, decimating our health care system by a thousand cuts, slashing the budget for the CDC (a major agency tasked to fight infectious diseases), and firing - through then-NSA head John Bolton - a White House pandemic response team back in 2018 that could have been managing this situation from Day One if they were still in place.

Wanna know how bad a problem this is?

Friend of mine from high school is a lawyer on the West Coast, travels a bit, was overseas when this all started, and she tweeted out recently her observations about the difference in responses between Singapore and the U.S.:

Part of this is the political culture, I'm sure. Singapore for example has a government-backed universal healthcare system, something that would encourage most residents to get checked out the second they get ill. They have a lot of incentives to organize and fight these outbreaks.

The United States, meanwhile, is still struggling to get the medical industry to mass-produce the tests needed to check a majority of residents, most Americans can't afford the time away from work to get checked, and the ones who do are getting hit with bills in the thousands of dollars, a serious discouragement against getting checked at all.

It does not help one damn bit that trump's response to this entire crisis has been to make sure HIS White House controls all messaging, that most of the response team are on board to keep the Stock Markets happy (because the last thing trump wants is the Dow to drop more than 5,000 points in a week), and that the messaging itself falls under the "All Is Well Never Mind the Increasing Numbers of Sick People" category of misinformation and underselling the severity of the pandemic.

We're about to face one of the biggest flu outbreaks in the U.S. since the "Swine Flu" (H1N1) of 2009, and possibly the most lethal one since the "Spanish Flu" of 1918. At a two percent fatality rate - compared to the regular flu we get that kills at less than a percent - we are looking at about 6 million Americans facing dire ends.

And right now, there's little evidence our government - supposed to be the ones protecting us from such health threats - is organizing well enough to fight this battle.

We are so fcking screwed.

A Statement On Core Principles

So, when it comes down to it, what are the issues I care about the most? On what hills will I stand and fight to ensure those beliefs remain core components of the United States I believe in?

My core principles on key political issues:

1. The rich, and large corporate entities, should be taxed at a higher rate than middle-income and low-income Americans to ensure fairness in the tax burden. This includes rigorous enforcement of upper incomes and large corporations to stop tax evasion.
2. Businesses must be regulated to ensure workplace safety, clean environments, fair access to products and services, high pay and benefits equal to the work performed, and consumer / community protection from any form of fraud.
3. All Americans 18 and older have the right to vote and shall not be blocked, suppressed, or denied their right to vote. Registration must be free and universal to all citizens. If imprisoned, Americans shall immediately regain their right to vote once their sentences are served or are on parole.
4. All Americans provided affordable healthcare across the board as a human right.
5. All Americans provided free public education for children, and affordable public education for all those of college age, as a human right
6. All Americans given personal control of their bodies and health with regards to reproductive rights, meaning affordable and unhindered access to birth control, women’s healthcare services, and abortion as a medical right.
7. All Americans have the right to know that the federal, state, and local governments that represent them are not committing crimes and human rights abuses, and that any agent, official or elected representative committing such crimes be punished (meaning no statute of limitations on those persons).
8. Americans have the right to be protected from active, violent, and spiteful racism / sexism, where haters do NOT have the right to attack someone because of their skin color, their ethnic origin, their gender, their gender preference, or their religion. As much as this means everyone SHOULD be protected, in practice this means protecting the rights and safety of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Jews, Hindi, Sikhs, Women, Gays, Trans, and other minorities from the hate groups that are predominately White Protestant (mostly Male) Assholes.
9. No radio personality or disk jockey shall speak over the opening, middle, or ending of a song. The next SOB who talks just as Pat Benatar starts whistling towards the end of “Love Is a Battlefield” will be executed with extreme prejudice. I don’t care if there’s just 30 seconds of the song left, I WANNA HEAR THE SONG NOT YOU.
10. No more lying in politics. All elected officials, candidates for office, and personnel hired to work for them or our government agencies shall be held to an ethical standard that will punish them for false, hypocritical, and misleading public statements. If you can’t speak truthfully and factually on a matter you can always say “No comment.”

This is what I want to see. This is what I hope for.

Does this make me liberal? Perhaps. But I look at Europe where liberalism and conservatism both agree roughly on public welfare matters like healthcare and education, so I don't think that is what's at issue here. I've seen some self-declared conservatives speak in favor of public schools and affordable healthcare, as well as speak for protecting the rights of minorities. It's not the issues themselves requiring extremism to defend or oppose.

What does matter is HOW such plans are enacted. To what degree can we support the public welfare? What's most sensible about regulating businesses for safe practices? THIS is where the ideological fights SHOULD be, where being a Big Letter Liberal and Big Letter Conservative and Big Letter Moderate would matter. This is where being the Liberal would seek massive support and broad freedoms, where the Conservative would be the skeptic honestly concerned about the costs, where the Moderate would find a pragmatic middle ground that would make the thing work as well and as long as possible. This is where I find myself as a Moderate: I want solutions that work and work well for the long term.

But this is where I split hard against Republicans. Where the Democrats - actively engaged among their own ranks between Centrist and Progressive stances - are amenable and solutions-oriented about the issues that matter to me (and hopefully most of you), the Republicans have gone Full Metal Dogmatic. 

The modern GOP -  reflecting not Conservative values but Reactionary values - does not want debate on ANY of those issues. The modern GOP is absolutely opposed to reasonable tax hikes on upper incomes, they want to slash-and-burn. They WANT to cut the social safety net to nothing. In practice at the state level I've seen Republicans gut funding for schools and teachers, and blocked improved funding for healthcare out of sheer spite. The Far Right wants to eliminate abortion (AND women's healthcare) as a safe practice, and oppose sensible affordable access to birth control not because they're pro-Life (they're not even that) but because they're pro-Judgment (they want to demean/control/depower women).

And dear GOD: The way the Republican Party acts towards Blacks and Latinos (and Muslims) should make any honest citizen sick to their stomachs.

The modern Republican Party wants to deny the rights - the right to vote, the right to learn, the right to LIVE - of every person who's NOT White, or Rich, or Male, or over the age of 50. That's all I see of that party anymore.

That's why I keep screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Because I have principles. And the Republican Party does not.

When You Consider All These Things

When you consider all the acts donald trump did this week:

• Signing an Executive Order screwing up CSRs (Cost Sharing Reductions) to ensure that insurers will have to raise premiums on everybody by at least 20 percent...
• Refusing to certify the Iran nuclear agreement in an attempt to demolish that multinational deal for his own short-sighted warmongering needs...
• Ignoring Puerto Rico as it struggles in its THIRD WEEK of recovery from Maria, pretty much ensuring that thousands if not millions of island residents WHO ARE AMERICAN CITIZENS will be sick or dying in short order...
• Avoiding any mention of California as it suffers the worst wave of wildfires that state has seen in decades...

It seems he's really pissed about getting called a fucking moron.

And he's taking it out on everybody else.

Republican Congress Trying to Kill Health Care. AGAIN.

It's the circus that never ends, kids.

Even after three failed tries while in majority control of both wings of Congress, the GOP Senate is pushing one more plan to gut the everloving shit out of Obamacare (via Jeffrey Young at HuffPost):

For what feels like the 1,000th time this year, the Republican Senate is looking to ram through a hugely consequential health care bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and “replace” it with ... a lot less.

The GOP Congress only has until Sept. 30 to advance health care legislation with a bare majority in the Senate, because that is when the special procedural rules enabling them to avoid a Democratic filibuster expire. That deadline seems to be motivating Republicans to line up behind a bill sponsored by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.). This could mean a vote next week.

That’s despite the fact that this legislation has never been the subject of a public debate or the normal congressional committee process. The Congressional Budget Office also won’t have time to analyze how many people would have health insurance as a result of the bill, or how much the premiums would cost.

In other words, Congress would be passing a bill with major ramifications for many millions of people without first finding out exactly what it does...

You'll notice the Republicans in charge of the Senate do not care about procedure. They do not care about the costs of what they're trying to pass. They do not care to debate this in public.

They only care about the goddamn tax cuts for the rich they'll get out of this move.

I've said this before: Republicans can't help themselves. There's this terrible mix of sadism and greed that drives the party leadership to repeat themselves on achieving their obsessive goals towards tax cuts and deregulation and privatization. Even after decades of evidence that shows every promise they make about all that never pans out, and even after their efforts make things worse with collapsing economies and collapsing (or exploding) infrastructures.

So it's back to the phones, everybody. Call the Senate, call your Senator's local offices in-state, and register your horror and anger that Congress is trying to gut health care coverage. Again. And again. And again. AND AGAIN...

You wanna stop making these phone calls, America? STOP VOTING REPUBLICANS INTO OFFICE.

Dysfunction

In all my studies of American History, I have never found a legislative body as chaotic, dysfunctional, or fucked up as 2017's Congress.

We are talking about a Congress that keeps tripping over itself trying to pass one "simple" little thing - a massive Repeal of Obamacare, with MAYBE a Replace plan to placate the 18-32 million Americans about to get kicked off healthcare coverage - and yet wounding themselves and each other in the process.

It's gotten so bad that Republican Senators are insisting that the Republican-controlled House promise to NOT vote on the very bill ("Skinny Repeal") that the same Senators are forcing themselves to vote for (via CNN.com):

The strange drama -- Republican senators imploring their own colleagues across the Capitol to vow that they would not pass the bill they are about to pass -- unfolded as lawmakers prepared to kick off a long and exhausting open-amendment process in the Senate known as vote-a-rama.

It crystallized the remarkable dissatisfaction and deep reservations that Republican members feel just hours away from potentially voting to weaken the Affordable Care Act, something they had campaigned to do since the law's enactment more than seven years ago...

"I'm not going to vote for a bill that is terrible policy and politics just to get something done," GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said at a press conference...

Except that Graham is willing to vote for a bill that is terrible policy just to get something done.

It's so blatant a lie that you wonder when these Senators' parents will show up to send them to their rooms for being naughty.

It's as Matthew Yglesias notes over at Vox.com:

But if denouncing both the process by which a bill has been assembled and the substantive ideas it contains doesn’t lead you to vote against leadership on procedural matters, then what do your words even mean?

...Mitch McConnell is operating with a narrow Senate majority and basically zero margin for error ever since Susan Collins got off the BCRA bus. Objections to his approach are flying from virtually every direction of the caucus. Yet the health bill keeps shambling forward, since Republicans seem comfortable lying to the American people about essentially all aspects of the process, up to and including their own position on it.

That is the story of the health care process that has consumed the past several months in Congress: the almost unceasing parade of lies...

...The ultimate irony is that at every step along the way, the argument that appears to propel Republicans forward is the notion that they have an obligation to fulfill their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

In reality, everything they have done in pursuit of repeal is breaking promises. As a candidate, donald trump promised to protect Medicaid, lower premiums and deductibles, and cover everyone. Every single version of repeal that Republicans have considered does the opposite on every front...

...McConnell and Paul Ryan then, entirely of their own volition, with no evident input from trump, proceeded to enact the most fantastically irregular legislative process anyone has ever seen. And dozens of Republican senators proceeded to repeatedly bemoan the slipshod process even while continually voting to continue the process. Now they daily — hourly, even — express intense anxiety about the pressure they are under and profound eagerness to see their way clear of this mess. But at every turn, they resist the obvious alternative — a bipartisan process aimed at a bipartisan bill that would actually stabilize exchanges and fulfill both parties’ commitment to improve Americans’ health care...

The Republicans painted themselves into this corner years ago when they went full Obstruction against Obamacare. As Frum warned, the Republicans are now in no position to make sensible health care policy because every conservative-based option is cut off to them.

The Republicans were so desperate to paint Obamacare as a failure from Day One that they resorted to lying and distortion and refusal to recognize its benefits to the majority of Americans. They screamed about Death Panels that weren't there, they complained about costs that never emerged, they laughed at a faulty website even as millions used it to get affordable health coverage.

Yet for all their lies, the Republicans now have to face reality: They cannot repeal the existing healthcare system without kicking millions of people - families, working poor, kids, elderly - off that system. And while they'll do their best to lie about who'll be responsible for all those people losing health care, the Republicans know damn well that people will blame the elected officials who voted for that repeal.

This is why Republicans are whining about the Democrats not giving them any political cover by sharing the burden of voting for these disastrous bills: The Dems are wisely avoiding any situation where they'll end up the scapegoats for this.

And yet, as we're seeing right now, the Republicans keep pushing themselves over the cliff to pass a bill nobody wants to pass. All because of that goddamn tax cut they want to get out of doing this.

There is chaos on the floor of the Senate tonight. There remains chaos across the whole of Congress as both houses play a deadly game of Hot Potato with the nation's health care.

The smartest and simplest move the Republicans can make tonight is tell the truth: They HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE to Obamacare, and that they are better off fixing the glitches in Obamacare to keep most of America in a stable and affordable health care system.

Just don't fucking vote for bad bills, Republicans. Christ. IT IS THAT SIMPLE.

Hold Tight, Wait 'Til the Party's Over

So, what exactly just happened the last 48 hours regarding the Senate's attempt to nuke Obamacare? Via the Tampa Bay Times:

President Donald Trump declared Tuesday he's going to "let Obamacare fail" after the Republicans' effort to rewrite the 2010 health care overhaul imploded in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a vote on a backup plan simply repealing the statute, but desertions by his own party seemed to ensure that would fail, too.

Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said they opposed McConnell's Plan B. That's enough to spell defeat and could send a message to conservative Republicans that it is time to abandon efforts to tear down Obama's law.

There'd already been a bit of grumbling over how the Senate Replace bill had been mishandled, and when Senator McCain's emergency blood clot surgery forced a suspension on the vote, it gave the naysayers enough to time to make their concerns known. Apparently when McConnell tried to promise his caucus that the Medicaid funding wouldn't really go away as feared, he actually lost some of the Far Right members, killing the main plan.

So McConnell switched to a straight-up Repeal bill, bringing back one from 2015 (allowable, I guess) to vote as soon as possible. What THAT bill did was kill off all funding but kept the rules in place, which would have kicked even MORE people off health care coverage - CBO scoring had it at 32 million by 2026, with 18 million in the first year! - while forcing everyone else to pay a 100 percent increase on premiums.

Even the Moderates in the Senate - Collins especially - had to balk at that.

Where the game against Obamacare goes from here is still an open matter: As I've said repeatedly, the Republicans want their goddamn tax cuts - at the expense of the social safety net - at all hazards. But the failure here in the Senate - and the struggles earlier in the House - are highlighting the problems where the GOP have trapped themselves.

By constantly screeching for years to Repeal (and forced to offer a form of Replace), the Republicans can't turn themselves around and compromise on the existing health care system. Every offered plan has a major flaw - kicking people off coverage, which can be lethal - and nobody is willing to volunteer to give up their health care plans.

The Republicans' idea of compromise - where they insist the Democrats cave to their demands and then take the blame when it all goes to hell - is useless. The Democrats may not have explicit power right now in government being in the minority and out of the White House, but they have the ability now to say NO and stick to that. They're forcing the Republicans to deal within their own ranks - which has empowered both the Far Right AND NOW the Moderates who are punching back - and lift their own works... something the Republicans really don't want to do. Enough of them know damn well not to be holding this hand grenade when it goes off.

It does not help that this Republican Congress is trying to cope with a weak President Loser of the Popular Vote in trump. In previous times, when there was a tough piece of legislation involved, the President would make deals or offer alternatives that would placate enough members of Congress to get the job done. Obama had to to get Obamacare passed in the first place. LBJ was a fucking master at it.

But trump has almost no political capital to use. Granted, he's got his rabid fan base to scare the weaker members of the GOP. But when it comes to wheeling and dealing, he holds few favors with the major players. His current legal woes - under constant investigation for not only his Russian ties but also other scandals with his Foundation and elsewhere - doesn't give him a chance to make favors for the future (if he has one).

Making it worse is that trump is failing at reaching out: He's either tried bullying, berating, mocking those in Congress he thinks are stalling his glorious promises, or buttering up those who are not the ones he needs to win over. He's not building the back-room connections necessary between White House and the Capitol. It's not helping that his West Wing is criminally understaffed: if trump had hired enough people to massage the right Congresscritters, we'd be seeing results (granted, NOT the results we'd like...).

Update: It's worse than THAT. trump's dinner invite to "talk about the health care bill" turned into a ego-inflating talk about how France had treated him on his recent visit. The idiot cannot focus.

So what happens now?

The next major issue - one that Congress cannot avoid - is their planned budget for 2018. The proposal in the House is a massive tax cut, spending cut disaster... that may lose Far Right support from the "Freedom" Caucus because it doesn't go far enough in slashing the safety net. And this time, I don't think the House Moderates are going to accept any excuse from Ryan to back his efforts...

Keep calling, America. Call your Congresscritter, call your Senators. Remind the Republicans they have to answer for their sins, remind the Democrats to stand firm against any cut that will hurt the public.

This party ain't over.

No visible means of support and you have not seen nothing yet
Everything's stuck together
And I don't know what you expect staring into the TV set
Fighting fire with fire...
- "Burning Down the House" Talking Heads

So Many Different Ways The Republicans Can Make Things Worse

Trying to figure out how the endgame of the Republican War on Obamacare will go. As David Atkins over at Washington Monthly notes, the normal rules of politics no longer apply:

The setup is actually fairly simple: would the Republican desire to pass massive tax cuts for its donor class overwhelm its fear of being punished at the ballot box for taking healthcare away from millions of Americans, including their own voters? Under normal circumstances fear of electoral consequences would prevail. But we live in an age of unprecedented partisanship and big money influence, which leads many Republicans to feel insulated from the consequences of even openly cruel actions that damage their loyal constituents. That Republicans would actually destroy Obamacare went from remote possibility to very real.

What that means is anyone's guess, so I'm trying to plot out the scenarios just to determine how fucked we are.

Scenario One: McConnell is somehow able to push through the horrendous Senate version (BCRA) of trumpcare.

By making tweaks to the Senate package, McConnell will try to keep the "moderate" Republicans from bolting - gifting possible holdouts with small relief funding - while giving the Far Right more reason to vote for the bill. While the Democrats could use various procedural rules to delay or hold the bill, given McConnell's track record of bulldozing through his agenda this could also mean those procedures will get napalmed into ash.

Because the Senate bill differs from the House version (AHCA), this means the hot potato goes back to the House for a new vote, and this is where the scenarios can really diverge.

Scenario One-A: The House - despite the griping from the Freedom Caucus (Far Right) that it doesn't go far enough, and the worries of the Tuesday Group (Moderates) fully aware of how the voters hate the bill - passes the Senate BCRA and trump signs it, essentially dooming 18-24 million Americans having their healthcare taken away.

Given the delays written into the Senate bill, most of the damage from it won't be obvious until 2020. But early shifts in Medicaid funds, the loss of maternity care, and the loss of regulatory control protecting pre-existing conditions will be clear early on. The CBO score rated that 11 million could lose their health care by 2018. That's even before the hard cuts to Medicaid kick in.

Scenario One-B: The House Republicans split on the vote. The Tuesday Group were angry about how they were told to vote for a bad bill with the promise that "the Senate will fix it" only to have the Senate pass the buck back to them. They've had months to watch the public outcry against any Repeal-Replace and can refuse to support this next step. Ryan may not have enough favors in his pocket to get enough of them around to support it... while coping with a Freedom Caucus that would never accept any moderate changes to their Repeal-Replace desires.

As a result, the entire Repeal-Replace effort collapses for good. This does turn into a serious problem with Congress, because the real reason the Republicans were so eager to get rid of Obamacare first was to clear the table for bigger issues such as their overall Tax Cut Budget of Doom. They can't push that massive tax cut if there's still a big federal healthcare mandate like Obamacare in the way. The GOP hasn't even looked at a serious budget proposal this session despite several on the table, and the budget is due by September I believe. They're running out of time.

The delay in legislative action is having a cascade effect on everything else: The debt ceiling vote in particular is coming up fast, serious political infighting with the hardcore Freedom Caucus poised to block any debt hike. The Republicans can't afford to let their Repeal-Replace effort wither away, as it would signal a serious rift among their ranks preventing anything from getting done. That lack of effort will discourage their voting base, another midterm woe they'll have to cope with.

Scenario One-C: This goes a little farther than One-B in that the Republican split turns into a party civil war. Failure by Ryan and the House leadership to keep the factions in line leads to a public falling out, where either the Freedom Caucus quits the GOP (likely) to form a third party, or the Tuesday Group quits (unlikely, 'cause they're cowards) and throws in their lot with the Democrats.

There's currently 240 Republicans to 194 Democrats in the House. It would take 47 Republicans quitting the GOP and forming a third party to get them down to 193, giving Dems a plurality. Better still, any Republicans flipping party to the Dems - allowable during the sessions - would boost Democratic numbers into a majority of their own: That would need 24 Republicans switching the aisles.

By numbers, there's 33 official members of the Freedom Caucus: Not enough to form a third party unless they convince - or the SuperPAC deep pocket funders convince - enough regular Republicans to flee with them. They definitely will not flip to the Democrats, so that part of the scenario won't happen. A serious move for this scenario would have to involve enough of the moderate Tuesday Group - 48 in their roster, so either way they can do this - flipping sides or going third party.

Once the Democrats are in control of the House, the whole effort to Repeal-Replace stops.

This is pure fantasy, of course. I'd personally love to see the moderate factions grow a spine and tell the wingnuts to go fuck themselves, but that's not how elected moderates roll. It's possible the Freedom Caucus could pull off a revolt of some kind that would force the Tuesday Group to flee no matter what, or pull off a split with enough members to give the Democrats minority-majority control, but that's next-to-impossible with the current math.

Of the three variances, One-B is the one we can hope for... but don't be surprised if we get One-A. After all, with the Republicans in charge we're all screwed.

Past all this, we move on to Scenario Two: Unable to pass a Repeal-and-Replace package, the GOP Senate - then the House - opts for a straight-up Repeal and let the whole thing crash until people beg for their bad bill(s).

This is the Shoot-The-Hostage strategy. The Far Right factions in both House and Senate would view this as a winning move, because it clearly destroys Obama's signature achievement AND it validates their worldview that government regulations are bad. The logic for this move is that once they reset the nation's healthcare system to how it was in 2009 - which is, shitty - and let the nation stew in horror for six months, the Republicans could force the Democrats to agree to ANY Replace package the GOP would put on the table.

There are several faults in this logic. One, there is nothing the Republicans can do to force the Democrats to cave on this issue. The Dems may genuinely care that millions of Americans need healthcare coverage, but they are competent enough to know that any GOP plan will be a disaster compared to what Obamacare - or a Medicare/Medicaid For All - offers. The only thing Democrats will ever vote on is keeping Obamacare the way it is (or at best fixing its gaps with a Public Option). Plus, the Democrats are smart enough to know that any deal with the devil is no deal at all.

Second, for all the attempts the Republicans will try to pin the blame of losing healthcare on the Democrats, a majority of Americans are fully aware which party - the one yelling and screaming and lying their asses off about Obamacare - will deserve the blame (hint: it ain't Obama). The sudden turnaround of pro-Obamacare support is a clear sign of that. This is what David Frum warned the party about: Once a public benefit is out there - Social Security, Medicare - you can't take it away without getting punished for it.

The Republican leadership may think themselves protected via gerrymandered "safe" districts and via their growing voter suppression efforts, and given the recent history of midterms - 2010, 2014 - going their way they may be right. However, the conditions the GOP are setting up - massive social trauma, the likelihood of economic chaos when the health care industry takes the hit - could make this coming election cycle similar to 2006 when the disasters of Katrina, rising gas prices, and the failing Iraq occupation led to the Democrats flipping the House and Senate with historic gains.

A full Repeal without a Replace would also betray the Republican Moderates who are keen on genuine replacement, and that might lead to the One-C scenario.

Scenario Three: The Senate can't agree on a path forward on their version of trumpcare, and since they'd already pissed on the House version that ends any effort to Repeal. Instead, a genuine effort to Reform the existing Obamacare system (ACA) gets a bipartisan deal in the Senate done. And it goes - with some grumbling - to the House for passage just to get it out of the way.

This is from the noise coming from "moderate" Senators - Collins in particular, with harrumphs from Murkowski, Cassidy and Heller - who are openly opposed to the current Senate bill. Their plan(s) range from just minor cuts of Medicaid funding to changes of the tax model to shift the revenue burdens and placate both sides (mostly), with an eye towards making sure they keep the healthcare loss to a minimum - say, just a million or two Americans - while avoiding the bad optics of kicking children and elderly to the curb.

Whatever they come up with, the plan would have to appease either the Democrats in both the Senate and the House, or the Far Right Republicans.

In short: This could never happen. Not with the existing dogma choking the Republican leadership. The Far Right wants their goddamn tax cuts at all hazards - which would be about $750 BILLION out of ACA - and in order to justify that cut from Obamacare they HAVE to cut spending somewhere - which is why Medicaid is seeing cuts to around $744 BILLION when it's all said and done. Unless the moderates find a revenue source that can cover $744 BILLION - which means a tax hike somewhere in the economy that no wingnut can accept - that one step alone blocks all compromise.

Scenario Four: Aliens show up that can provide free health care to all, making the entire matter moot.

Problem with this is, no sentient lifeform in the universe is going to want to deal with that goddamn con artist sitting in the White House.

So you can kind of see the trouble we're in. The only scenario that looks even remotely possible is One-B where the attempt to Repeal-Replace fails again and Congress is forced to move on to other pressing matters. But knowing the wingnut nature of the modern Republican Party, they are going to get their goddamn tax cuts come hell or high water, which means we're all getting One-A.

At which point our nation DOES go to hell and we all drown in the flood.

Thanks, Russia. Thanks, 62 million trump voters. Thanks, Grover "Drown 'Em In My Bathtub" Norquist. Thanks, spineless moderate Republicans.

We are so royally fucked.

What The Republicans Want to Do When They Kill Off Obamacare

It's really very simple:

Republicans want to give everyone earning over $200,000 annual income a tax cut. So screw the 90 percent of Americans under that income limit.

And Republicans want to kill 22 to 25 million Americans who will lose their Medicaid support and/or their health care coverage.

Try this as a reality check. Go outside to a crowded place, like a shopping mall or grocery store or a summer day's park. Start counting each person. One out of every twenty Americans are going to lose their health care. So when you get to the twentieth person, realize that the person you're pointing at is going to die.

If you think that you aren't affected, that your family or friends are safe, you're wrong. Start counting your family, start counting your friends. When you get to Number Twenty, say goodbye to that person.

And we are all fucking screwed.

The Republican Party Bites

I don't think I ever believed the Senate would ever stop the madness.

When the House tripped over themselves trying to nuke Obamacare earlier this year, it had more to do with the GOP being too inept to pull off the stunt. So of course, the Far Right Republicans pressed ahead on another plan to gut the Affordable Care Act, passing a horrifying House bill that granted them their oh-so-precious TAX CUT FOR THE RICH at the cost of kicking 18 to 24 million Americans off health care.

The House did that all in a rush, in secret, unwilling to let it be up for debate or cross-examination.

So why expect the Republican-controlled Senate to be any different?

They too worked on their version of the Kill Americans Act in utter secrecy, avoiding committee room reviews or public debate on the matter. What they came up with was a horrifying Senate bill that grants them their oh-so-precious TAX CUT FOR THE RICH at the cost of kicking 18 to 24 million Americans off health care.

You might notice there is little goddamn difference between the two bills. Merely the wording and the time-delays the Senate built into their ticking time bomb.

And of course the Beltway media will condemn in the softest language, debate using rules only the Far Right will accept, falsify history about how Obama and his Democratic allies passed their ACA, and pretend that this would all somehow work out if only the Democrats in Congress would be more bipartisan about it.

And of course the Moderates in the Senate - the Concerned Corps of Crunchy Conservatism - will roll over and vote for this bill after a hammy performance of "oh we need to tweak just this little bit and ALL WILL BE WELL" so they can campaign on "I fought for you" when they really didn't.

And of course trump will sign whichever travesty of "Nuke Obamacare" reaches his desk, because then he will claim HE'S DONE THE MOST OF ANY PRESIDENT EVER and preen like a jackass pretending to be an eagle.

AND OF COURSE MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WILL LOSE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE, EITHER THROUGH MASSIVE CUTS TO MEDICAID OR THROUGH INCREASED PREMIUMS THEY CAN'T AFFORD TO MATCH. Even working Americans are going to find themselves feeling the pinch, not just in three years but in three months when the insurance companies freak out against the changes in law and funding.

All because the Republican Party as a whole no longer gives a shit about any American making less than $200,000 a year.

All because too many voters bought into the decades-long propaganda campaign by the Republicans and their Fox Not-News shills that libruls are the true evildoers who cavort with the Dreaded OTHER.

All because we have a broken electoral system from the gerrymanders all the way up to an outdated Electoral College.

I wrote two years ago that the Republican Party was dead, that all that remains was a soulless shambling ghoul, a zombie whose continued existence was racing to the grave.

Problem with zombies: anything they bite turns into a zombie too.

This nation got bit by the Wingnut plague, and we're at the point it's shambling into that grave along with the GOP.

Gods Help Us All.

A Dark Night Full of Republicans Drunk On Their Hate

I noted earlier, the modern Republican Party is so hate-driven, so obsessed with its Utopia tax-cut world, that they would keep coming after Obamacare because they can't think any other way.

Because Republicans hate Obama this much, they voted to kill off your health care coverage. They did it with a bill so screwed up that they didn't even have the language for it ready for people to read it. They rushed it to the floor without the Congressional Budget Office grading it. They just wanted to crow that they had "their victory" killing off Obamacare.

And then the motherfuckers celebrated with a beer.

I am not joking.

Despite all the phone calls, despite all the angry town halls of people terrified of losing their coverage, despite all the polls saying how Americans were realizing just what Obama's Health Care plan meant... these Republicans are a bunch of sadists.

They don't deserve your votes. They never did.

Do you see why I kept screaming the last ten years "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN?" This is why.

To every Democrat, get candidates in EVERY Congressional district NOW. Start campaigning. Make this the issue. Hit the Republicans every fucking day on this until 2018 and beyond.

To every Independent voter, this is your wake-up call. There is only one side of this fight that is fighting for the people to survive. Start supporting Democrats across the board, dammit.

To every registered Republican about to lose their family's Medicaid funding, to every registered Republican about to find out your hospital visit for a bum knee twenty years ago counts as a pre-existing condition disqualifying you for any help, to every registered Republican who voted for these liars and hypocrites and evildoers who cut your health care just so their billionaire buddies can keep a million more in their pockets... You deserve every hellish health-care moment that awaits you.

To the worthless cowardly Tuesday Group, you so-called moderates showed no power or willingness to stand up against a terrible health care bill. No wonder the Far Right wingnuts bully their way into party leadership roles.

And to the goddamn Republican Congresscritters getting drunk while the rest of us die, I hope to GOD YOU ALL GET CIRRHOSIS OF THE LIVER.