Last Call For Conway Con Job, Con't

OK, I definitely needed to be over being mad at the Dems about Jon Ossoff, as several of you pointed out in the comments.  Let's not forget who the real bad guys here are, and that's the friggin Trump regime and their Queen of Propaganda, Kellyanne Conway.

Presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway asserted Sunday that the Senate health care bill does not propose cuts to Medicaid, despite projections that it would cut the federal health insurance program by $800 billion.

“These are not cuts to Medicaid," Conway said to ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" Sunday.

"This slows the rate for the future and it allows governors more flexibility for the future with Medicaid dollars,” she said.

“If you are currently in Medicaid, if you became [a recipient] ... through the Obamacare expansion, you are grandfathered in. We’re talking about in the future,” Conway said.

When pressed by Stephanopoulos on how the proposal doesn’t amount to cuts when it directly curtails funding for Medicaid, Conway said the administration sees its actions as putting Medicaid back to pre-Obamacare levels.

“We don’t see them as cuts, it’s slowing the rate of growth in the future and getting Medicaid back to where it was,” she said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is expected to release its analysis of the impact of the Senate bill this week.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hopes to bring the bill to a vote on the Senate floor before the July 4 recess.

That part about being "grandfathered in" is 100% nonsense.  What will really happen is that 1) states will be free under Trumpcare to spend Medicaid funds for whatever they want to do with them, and 2) the amount of funds from the federal government will be reduced.  It'll be then the fault of the states who will have to either raise revenue dramatically to "grandfather people in" or make steep cuts to Medicaid, not Trump or the GOP-led Congress, as nearly all states have to balance their budgets and can't go into deficit spending.

What the GOP is really hoping is that enough people lose that grandfather status because they won't be able to afford the massive increase in premiums they'll have to pay under the GOP plan, with the loss of premium subsidies under Obamacare.  Then, Republicans can say "Well, you didn't come up with your fair share of your insurance payments" and then they'll of course have to lose coverage.

Getting Medicaid back to where it was means tens of millions of people will no longer be on Medicaid, and it will be everyone's fault but Dear Leader Trump.

No wonder Republican governors like John Kasich, Brian Sandoval, and Charlie Baker are in full panic mode and publicly attacking Trumpcare.  They know what's coming for the GOP brand in their states.  And they know they're the ones who will have to present and sign ruthless austerity budgets under the "new and improved" GOP healthcare system.  If it doesn't do their party in come 2018, it'll definitely end them in 2020.

Sunday Long Read: To Serve And Neglect

HuffPost Highline gives us our Sunday Long Read for the week, as America's epidemic of domestic abuse is particularly grim when it comes to the abuser being a law enforcement officer.  Who watches the watchmen, indeed?

If domestic abuse is one of the most underreported crimes, domestic abuse by police officers is virtually an invisible one. It is frighteningly difficult to track or prevent—and it has escaped America’s most recent awakening to the many ways in which some police misuse their considerable powers. Very few people in the United States understand what really happens when an officer is accused of harassing, stalking, or assaulting a partner. One person who knows more than most is a 62-year-old retired cop named Mark Wynn.

Wynn decided to be a police officer when he was about 5 years old because he wanted to put his stepfather in prison. Alvin Griffin was a violent alcoholic who terrorized Wynn’s mother, a waitress and supermarket butcher. Looking back, Wynn compares his childhood in Dallas to living inside a crime scene. “There was always blood in my house,” he said.

The cops sometimes showed up, usually after a neighbor called to complain about the screaming, but they didn’t do much. Wynn doesn’t remember them ever talking to him or his four siblings. He does remember clinging to his mother while a police officer threatened to arrest her if they had to come back to the house again. “There was no one to help us,” he said. “We were completely isolated.” Wynn has often spoken of the time he tried to kill his stepfather when he was 7—how he and his brother emptied out the Mad Dog wine on Griffin’s bedside dresser and replaced it with Black Flag bug spray. A few hours later, Griffin downed the bottle as the boys waited in the living room. Griffin didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the wine. But he didn’t die, either.

Years later, when Wynn was around 13 and all but one of his siblings had left home, he was watching television when he heard a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot. He found his mother splayed on the floor of their tiny kitchen, blood pooling around her face. Griffin had knocked her out with a punch to the head. Wynn watched as Griffin stepped over her, opened the fridge, pulled out a can of beer and drank it. That night, Griffin got locked up for public drunkenness and Wynn, his sister and his mother finally got out, driving to Tennessee with a few belongings. Griffin never found them.

Wynn became a police officer in the late 1970s and after a few years, he wound up in Nashville. Then as now, domestic complaints tended to be one of the most common calls fielded by police. And Wynn was disturbed to find that he was expected to handle them in much the same way as the cops from his childhood had—treat it as a family matter, don’t get involved. He remembers that officers would write cursory summaries on 3 by 5 inch “miscellaneous incident” cards rather than full reports. To fit what he regarded as essential details in the tiny space provided, Wynn would print “really, really small,” he said. “The officers I worked with used to get pissed off at me,” he added. They couldn’t understand why he bothered.

But Wynn had entered the force at a pivotal moment. In the late 1970s, women’s groups had turned domestic violence into a major national cause, and abused women successfully sued police departments for failing to protect them. Over the next decade, states passed legislation empowering police to make arrests in domestic incidents and to enforce protective orders. Wynn eagerly embraced these changes and in the late 1980s, the Department of Justice asked him to train police chiefs on best practices. He went on to lead one of the country’s first specialized investigative units for family violence. By the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which poured more than $1 billion into shelters and law enforcement training, the U.S. was finally starting to treat domestic violence as a crime. “It was like stepping out of the Dark Ages,” Wynn said.

And yet when officers themselves were the accused, cases tended to be handled in the old way. Wynn would hear stories around his station, like an assailant who received a quiet talk from a colleague instead of being arrested. “Officers thought they were taking care of their fellow officer,” said David Thomas, a former police officer and a consultant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). “But what they were doing was colluding with a criminal.”

It is nearly impossible to calculate the frequency of domestic crimes committed by police—not least because victims are often reluctant to seek help from their abuser’s colleagues. Another complication is the 1996 Lautenberg Amendment, a federal law that prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning a gun. The amendment is a valuable protection for most women. But a police officer who can’t use a gun can’t work—and so reporting him may risk the family’s livelihood as well as the abuser’s anger. Courts can be perilous to navigate, too, since police intimately understand their workings and often have relationships with prosecutors and judges. Police are also some of the only people who know the confidential locations of shelters. Diane Wetendorf, a domestic violence counselor who wrote a handbook for women whose abusers work in law enforcement, believes they are among the most vulnerable victims in the country.

This is where America needs to start cleaning up domestic abuse, with law enforcement personnel.  But it's not going to happen as long as we keep pretending police are above the law.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Yet another massive difference between Democrats and Republicans: House Democrats want to fix the Voting Rights Act, which has been fatally broken since before the 2016 election. Republicans will never let such legislation come to a vote.

House Democrats introduced legislation Thursday to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act while pledging to make the issue of voting rights a priority if the party wins in 2018.

On the eve of the four-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down key parts of the VRA, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-AL, told a crowd of voting rights advocates and supporters gathered on Capitol Hill that it is time to “restore the promise of voter equality.”

“Today, I’m introducing the Voting Rights Advancement Act because I believe that the right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights in our democracy,” Sewell said. “As state after state create new barriers to the polls, our work to prevent discrimination and protect the rights of all voters has taken on a new urgency. The time to restore the vote is now.”

The Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA) aims to modernize Section 4 of the VRA that the Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder was outdated on June 25, 2013. Under the new act, local and state governments with a history of voter discrimination from the past 25 years would have to obtain federal approval before making changes to voting policies or procedures.

These states would include: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

The bill has 180 Democratic co-sponsors, but has yet to garner support from across the aisle. Without it, the bill cannot forward in the Republican-controlled chamber.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, while calling on her GOP colleagues to make it a bipartisan measure, said the bill "will be introduced on the very first day" Democrats regain control of the House in 2018.

“We want people to understand they have the right to vote and their vote will be counted and counted as cast. Many people sacrificed so much for the right to vote in our country,” Pelosi said. "You have our commitment that this will become the law when we become the majority and we want it to become the law even before then."

I'm extremely glad that Democrats are focusing on this important issue, but there's no way it will ever pass as long as Republicans control the House, Senate, and/or the Oval Office.  And it's going to be extremely difficult to fix Congress and the White House before we fix rampant GOP voter suppression.

We need to start now.