Last Call For Obamacare

Things are going to move quickly in the new year with our new Republican masters.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled the Senate would move swiftly to repeal Obamacare now that the GOP Congress will have a Republican president next year.

"It's pretty high on our agenda as you know," the Kentucky Republican said on Wednesday. "I would be shocked if we didn't move forward and keep our commitment to the American people."

McConnell would not explicitly commit to using budget reconciliation to repeal the healthcare law, though it's the likely path for Republicans to repeal the law, as they have only a narrow Senate majority next year.

Hope nobody had pre-existing conditions or has expanded Medicaid coverage, because that's going away pretty soon.   Gonna be fun to see a whole lot of people who voted for Trump lose their health insurance and please, please notice that McConnel didn't mention any plans of "replacement".  That's not going to happen with this administration.

Well I take it back, tens of millions will lose health coverage and have it replaced by a bottle of Aleve and a box of bandages, medical bankruptcy, and foregoing care.

Stay tuned, middle America.  You voted for it.

Dispatches From Bevinstan

As I said last night, the KY Democrats are now gone, wiped out in the General Assembly.  There is nothing standing between Bevin and everything he wants, and with a Trump administration, well, it's going to get bad here starting fast.  And he wants everyone to know that he his enemies are the first to end up under the bus.

On the defeat of House Speaker Greg Stumbo:

"The best news that came out of any individual district, for sure ... 38 years I believe Greg has been here, a career politician. He hasn't given a rip about the people in his district for a long time. He hasn't even lived there for better than a decade ... I say, 'Good riddance.' I mean he will not be missed one bit. Kentucky will be better for his absence." (From WVHU Radio.)

On the Environmental Protection Agency:

"Donald Trump has voiced his support for the coal industry ... Nothing would make me happier than to see his administration say, 'You know what? We're going to gut the EPA.' The EPA is not needed at the federal level ... There's not one state in America that wants dirty water and dirty air for its people. Not one. We've got the ability to implement, we're already the ones that enforce all the action at the state level. Let us continue to do what we are doing and what we can do well without the interference, without the un-elected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., passing down edicts ..." (From WVHU Radio.) 

On Obamacare:

"Obamacare is a disaster. It has been from the time it was rammed down our throats by Democrats –100 percent of the people supporting it were Democrats. Well, guess what? The American people sent a powerful message last night. We have the presidency. We have the U.S. Senate. We have the U.S. Congress. We have states like ours and governors like myself that are saying enough of this. We're rejecting it. We want it gone. It's going to be gone." (From WVLC Radio.)

On Kentucky's direction:

"We will start to go in a different direction where able-bodied working age men and women are going to be expected to go to work. They're not going to get things for nothing in the state of Kentucky. Where deadbeat dads are not going to be welcome in this state – they are going to be held to account to take care of their children. Where people are going to (have) incentive to be, you know, traditional families with a mother and a father raising their children. Where we're going to start to reward the types of things that we know the cornerstone of a good, civilized society and a successful society are based on. We're going to return to the true Judeo-Christian principles that this nation was founded on. We're not going to be apologetic for the values that made this state and this nation great." (From WVLC Radio.)

I now live in a Christian theocratic state, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself, in a Christian theocratic country, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself.

Gonna be good times.

Welcome to Bevinstan.

So What The Hell Happened?

Well, to keep it simple, a whole lot of Americans showed up at the polls yesterday and voted, and it was very much "Dewey Defeats Truman" as all the pollsters got 2016 as wrong as Kentucky pollsters got 2015's rise of Matt Bevin wrong.

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

No one predicted a night like this — that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.

And they were wrong. The exit polls tell the tale.  Despite the percentage of white voters dropping to 70% of the electorate, below 2012's 72%, white voters pulled the lever for Trump by big margins.



Clinton's purported lead among college-educated whites evaporated 45-49% in favor of Trump, and among white voters without a degree, Clinton was destroyed 28-67%.  She actually did have a slight lead among white women with degrees, 51-45%, but white men with degrees voted for Trump by a whopping 15 points, 39-54% in favor of The Donald.

But here's the other knife that Clinton didn't see coming:



Clinton *lost* white Millennials by five points, and Gen Xers by 18.  Overall, Clinton did win Millennials 55-37%, but in 2012, Obama won them 67-30%.

Here's the thing: Clinton will end up winning the popular vote by millions, Trump might not actually get even to McCain's 60 million.  But the electoral college means that Clinton ran up the score in states like California, Texas, Georgia and New York when she needed to run it up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

Most of all where Dems got "Nadered" in Florida in 2000, the third party vote for Johnson and Stein in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin was higher than Trump's margin of victory in any of those states.

That was the ball game.

Now comes the consequences.

StupidiNews!

• With a stunning victory and record turnout that shattered Clinton's Midwest "firewall" states, Donald J. Trump is now President-Elect of the United States of America.
• Republicans will also keep control of the US Senate as Democrats came up short but Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth did win her race unseating Republican Mark Kirk.
• California became the largest state to legalize recreational use of marijuana along with Massachusetts, at least one-fifth of Americans now live in states where pot is legal.
• Dow futures were down as much as 1000 points before reality set in early Wednesday as world markets were roiled by the Trump upset.
• President-elect Trump's victory leaves the state of US cybersecurity in doubt other than promising an immediate review of America's internet structure.