To summarize, RyanCare will take away health insurance from millions of non-affluent people, make the insurance people do have much worse, and open a major front in the War on Women in order to pay for a massive upper-class tax cut. In conclusion, Both Sides Do It but Hillary Clinton is worse.

Little in politics shocks me. The process House Republicans want to use for their health care bill does. After literally years of complaining Obamacare was jammed down the American people’s throats with insufficient information or consideration, the GOP intends to hold committee votes on their bill two days after releasing it, and without a Congressional Budget Office report estimating either coverage or fiscal effects. It’s breathtaking.

You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks – a third of the South’s laborers – to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

It is easy to know how we respond to a president with whom we disagree on many, many issues. I disagree with Trump’s support for repealing the Affordable Care Act. I disagree with Trump’s plan to give huge tax breaks to billionaires. I disagree with Trump’s appointment of an anti-environmental EPA administrator. I disagree with Trump’s appointments of major Wall Street executives to key economic positions and his plans to loosen regulations on Wall Street designed to protect consumers. And on and on and on! These strong policy disagreements are a normal part of the political process. He has his views. I have mine.

But how do we deal with a president who makes statements that reverberate around our country and the world that are not based on fact or evidence? What is the appropriate way to respond to that? And if the media and political leaders fail to call lies what they are, are they then guilty of misleading the public?

“So bottom line, why would the president want Congress to investigate for information he already has?” Jackson wondered.

Spicer asserted that the president was concerned about the “separation of power aspect.” [Which is absolute nonsense - Dave W.]

But there was a sudden change in the net sentiment results that follows immediately after FBI Director James Comey released his letter about a renewed investigation of Clinton emails to leaders of Congress on Oct. 28. Immediately afterwards, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump. At a time when opinion polling shows perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth “standings.” The change in word of mouth momentum was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.

Based on this finding, it is our conclusion that the Comey letter, 11 days before the election, was the precipitating event behind Clinton’s loss, despite the letter being effectively retracted less than a week later. In such a close election, there may have been dozens of factors whose absence would have reversed the outcome, in particular the influence campaign of the Russian government as detailed by US intelligence services. But the sudden change in the political conversation after the Comey letter suggest it was the single, most indispensable factor in the surprise election result.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes held a briefing on Tuesday afternoon where he addressed President Donald Trump’s wild and unsubstantiated Twitter allegations that former President Barack Obama wiretapped his office.

Nunes said he had not seen any evidence that would back up the claims. When asked whether it was appropriate for Trump to make such a bold assertion without evidence or before any investigation, Nunes said, “I think a lot of the things that he says, you guys take literally.” He added that “we should [not] attack the president for tweeting.”

President Trump has no regrets. His staff has no defense.

...So for Mr. Trump’s allies inside the West Wing and beyond, the tweetstorm spawned the mother of all messaging migraines. Over the past few days, they have executed what amounts to a strategic political retreat — trying to publicly validate Mr. Trump’s suspicions without overtly endorsing a claim some of them believe might have been generated by Breitbart News and other far-right outlets.

“No, that’s above my pay grade,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary...

“No comment,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said earlier in the day...

“I don’t know anything about it,” John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said on CNN on Monday...

The Kaiser Family Foundation calculates the changes to customers in two sample markets: Reno, which is a cheap market, and Mobile, which is expensive. A 60-year-old in Mobile who earns $20,000 a year currently qualifies for a tax credit of $13,235 to buy insurance. Under Trumpcare, that tax credit would be reduced to $4,000 a year. On the other hand, people who earn $75,000 a year, who currently get nothing to help them buy insurance, would get a $4,000 credit from the Republican plan.

...The national health-care debate began in 2009. Republicans have had eight years since then to draw up and unify around a plan of their own. They have spent this time insisting they could do so easily. For most of the year, in fact, House Republicans have been running a television ad assuring the public they already “have a plan” with wonderful features: “Health insurance that provides more choices and better care, at lower costs. Provides peace of mind to people with preexisting conditions … without disrupting existing coverage.”

Eventually they had told the lie so long it became impossible for them to abandon it. And so Republicans have found themselves frantically scrawling out a hopelessly inadequate solution in order to meet a self-imposed deadline driven by their overarching desire to cut taxes for the rich. “Expanding subsidies for high earners, and cutting health coverage off from the working poor: it sounds like a left-wing caricature of mustache-twirling, top-hatted Republican fat cats,” writes the Republican health-care adviser Avik Roy. The caricature is true.

I strongly recommend this Dylan Mathews post, which demonstrates that the biggest generator of tax revenue RyanCare would eliminate is a tax on investment income for households making over $250K (or single people making $125K). If you’re making more than $250K a year and would notice a 3.8% tax on your capital gains, you’re doing very well. And yet Republican orthodoxy is that giving you that money back by taking health insurance away from the less affluent should be a central policy goal. They’re just not willing to put it in those terms, because the vast majority of people correctly see this as monstrous. But this is what the Republican Party is.

A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.

These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for positions across the federal government, according to documents received by ProPublica through public-records requests.

While President Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior.

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

...the new GOP plan has a similar structure to Obamacare, fails to address most of its flaws, and may well make some of them worse. Republicans should take note: If one of Obamacare’s leading critics concludes that your “repeal and replace” bill is even worse than Obamacare, and worse than doing nothing, that’s a pretty damning indictment.

President Trump is now wallowing in fury, we are told, because he can’t make the Russia story disappear; he can’t stem the leaks to the media; and he can’t seem to realize his promises. Some reports tell us that unflattering comparisons to Barack Obama’s early accomplishments are “gnawing at Trump,” while others say he went “ballistic” when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia probe, because it telegraphed capitulation to Trump’s foes.

But all of these things are connected by a common thread: Trump is enraged at being subjected to a system of democratic and institutional constraints, for which he has signaled nothing but absolute, unbridled contempt. The system is pushing back, and he can’t bear it...

We’re witnessing a level of total disdain for basic democratic and institutional processes that defies description, and perhaps calls for a new vocabulary. But the story does not end here. As Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic explain in a great piece, the almost comical lack of good faith that Trump and the White House are showing toward our processes is inspiring an escalation in institutional pushback — from the courts, the media, government leakers, and civil society — that is having much more of a constraining effect than Trump ever could have anticipated. Indeed, the Trump White House’s ongoing conduct is itself producing the very systemic resistance that now has Trump in such a rage.

They aren’t quite ready to share their belief that slavery itself was O.K., but pushing the idea that slaves from Africa were just another group of immigrants is a step in that direction. It makes America’s history less brutal and bloody, shifts the African-American’s place in that history and gives the impression that with a little effort, African-Americans could be as well incorporated into society as the Irish.

The GOP’s plan guts the Medicaid expansion, defunds Planned Parenthood, and sunsets a federal rule that requires that qualified insurance plans cover things like mental health care, maternity care, and pediatric dental and vision care, among other things. That means that states could individually choose not to require insurance plans to cover maternity care, and that women who are planning on having a child would need to purchase special insurance riders, which would likely be prohibitively expensive. Further, the fate of the ACA’s birth control mandate—which allowed women to obtain contraception at no out-of-pocket cost, ostensibly because making it extremely easy for a woman to not get pregnant is more cost effective than dealing with a woman who is pregnant and does not want to be—is also up in the air...

Why, then, would House Republicans include so much language in their bill that specifically targeted the poor and/or female, unless it was to throw red meat to a base that wanted to see those groups punished? And what does that say about the moral character of their base?

...[A] couple of days ago the [China Trademark Office] announced that it had granted 38 of them [Trump trademarks]. According to the Daily Telegraph (London), the trademarks cover use of the “Trump” name for businesses “including branded spas, massage parlors, golf clubs, hotels, insurance, finance and real estate companies, retail shops, restaurants, bars, and private bodyguard and escort services.”

So there we are. Not only is our president accepting valuable property rights from foreign governments in violation of an express constitutional provision, he is now positioned to offer Trump™ Massage Parlors and Trump™ Escort Services in the world’s most populous country.

Mike Pence’s use of a private email account that actually was hacked reveals what was blindingly obvious all along: although it dominated campaign coverage in 2016, the story of Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS! was a trivial psuedoscandal involving behavior nobody would care about at all if it didn’t involve Hillary Clinton...

...So, to summarize, it was legal when Mike Pence used a private email account, and it was legal when Hillary Clinton did it...

...Mike Pence’s private email account was hacked. There is no evidence Clinton’s was...

...Republicans led by straight-shooting man of impeccable nonpartisan integritude James Comey engaged in investigations of Hillary Clinton and not Mike Pence, which proves that what Clinton did was much worse, and the fact that these investigations of Clinton turned up no evidence of a crime is central to this point. This is how your anti-Clinton propaganda sausage gets made, ladies and gentlemen.

Top Definition

Godwin's Law

THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

With the emboldening of the Alt-Reich Fascists all over North America and Europe following the election of their cheeto-dusted Fuhrer, Donald J. Trump. The Godwin's Law is hereby suspended in solidarity with the Anti-Fascist resisters, until further notice.

Effective immediately.

With Trump's new requirement for the elimination of two old regulations everytime a new one (for the health and safety of people and the planet alike) is put into place, it's only responsible that Godwin's Law be the first to go.