Donald Trump and the Deathly Fallout (Part 15)

[sawasdee]

@fraurosenaFrom  your mouth to God's ear.

[sawasdee]

I hesitate, and hate, to say this - but I have a horrid feeling we are seeing the demise of the US not just as a world power, but as a nation, if someone can't stop the Orange Voldemort.

Why should the more prosperous blue states, which are coming to hate him, prop up the red? They'd be better off alone.

Oh god, I'm in doomsday mood. Just everything I've read today has depressed me.

[fraurosena]

Nuh-uh-uh @sawasdee, not so negative! Remember: from the ashes rises the Phoenix. 

As I see it, the GOP has been struggling internally for more than a decade, and now the worst of the worst has come drifting to the top. This is a wonderful opportunity for America to purge all the ugly, all the nastiness (rascism, mysoginy, fundamentalism and so on) from politics. 

Right now, all the scum is floating on the top, for all to see. It's ugly. It's horrible. it stinks to high heaven. Nobody really wants to partake of this particular cocktail. So, when eyes are finally opened, when people are ready to admit that this is truly unpalatable, the true American spirit will come to the fore, and the great sieve will be brought forth and the dross will be thrown out with the trash.

Ok, I admit I was watching a cooking programme and got a bit carried away there with my metaphor. 

[RoseWilder]

Things are chaotic inside the White House right now. What a shock: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, sawasdee said:

The irony is, that apart from tax reform and abortion, tRump's promises on the campaign trail were much closer to the Democrats than the Republicans - and in some cases, closer to Bernie than Hillary!

eg His promises on health care......

Interesting you write this. I saw this article in the NYT: "Republicans for Single-Payer Health Care"

Quote

Without a viable health care agenda of their own, Republicans now face a choice between two options: Obamacare and a gradual shift toward a single-payer system. The early signs suggest they will choose single payer.

That would be the height of political irony, of course. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan and Tom Price may succeed where left-wing dreamers have long failed and move the country toward socialized medicine. And they would do it unwittingly, by undermining the most conservative health care system that Americans are willing to accept.

You’ve no doubt heard of that conservative system. It’s called Obamacare.

Let me take a step back to explain how we got here and how the politics of health care will most likely play out after last week’s Republican crackup.

Passing major social legislation is fantastically difficult. It tends to involve taking something from influential interest groups — taxing the rich, for example (as Obamacare did), or reducing some companies’ profits or hurting professional guilds. Those groups can often persuade voters that the status quo is less scary than change.

But when big social legislation does pass, and improves lives, it becomes even harder to undo than it was to create. Americans are generally not willing to go backward on matters of basic economic decency. Child labor isn’t coming back, and the minimum wage, Social Security and Medicare aren’t going away. Add Obamacare to the list. “Americans now think government should help guarantee coverage for just about everyone,” as Jennifer Rubin, a conservative, wrote.

Trump seemed to understand this during the campaign and came out in favor of universal coverage. Once elected, though, he reversed himself. He turned over health care to Price, a surgeon and Georgia congressman with an amazing record, and not in a good way.

Price had spent years proposing bills to take away people’s insurance. He also had a habit of buying the stocks of drug companies that benefited from policies he was pushing. Preet Bharara, the federal prosecutor, was investigating Price when Trump fired Bharara this month, ProPublica reported.

Price and Ryan were the main architects of the Republican health bill. They tried to persuade the country to return to a more laissez-faire system in which if you didn’t have insurance, it was your problem. They failed, spectacularly. Again, Americans weren’t willing to abandon basic economic decency.

But Price may not be finished. This weekend, Trump tweeted that “ObamaCare will explode,” and Price, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services, has the authority to undermine parts of the law. Here’s where the irony begins: He can more easily hurt the conservative parts than the liberal parts.

Obamacare increased coverage in two main ways. The more liberal way expanded a government program, Medicaid, to cover the near-poor. The more conservative way created private insurance markets where middle-class and affluent people could buy subsidized coverage.

The Medicaid expansion isn’t completely protected from Price. He can give states some flexibility to deny coverage. But Medicaid is mostly protected. On Friday, after the Republican bill failed, Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicaid and Medicare for Obama, was talking on the phone to a former colleague. “Virtually the only words either of us could say,” Slavitt relayed, “were ‘Medicaid is safe.’ ”

The private markets are less safe. They have already had more problems than the Medicaid expansion. Price could try to fix those problems, and I hope he does. Or he could set out to aggravate the problems, which he has taken initial steps to do. Above all, he could make changes that discourage healthy people from signing up, causing prices to rise and insurers to flee.

Now, think about the political message this would send to Democrats: It’s not worth expanding health coverage in a conservative-friendly way, because Republican leaders won’t support it anyway.

Politics aside, private markets in many areas of the economy have substantive advantages over a government program. They create competition, which leads to innovation and lower prices. But private markets in medical care tend to be more complicated and less successful.

And government health care programs turn out to be very popular, among both Democratic and Republican voters. Medicare is a huge success. Medicaid also works well, and some Republicans have defended it in recent weeks.

...

 

[sawasdee]

I love you, @fraurosena!

I know I'm feeling pessimistic, but difficult when

a) I live alone

b)Most of my social circle believe tRump is a'breath of fresh air'.

I literally have one person I can talk to honestly without causing maybe permanent rifts in relationships....which is why I probably sometimes go over the top.

And why if I type a b and a bracket do I get a smiley?

 

 

[onekidanddone]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Fox News said Trump spent the weekend ‘working at the White House.’ He was at his golf club."

I love some of the Tweets in the article. My favorite: "News Alert: President does his job. Maybe."Categories

 

 

I love Dana Milbank's writing: "Trump is looking more and more like a man without a plan"

"We will figure something out." Seriously?

My niece was in Georgetown on Saturday.  She said she saw three helicopters flying over head. Assuming they were Trump's she told me she flipped him the bird with both hands.  Love that girl.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dc-sports-bog/wp/2017/03/28/report-trump-in-talks-to-throw-ceremonial-first-pitch-at-nationals-opening-day/?hpid=hp_local-news_nats-945am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.af6ef5b3d43a

I think the Nationals had to ask him to keep up the tradition and he declined because he knew he would get booed off the mound. SAD. The toddler might get his itty bitty feelings hurt.

[fraurosena]

1 minute ago, sawasdee said:

I love you, @fraurosena!

I know I'm feeling pessimistic, but difficult when

a) I live alone

b)Most of my social circle believe tRump is a'breath of fresh air'.

I literally have one person I can talk to honestly without causing maybe permanebt rifts in relationships....which is why i probbly sometimes go over the top.

And why if I type a b and a bracket do I get a smiley?

 

 

Hugs to you! 

It must really suck to live in that kind of situation right now. But although it might seem dismal because of that, know that there are many out here who think like you. You are not alone. 

[VelociRapture]

Only two months in and I'm tired. So, so tired. And scared. I brought a beautiful and perfect little girl into the world at the exact worst time and it terrifies me to think about what she's going to have to deal with as she grows up. 

[fraurosena]

8 minutes ago, VelociRapture said:

Only two months in and I'm tired. So, so tired. And scared. I brought a beautiful and perfect little girl into the world at the exact worst time and it terrifies me to think about what she's going to have to deal with as she grows up. 

Little Anna will have a wonderful, loving and doting mother to deal with, that much is certain!

And she'll deal with a much better world too. Like I said in my earlier posts, things will change. It won't stay like this. It will be different, and improved. So your little one's going to grow up in a loving environment, happy and content.

She might moan about it when she has to learn about these times in school though.

[onekidanddone]

44 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

I love you, @fraurosena!

I know I'm feeling pessimistic, but difficult when

a) I live alone

b)Most of my social circle believe tRump is a'breath of fresh air'.

I literally have one person I can talk to honestly without causing maybe permanent rifts in relationships....which is why I probably sometimes go over the top.

And why if I type a b and a bracket do I get a smiley?

 

 

Fresh air? Yea, because Agent Orange smells so lovely. I understand you are feeling pessimistic. Life really is hard right now. As @fraurosena said, you are not alone. FJ sometimes feels like we are preaching to the choir, but it is a damn good one.  We all sound awesome.

[GreyhoundFan]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Fresh air? Yea, because Agent Orange smells so lovely. I understand you are feeling pessimistic. Life really is hard right now. As @fraurosena said, you are not alone. FJ sometimes feels like we are preaching to the choir, but it is a damn good one.  We all sound awesome.

Amen! I don't know what I would do if I couldn't come here and share information with like-minded folks. I have learned so much from everyone here.

 

No surprise here: "Trump claims that killing Obama’s climate legacy will bring back coal jobs. It’s a ruse."

Quote

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order rolling back the Clean Power Plan, former president Barack Obama’s 2015 policy aimed at reducing the carbon emissions that cause climate change. He touted this as a big step in restoring American jobs — in particular, coal mining jobs, which are concentrated in areas carried by Trump in the 2016 election.

But contrary to the White House spin, Tuesday’s action has little to do with improving the lives of Trump’s working-class base. It will do far more to promote the aims of the monied interests who backed his candidacy and now help shape White House policy.

In advance of Tuesday’s signing, the White House pushed the storyline that Trump was making good on “a pledge to the coal industry,” claiming that “he’s going to do whatever he can to help those workers.” At the signing ceremony at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, coal miners flanked the president as he pledged to “end the war on coal” for those miners who “told me about the attacks on their jobs and their livelihoods.”

But there’s no evidence that Trump’s actions will help coal miners who have lost their jobs. Instead, other motives appear to be in play: an embrace of climate change denial and a hostility toward government regulation that doesn’t even appear rooted in the goal of job creation.

As Coral Davenport of the New York Times reports Tuesday, although there have been losses in coal mining jobs over the past decade, these were occurring well before Obama enacted his climate change policy in 2015. These job losses, she reports, resulted not from government regulations but from increases in the use of natural gas and other energy alternatives, as well as automation in the coal industry. Thus, one energy economist tells Davenport, even if Trump’s rollback of the Obama policy does result in increased coal production, it may not result in more jobs for out-of-work miners — because these jobs have been mechanized.

What’s more, as Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis of The Post report, market forces have made coal less competitive with other cleaner sources of energy, like natural gas and renewables. Thus, it’s unclear how Trump’s action would even increase demand for coal.

Nonetheless, Trump’s allies are promoting the action as a victory for ordinary Americans over regulation-happy government bureaucrats. Breitbart on Tuesday led with an “exclusive” interview with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who, as Oklahoma’s attorney general, aligned himself with the energy industry in legal efforts to derail federal efforts to combat climate change.

The Breitbart piece mocks EPA employees as sensitive snowflakes, sneering that Trump’s visit to the agency’s headquarters to sign his executive order “will likely trigger renewed sadness for some agency bureaucrats who were reportedly in tears after Trump won the election.”

Pruitt, on the other hand, is depicted as a heroic scourge of government regulation. The piece praises his philosophy as “an example of the Trump administration’s goal to dismantle the federal government’s overbearing bureaucracy, for the sake of boosting economic growth.” But as noted above, experts doubt that this particular spasm of deregulation will actually create jobs in any significant way.

Meanwhile, climate change denialism also appears to be a driver of Tuesday’s events.

Trump himself has repeatedly described climate science as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, and as Jane Mayer reports this week in the New Yorker, one of Trump’s key supporters is a climate change denier. Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund tycoon whose family, as it happens, has provided millions in funding to Breitbart, believes climate change is “overblown.” If it is happening, he contends, contrary to the scientific consensus, climate change would result in enhanced plant and animal life, rather than degradation of the environment. According to Mayer’s piece, Mercer relies on the advice of Arthur Robinson, an Oregon biochemist with no peer-reviewed publications on climate science, who calls climate change a “false religion.”

More broadly, Mayer reports, Mercer wants the government to be “shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.” The Mercer family, in tandem with White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, is apparently striving to achieve what Bannon has called the “deconstruction of the administrative state” through crafting Trump policy and creating an alternative media — Breitbart — to cheerlead the effort.

...

 

[fraurosena]

Speaking of awesomeness, here's the latest Keith Olbermann. 

 

And take note, he even mentions me! I'm so proud...  

(although if you blink you'll miss it)

[onekidanddone]

1 minute ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Amen! I don't know what I would do if I couldn't come here and share information with like-minded folks. I have learned so much from everyone here.

 

No surprise here: "Trump claims that killing Obama’s climate legacy will bring back coal jobs. It’s a ruse."

 

My only regret about coming to FJ, is that I didn't start posting sooner.  I joined a few years ago and then never kept up.  Oh my youth wasted.  Well not really youth, but you know.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

2 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

My only regret about coming to FJ, is that I didn't start posting sooner.  I joined a few years ago and then never kept up.  Oh my youth wasted.  Well not really youth, but you know.

 

Me too! And that I wasted so much time only reading and posting in the Bates/Duggars forums. I still don't venture some places (Nauglerville, Maxhell, PP, and such), but I have expanded my reading and posting slowly but surely.

[fraurosena]

1 minute ago, onekidanddone said:

My only regret about coming to FJ, is that I didn't start posting sooner.  I joined a few years ago and then never kept up.  Oh my youth wasted.  Well not really youth, but you know.

 

Ha, I joined a few years ago too, and only really started posting in these political threads. And now look at me.

My name is fraurosena, and I'm an addict...

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Speaking of awesomeness, here's the latest Keith Olbermann. 

 

And take note, he even mentions me! I'm so proud...  

(although if you blink you'll miss it)

Do you think he reads here?  Keith.  Keeeeeeith.  I love you Kieth.  Never stop fighting.

7 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Me too! And that I wasted so much time only reading and posting in the Bates/Duggars forums. I still don't venture some places (Nauglerville, Maxhell, PP, and such), but I have expanded my reading and posting slowly but surely.

I skim some of the other fundy places, but try to limit it.  If I gave in I'd never get up from my desk.  

[fraurosena]

Ok everyone, it's time for the absurd. As it's about one of the main 'news sites' where Trumpolini (thanks Keith for that one) gets his 'truth', I'm posting it here.

Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, claimed that her royal majesty, Queen Elizabeth II is being forced to convert to Islam.

I kid you not. It's true. Believe me.

 

[onekidanddone]

21 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Ok everyone, it's time for the absurd. As it's about one of the main 'news sites' where Trumpolini (thanks Keith for that one) gets his 'truth', I'm posting it here.

Alex Jones, of Infowars fame, claimed that her royal majesty, Queen Elizabeth II is being forced to convert to Islam.

I kid you not. It's true. Believe me.

 

Alex will be Alex.  What is frighting is that the scum in the White House is a fan.  I'd like to see Trump come out and say to the faces of the Sandy Hook families that the shooting was a  hoax.  Am I filled with rage?  Oh fuck yea.

[formergothardite]

Can you imagine Trump trying to handle a crisis like Sandy Hook? I can't. 

[onekidanddone]

4 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Can you imagine Trump trying to handle a crisis like Sandy Hook? I can't. 

No response. He would be bigly quiet.  Or make it about him.  I was trying to come up with a tweet he might give and I just couldn't. 

[47of74]

53 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

No response. He would be bigly quiet.  Or make it about him.  I was trying to come up with a tweet he might give and I just couldn't. 

Or would parrot what Bannon/Jones/et al say, no matter how offensive.  One of the right wingers around here was going on telling people that Sandy Hook was staged and was a ploy to take guns.  Even after it was pointed out to him several times that he was full of it.  I could see the reich wing echo chamber starting that up again next disaster and saying it's Democrats/Muslims/etc who staged the disaster to take away peoples rights.

[VelociRapture]

1 hour ago, onekidanddone said:

No response. He would be bigly quiet.  Or make it about him.  I was trying to come up with a tweet he might give and I just couldn't. 

Here you go:

"Spoke to Newtown Mayor Dawn Hochsprung today to offer condolences on the shooting at Sandy Hook. She is strong and doing very well."

I'm assuming here that he's:

1. Too lazy to come up with something new each time something horrible happens and

2. Stupid enough to confuse the First Selectman, E. Patricia Llorda,  with the heroic slain Principal of the school, Dawn Hochsprung and

3. That he would get her job title wrong.

Or, you know, he'll just get the smart black guy to take care of it for him.

Then he can forget all about actually commemorating the anniversary. Or doing anything to protect other innocent kids. And continue to support Sandy Hook deniers. Because that's how you make America great again. 

[AmericanRose]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/politics/health-care-obamacare-freedom-caucus.html

Apparently the ACA repeal is back on the table. Ryan wants to get it done before insurers set their premiums and benefits for next year.

Quote

The House Republican whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, said of Democrats, “Their celebration is premature. We are closer to repealing Obamacare than we ever have been before.”

I assume he means they're closer because... they have a plan, however crappy that plan proved to be!

I wish they would just stop :\ I also don't think any Republican should be trusted to investigate anything involving another Republican. I'm sure they would scream bloody murder if Clinton had won and Democrats were leading 'investigations' about her! I feel the only reason any Republican is stepping up to do so is because they can attempt to hide all the unsavoury things that would be found / have been found.

And now I'm off to wonder what "conservative activists" are pushing for this.

[GreyhoundFan]

17 minutes ago, VelociRapture said:

Here you go:

"Spoke to Newtown Mayor Dawn Hochsprung today to offer condolences on the shooting at Sandy Hook. She is strong and doing very well."

I'm assuming here that he's:

1. Too lazy to come up with something hew each time something horrible happens and

2. Stupid enough to confuse the First Selectman, E. Patricia Llorda,  with the heroic slain Principal of the school, Dawn Hochsprung and

3. That he would get her job title wrong.

Or, you know, he'll just get the smart black guy to take care of it for him.

Then he can forget all about actually commemorating the anniversary. Or doing anything to protect other innocent kids. And continue to support Sandy Hook deniers. Because that's how you make America great again. 

Don't forget that he'd have to slam Hillary and/or Obama in his Tweet.