Nobody To Blame But Themselves

Congratulations, rural red state and Rust Belt Trump voters!  You just screwed yourself out of thousands of dollars a year and will be the people who suffer the most under Trumpcare. Nate Cohn at the NYT Upshot explains:

The people who stand to lose the most in tax credits under the House Republican health plan tended to support Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to a new Upshot analysis. 

Over all, voters who would be eligible for a tax credit that would be at least $1,000 smaller than the subsidy they’re eligible for under Obamacare supported Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton by a seven-point margin. 

The voters hit the hardest — eligible for at least $5,000 less in tax credits under the Republican plan — supported Mr. Trump by a margin of 59 percent to 36 percent.

Congratulations, MAGA folks.  You played yourself every step of the way.

The plan would hit older and rural Americans hardest because it wouldn’t provide a larger tax credit to people with more expensive plans. Older Americans pay the highest premiums, and the law would allow insurers to raise premiums for older customers even further. The AARP opposes the bill as a result.

Trumpcare is a disaster that would badly hurt millions of Americans.  But the Americans who are going to suffer the most will be the ones who supported Trump by the largest margins, in particular older Americans and poorer Americans in rural areas.

You know, Trump voters.

I'd say that you're getting what you deserve, except for the fact the rest of us have to deal with the mess these crap-throwing primates are causing too.  We're right here in this mess with you, and we're the ones who are going to have to clean it up.

Again.  But in the meantime, Medicaid expansion is going to get nuked, and pre-ACA Medicaid along with it.

Most of the people who got insurance through Obamacare were the more than 11 million poor people who benefited from the Medicaid expansion that 31 states, plus Washington, DC, adopted. And they have the most to lose under the American Health Care Act, the Republican replacement. 

The Republican plan rolls back the expansion, taking 4 million to 6 million people off the rolls, according to Standard & Poor’s. But it goes further than that as well. 

The AHCA converts Medicaid from a matching program, in which the federal government chips in a set amount for every dollar states spend on beneficiaries, to a capped subsidy, where the feds give states a set amount per enrollee every year, an amount that rises according to a fixed formula instead of according to need. 

The cumulative effect, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is a $370 billion cut to federal funding to Medicaid over 10 years. Some of that money could be made up for by states, but most of it won't be. 

And because Medicaid is already the cheapest insurance there is in America — cheaper per person than either Medicare or private insurance — cuts of that scale will necessitate kicking millions of people off the program.

And all of that will go to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts.  Do you get it now, Trump voters?
"Make America Great Again" means you won't be around long enough to see it.

That Dipstick From Accounting Doesn't Know Squat

As Chuck Pierce reminds us, the biggest media falsehood over the last several years that doesn't personally involve Barack Obama is the idiotic notion that GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is some sort of policy wonk.

I had thought that the burlesque comic opera The Agony of Paul Ryan, Genius had closed on the night in 2012 when Joe Biden laughed the zombie-eyed granny starver off the stage during their debate. (That was the night that Ryan demonstrated that he knew it snowed in Afghanistan in the winter.) But I had not reckoned with his many fanboys among the kept political press. He ascended to become Speaker of the House, largely because nobody else wanted the job after John Boehner got kicked to the curb by the crazy people.

Now he is out there pimping the dungheap that is the new healthcare reform bill as though Mitch and Murray from downtown were lighting his pants on fire. He even lost the suit coat and broke out the PowerPoint on Thursday. It was like watching something on cable access late at night, or a flop-sweaty rookie substitute teacher, and it was hilarious—except for the parts where people will lose their health insurance and die, of course. And this is what he said and, peace be unto Dave Barry, I am not making it up, either:

Paul Ryan said that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick.

This is literally how all insurance works. If someone's house burns down, some of your fire insurance money goes to help that person rebuild. If someone gets sick, some of your premium, healthy person, goes toward that person's coverage. Increasingly, I have come to believe that Paul Ryan is a not particularly bright creature from another world. Let us see if we can explain this to the lad.

Let's say that, in 1986, a 16-year-old lad loses his father to a sudden heart attack. Despite the fact that the family's construction firm is relatively prosperous due to its generous share of government contracts, the family's finances are considerably straitened. For the next two years, the young man and his mother receive Social Security survivor's benefits. Of course, these came from millions of people who had Social Security withheld from their paychecks and whose fathers did not die young due to a sudden heart attack. One of them was, say, a 32-year-old sportswriter for the Boston Herald, who had Social Security withheld from what he was paid to watch the Red Sox blow the '86 World Series, and whose father was still alive, but slipping fast into Alzheimer's. Some of his money went to make sure Paul Ryan could complete high school and go on the college and get the BA in economics that made him the smartest man in the world. 

Ouch, man.  Ouch.

Pierce is right, of course.  The entire point of insurance is that healthy people who pay premiums help subsidize sick people (who also pay premiums).  The Law of Large Numbers states that as long as you have enough healthy people paying in, the system works.  It's not the best deal for the healthy people, but then again you never know if a car accident, cancer, or a pregnancy (hey those cost money too) is around the corner.  You're healthy now.  Eventually you won't be.

Car insurance (eventually you'll be in an accident), home insurance (eventually something will catch on fire), and life insurance (you too are mortal) work the same way.  It's there when you need it.

What Ryan's trying to do is tell people "Well that's not fair!  And our plan will fix that!"  Well yes, it'll "fix" that, by wrecking the entire concept of health insurance, turning it from "helping sick people" to "lowering costs because dead people don't really need health care."

This is kind of a basic thing here but surprise, Republicans want to wreck it in favor of tax cuts for wealthy people.  Actual health care doesn't matter, but tax cuts, well.

And so it goes.  Hey, we voted for them. Now we're getting what we deserve.

StupidiNews!

• With South Korea's Constitutional Court unanimously upholding the impeachment and removal of Park Geun-hye, the now former president faces prosecution for bribery.
• Tens of thousands remain without power in upstate New York this morning after a near-hurricane force windstorm downed thousands of trees and power lines near Rochester.
• A bus crash in Nepal has killed at least 25 as the overcrowded vehicle veered off a hilly road near Jajarkot, in the western part of the country.
• Nearly six million fewer Americans have filed their tax returns this year compared to this point last year, a drop that has even long-time tax professionals concerned.
• Republican senators are taking aim at FCC net neutrality measures, claiming that the rules are hurting telemedicine at the expense of internet pornography by treating them as the same.

America's New Priorities

The Trump regime has made it clear that budget cuts for domestic programs are the top priority to pay for more bombs and planes for the Pentagon, and that Americans can simply get along with $50 billion in yearly cuts.  The latest victim scheduled for the chopping block? Federal HUD grants will soon be gone because F-35s are more important than public housing.

The Trump administration has considered more than $6 billion in cuts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to preliminary budget documents obtained by The Washington Post. The plan would squeeze public housing support and end most federally funded community development grants, which provide services such as meal assistance and cleaning up abandoned properties in low-income neighborhoods. 

It’s the latest evidence that the administration is following through on President Trump’s goal to cut domestic spending by $54 billion to bolster the defense budget. HUD’s budget would shrink by about 14 percent to $40.5 billion in fiscal 2018, which begins in October. 

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has taken a staunchly conservative stance on public assistance in the past, saying dependency on HUD programs could become “a way of life” for recipients. While suggesting significant cuts, the preliminary budget maintains the same level of funding to rental assistance programs and avoids reductions that could directly put families on the streets. Instead, it targets funding for building maintenance and community development projects, although HUD recommends in the budget document that those projects receive funding from another source. 

About $1.3 billion would be cut from the public housing capital fund, under the preliminary plan — when compared to funding in 2016 — and an additional $600 million would be cut from the public housing operating fund. 

HUD spokesman Jereon Brown said the budget document “is still a work in progress.” The budget document appears to be part of a back-and-forth with federal budget officials, and it is unclear whether the proposed cuts will be included in the president’s final budget proposal. The Trump administration has said it will release its complete budget plan next week.

Oh well. I guess we didn't need to clean up public housing anyway.  Just have to make do with less America, because we're heading to war pretty soon and besides, we have to protect the country's most valuable resource: tax cuts for the 1%.  That's why I have a good chuckle at stories like this.

In southern West Virginia they call this The Highway That Time Forgot, a 100-mile, two-lane stretch of stomach-churning switchbacks and careening coal trucks, clogged by stop-and-start school buses, slow-driving seniors and the random pedestrian. 

Infamous are its ear-popping ascents and declines; its oscillating speed limits and paucity of passing zones; its (by one count) 333 substandard curves. Rock ledges tower over the road, and sometimes boulders fall on it. 

That Route 52 is the best east-west connection through the coalfields — two entire counties have not an inch of four-lane — testifies to how badly the area needs the 65-mph, limited-access divided highways that the rest of America takes for granted. 

President Trump has famously promised to “bring back coal’’ and put miners back to work. But he’s also who’s promised $1 trillion for infrastructure. At the Republican National Convention, on election night, in his inaugural address and last week in his first speech to Congress, the New York developer has vowed to build highways. 

To Trump supporters here, his infrastructure promises are as important as his coal promises. Highways, in fact, are seen as deliverance from coal’s economic tyranny. 

“If we could get highways in here, we wouldn’t have to depend on coal,’’ says Ray Bailey, the assessor in McDowell County, where Trump got 74% of the vote. He’s tacitly admitting that while Trump may be unable to revive an industry that has been declining for decades, he can at least build some roads. 

“Now is the time,’’ agrees Gordon Lambert, a county commissioner, a Democrat and a Trump voter. “If we don’t get our highways this time, we won’t get them in our lifetime.’’

Spoilers: You're not getting highways in your lifetime.  Well, not as long as Republicans are in charge.

Going to be a lot of disappointed voters come 2018, I would expect.

The Thoroughbred Of Corruption

Kentucky Republicans in Frankfort have decided that since the state Attorney General is Democrat Andy Beshear, that maybe the office needs a hefty chunk of its power removed so that GOP Gov. Matt Bevin can do whatever he wants to.

The President of the state Senate has filed a change to a bill that would strip power from the attorney general and give the governor exclusive authority to represent the state in many legal matters. 

On Wednesday morning, attorney general Andy Beshear called the measure “an unprecedented power grab and one of the worst constitutional overreaches since the adoption of our current constitution.” 

“The attorney general is not the governor’s lawyer, he’s not the General Assembly’s’ lawyer, he is the people’s lawyer,” Beshear said. “Because, as the Supreme Court explained, in Kentucky, the people are the sovereign, the people are the king. Not the government and not the governor.” 

Beshear said the proposal amounted to a “get-out-of-jail-free card” for the governor. 

The move comes after nearly a year of legal challenges brought on by Beshear, a Democrat, in which he sued Republican Gov. Matt Bevin for unilaterally making budget cuts and overhauling the University of Louisville board of trustees. 

Bevin has in turn accused Beshear of inadequately defending the state’s new law requiring to perform and describe ultrasounds on women seeking abortions. 

The proposal came as a surprise substitute to House Bill 281 that deals with making transparent the contracts the attorney general makes with outside law firms. 

The attorney general would still have authority over habeas corpus proceedings, medical fraud, public service commission appeals and consumer protections. 

Senate president Robert Stivers, the sponsor of the measure, said the legislature has “the ability to limit everybody’s power and authority.” 

“I disagree with the Supreme Court because the constitution is the constitution,” Stivers said. “And it says clearly that the legislature has the authority to prescribe the duties of the attorney general.”

Odds are really fantastic that this will pass and that Bevin will sign it.  Whether or not it gets past Kentucky's Supreme Court I couldn't tell you, but giving most of the office's statewide power to Matt Bevin seems like a horrendous idea.

It's also a serious ethical and oversight breach, but then again these are Republicans we're talking about.  Using government power for their own purposes is absolutely fine.  Using it to help the people of the Commonwealth, well that's unfair.

Please note also that Bob Stivers believes the state legislature has all the power in Kentucky's constitution and can "limit everybody's power and authority".  I'm sure the state Supreme Court would like to take a look at that theory.

Looks like we'll know pretty soon if they'll get the chance.

StupidiNews!

• House Republicans are quickly pushing their Obamacare replacement bill through committee with both the Ways and Means and Commerce Committees pulling all-night markup sessions.
• CIA officials suspect contractor employees leaked a trove of documents to WikiLeaks which were revealed this week rather than espionage by a foreign power.
• The Kremlin is rejecting US accusations that Moscow violated an joint arms-control agreement by deploying cruise missiles that could reach NATO countries.
• A spring supply glut has knocked the price of crude oil under $50 for the first time in 2017 as US shale oil production is rising despite OPEC production cuts.
• NASA continues work on its project to reach Jupiter's moon, Europa, which could contain liquid water and even signs of extant life under its icy crust.

Last Call For Sub-Tweeting Mayor Cranley

Cincinnati's mayoral race just got a bit more interesting as long-shot Democratic candidate Rob Richardson wants to not only run on expanding the city's streetcar program, long the bane of Mayor John Cranley's political existence, but he also wants to expand on Cincinnati's infamous abandoned subway system.

Mayoral candidate Rob Richardson Jr. has added four intriguing words to his campaign website: "Revive Cincinnati's subway system." 

Forward-thinking? Pandering? Unrealistic? Maybe all of the above. Regardless, the progressive Democrat wants to jump start the conversation about what – if any – role Cincinnati's unfinished and abandoned subway system could play in improving one of the nation's worst public transportation systems for connecting people to jobs. 

Richardson's campaign hatched the idea based on the fact 75,000 jobs in the region aren't accessible by public transportation, according to a 2015 study by the University of Cincinnati Economics Center. So why not take another look at the 2.2 miles of abandoned subway tunnels underneath Central Parkway? 

"The current infrastructure of the tunnel system provides a launching pad for this effort," said Danny O'Connor, Richardson's campaign manager. "We are confident that Cincinnatians are eager for legitimate and substantive investment in a variety of public transit options beyond the squabbling over the streetcar." 

As for paying to resume subway work, well, that's where Richardson is short on details. Construction stopped in 1929 amid rising costs, and it's difficult to determine what a cost to upgrade the tunnels would be, let alone burrowing on. For context, the two-mile Second Avenue Subway that opened in New York City this year cost $4.5 billion. 

"Rob plans to bring together several different constituencies – something he has always done – to determine how we can properly invest in the infrastructure and resources that are critically needed by thousands of Cincinnati residents," O'Connor said. "The reality, however, is that we will be assuming a $25.1 million budget deficit from the incumbent candidates in this race. Fixing that issue will be our first priority."

Well, if Robertson wanted to differentiate himself from Cranley in the primary election in two months, running on a huge expansion in the Queen City's mass transportation is definitely the tack to take.  As improbable as the plan is, the goal I'm hoping is a serious look at Cincinnati's terrible mass transit system, one of the worst in the country for a major US city, and one that just happens to have limited or no service to the area's black communities (looking at you, Cincy Bell Connector).

Subway or not, that's a problem that the next Mayor needs to work on, and I'm hoping Roberston at least makes that a major campaign issue this year, even if his subway plan is already sunk.  We've already got one of the worst transportation infrastructure problems in the country between our lousy mass transit and the Brent Spence Bridge, and it should be a top priority among voters.

We'll see how Cranley responds.

A Hostile Agency Environment

Trump regime EPA head Scott Pruitt is wasting no time stocking the top positions at the agency with GOP's leading climate change skeptics, and the damage they will cause future generations will be incalculable.

Mr. Pruitt has drawn heavily from the staff of his friend and fellow Oklahoma Republican, Senator James Inhofe, long known as Congress’s most prominent skeptic of climate science. A former Inhofe chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, will be Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff. Another former Inhofe staff member, Byron Brown, will serve as Mr. Jackson’s deputy. Andrew Wheeler, a fossil fuel lobbyist and a former Inhofe chief of staff, is a finalist to be Mr. Pruitt’s deputy, although he requires confirmation to the position by the Senate.

To friends and critics, Mr. Pruitt seems intent on building an E.P.A. leadership that is fundamentally at odds with the career officials, scientists and employees who carry out the agency’s missions. That might be a recipe for strife and gridlock at the federal agency tasked to keep safe the nation’s clean air and water while safeguarding the planet’s future. 

“He’s the most different kind of E.P.A. administrator that’s ever been,” said Steve J. Milloy, a member of the E.P.A. transition team who runs the website JunkScience.com, which aims to debunk climate change. “He’s not coming in thinking E.P.A. is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Quite the opposite.” 

Gina McCarthy, who headed the E.P.A. under former President Barack Obama, said she too saw Mr. Pruitt as unique. “It’s fine to have differing opinions on how to meet the mission of the agency. Many Republican administrators have had that,” she said. “But here, for the first time, I see someone who has no commitment to the mission of the agency.” 

Pruitt is determined to turn the EPA into an Orwellian dark comedy, an agency that cares nothing for protecting the environment and in fact will be dedicated to exploiting it for corporate gain at every opportunity, not to mention putting the health and well-being of millions of Americans at risk. But it gets worse.

A pair of Trump campaigners from Washington State are also heading into senior positions at the E.P.A. Don Benton, a former Washington state senator who headed President Trump’s state campaign, will be the agency’s senior liaison with the White House. Douglas Ericksen, a current Washington state senator, is being considered as the regional administrator of the E.P.A.’s Pacific Northwest office. 

As a state senator, Mr. Ericksen has been active in opposing efforts to pass a state-level climate change law taxing carbon pollution. Last month, he invited Tony Heller, a climate denialist who blogs under the pseudonym Steven Goddard, to address a Washington State Senate committee on the costs of climate change policy. Mr. Heller’s blog says “global warming is the biggest fraud in science history.” 

“I think the reason both of these guys are being considered for this stuff is they were the only prominent elected officials in the state of Washington that were early supporters and organizers for Trump,” said Todd Donovan, a political scientist at Western Washington University. “No other state legislators were putting their necks out for Trump.”

On top of the EPA now being a joke, it's now a plum bureaucratic reward for those Republicans who jumped on the Trump train early in order to make big government paychecks at taxpayer expense. But that's the party of fiscal responsibility for you, right?  Ahh, but here's the fun part:

The agency’s policy agenda is snapping into focus: Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of dismantling a major Obama-era regulation aimed at increasing the federal government’s authority over rivers, streams and wetlands in order to prevent water pollution. Also last week, Mr. Pruitt ordered the agency to walk back a program on collecting data on methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. 

This week, Mr. Trump is expected to sign an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin the legal process of unwinding Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming pollution from coal-fired power plants, and Mr. Pruitt is expected to announce plans to begin to weaken an Obama-era rule mandating higher fuel economy standards. 

A draft White House budget blueprint proposes to slash the E.P.A. budget by about 24 percent, or $2 billion from its current level of $8.1 billion, and cut employee numbers by about 20 percent from its current staff of about 15,000. 

Agency employees say morale has already been damaged. After working for years to draft climate change regulations under the Obama administration, many of those same career scientists and lawyers will be ordered to go back and undo them.

Undoing the entire Obama environmental agenda was always a chief goal of the GOP, and now it looks like they will completely erase 44's entire legacy on climate change and the environment.  All of it, gone.  But her emails, right?

I don't think our grandkids will forgive us, either. New tag, as I expect I'll be writing a lot about his crimes against the planet: Scott Pruitt.

To Whom The Wiki-Benefit?

Jon Fingas over at Engadget has details of WikiLeaks' latest package of alleged CIA technical documents, revealing tools the agency reportedly uses to get around encryption and to spy on people. The "Level 7" documents come just a few days after Trump's paranoid tirade that Obama had Trump Tower bugged and once again it's Julian Assange's outfit that comes riding the Trump regime's rescue.

WikiLeaks just ignited another powder keg. Julian Assange's outfit has posted the first of a string of CIA leaks, nicknamed Vault 7, that purports to reveal the agency's "entire hacking capacity." The information is said to have escaped an "isolated" secure network at the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Virginia, and indicates that the organization has far-reaching abilities to snoop on modern technology... including encrypted apps that are supposed to be tough to crack.

According to WikiLeaks, the CIA has horded a slew of zero day (that is, unpatched) exploits that let it infiltrate a slew of platforms, including current desktop and mobile platforms, network routers, smart TVs and antivirus software. Notably, the CIA is capable of bypassing the encryption for secure chat apps like Confide, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp -- the agency compromises the phone and intercepts message traffic before encryption kicks in. It's not as significant as cracking the encryption itself (these apps are still safer), but it's still noteworthy. Also, the mobile teams have reportedly produced malware that can compromise Android and iOS devices that run or have run "presidential Twitter accounts" -- a particular problem for the current Commander-in-Chief.

Other infiltration methods are similarly sneaky. An attack against Samsung smart TVs, built in tandem with the UK's MI5 agency, quietly leaves a set turned on so that it can record conversations like a giant wiretap device. And when the CIA needs physical access to a device, it sends an agent out with a USB drive that grabs data from a PC while a decoy app runs in the foreground. Malware is designed to avoid any fingerprints that would lead back to the CIA or its partners, and even the infection patterns are meant to throw people off the scent. Code can lurk in a device for years.

The leak also goes into some of the organizational structure of the CIA's digital surveillance efforts, including some security concerns. It notes that the US consulate in Frankfurt doubles as a base for CIA hackers targeting Europe, the Middle East and Africa, giving them freedom to travel throughout much of Europe once they arrive. However, it also appears that the agency's malware, command and control tools and listening post software are all labeled as unclassified -- there's not much officials can do if it gets out into the wild, which it clearly has given the leak. There's a similar worry that the CIA's propensity to hog zero day exploits is violating the government's Vulnerabilities Equities Process, which promises that the government will share flaws with companies on a continuous basis.

So again, a whole bunch of CIA tools, techniques, and tradecraft just happen to show up on WikiLeaks within hours of when the world starts thinking that the Trump regime has all but confirmed wrongdoing with Russia.  Suddenly now the story is back to the eeeeeeeeeevil intelligence community and how noble patriot Trump is right to consider them a problem. 

It also happens to blow yet another giant hole in America's cyber-counterintelligence capabilities just as stories about CIA cyberwar with North Korea surface and how effective the CIA has been at stopping Pyongyang from getting too far down the road of nuke technology.  That just got thrown in the trash can overnight.

And finally, please note the documents claim the CIA can make their cyber-snooping look like anyone but the CIA is behind it, which of course has both Trumpies and Moscow screaming that the entire Trump-Russia kerfuffle is in fact a giant false flag operation by Obama to harm Great Patriot Friend Donald Trump.

And lo and behold, now people are saying "Well maybe Trump wasn't crazy after all."

Funny how that exact coincidental timing works when Trump needs "evidence" of his conspiracy theory, and it magically appears once again thanks to his good friend Julian Assange.

StupidiNews!

• Hawaii is the first state to challenge the Trump regime's revised Muslim travel ban in court, the state Attorney General's office plans to file a motion today.
• Although Canadian PM Justin Trudeau has promised to legalize pot across all provinces, lawmakers in Ottawa say there's still a lot of work to do to craft legislation and regulations.
• Iran is claiming that a US Navy ship apparently changed course in the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend as ships passed within 600 yards of each other, provoking a rebuke from Tehran.
• On International Women's Day today, women all over the US plan a general strike across the country for the Day Without Women movement.
• A new study finds Americans are having sex less often than they did 20 years ago, with significant drops among those with college degrees and people living in Southern states.

Last Call For The Criminalization Of Dissent, Con't

Last month I noted Arizona Republicans wanted to turn protesting into a felony crime with legislation that, in theory, would have held all marchers and organizers responsible under felony state racketeering charges if any property damage was done whatsoever, even if it wasn't by actual people involved in the protest itself.  The outrage over the bill was so hot that Arizona Republicans shelved the bill within days, but I warned you of this at the time:

Arizona's bill was the most egregious, and the intent was certainly to turn the state's next Black Lives Matter or immigration protest into an opportunity to declare thousands to be felons, throw them in prison (or deport them) and remove their right to vote. Like most states, Arizona does not allow felons to vote, and if convicted of multiple felonies, that disenfranchisement is permanent. 

But several other states are moving to criminalize mass protests. Republicans in Arizona may have been defeated for now, but eventually this bill or something like it will be passed, and it will be used against people of color to disenfranchise. harm, or even kill.

As I predicted, another state has stepped up on this, and it should come as no surprise that our next contestant on "Who Wants To Criminalize Dissent?" is North Carolina's GOP.

Rep. John Torbett, a Gaston County Republican, is the primary sponsor of House Bill 249. He says drivers who came upon protesters on Charlotte highways last fall “feared for their lives,” and his bill would “add a little bit more of a deterrent by heightening awareness and adding a penalty.” 

“The first core responsibility of government is the safety and security of its citizens, and this will assist in that effort,” Torbett added. 

North Carolina is one of 17 states where Republican lawmakers have filed bills addressing recent protests, according to The New York Times. Some of the proposals are similar to Torbett’s legislation. 

If Torbett’s bill passes, people who block roads while participating in a “riot or other unlawful assembly” would face Class A1 misdemeanor charges, the misdemeanor category with the longest sentences for jail, probation or community service. Illegally blocking roads for any other reason would remain a Class 2 misdemeanor. 

The bill would also allow local governments to sue people convicted of riot, unlawful assembly or traffic obstruction charges for the cost of the law enforcement response. 

Penalties would be even tougher for anyone convicted of the new crime of “economic terrorism,” which the bill defines as “a criminal offense that impedes or disrupts the regular course of business” by causing damage of at least $1,000 with the intent to “intimidate the civilian population” or a government entity. That would be a Class H felony, which typically carries a prison sentence of four to 25 months. 

The American Civil Liberties Union is voicing concerns that the bill could infringe on First Amendment rights to protest. 

“No matter your politics, all North Carolinians should be concerned any time lawmakers seek to curb our fundamental constitutional right to protest and criticize our government,” ACLU North Carolina spokesman Mike Meno said Friday. “This bill is part of a wave of legislation we’ve seen across the country designed to criminalize peaceful protest and have a chilling effect on people’s First Amendment rights”.

That's correct folks, NC Republicans want to round up any protesters who participate in any "unlawful assembly" on maximum misdemeanor charges and jail time, and want to turn rioters into "economic terrorists" complete with felony convictions and in NC, loss of voting rights.

The next Black Lives Matter protest in NC under this legislation?  Mass arrests, convictions, and countersuits to allow local governments to sue protesters for the cost of the police response.  And who gets to determine what an "unlawful assembly" is?  Why the very government looking to pass this legislation.  It's whatever the state wants to deem as unlawful.

It may not be quite as egregious as Arizona's proposed legislation, but North Carolina is definitely heading dow the road of authoritarian government in order to protect Dear Leader Trump.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article136241788.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article136241788.html#storylink=cpy

Repeal And Repulse, Con't

The long-awaited Republican double-secret probation plan to save America from affordable health insurance is out, and it's effectively the worst of all worlds and has basically no chance at all of passage even in the GOP-controlled House, let alone the Senate.  Vox's Sarah Kliff:

The American Health Care Act was developed in conjunction with the White House and Senate Republicans. Two big questions — how many people it will cover and how much it will cost — are still unresolved: It will likely cover fewer people than the Affordable Care Act currently does, but we don’t know how many. And the Congressional Budget Office has not yet scored the legislation, so its price tag is unknown.

But what we can say for sure is this: 

• Some of Obamacare’s signature features are gone immediately, such as the tax on people who don’t purchase health care. Other protections, including the ban on discriminating people with pre-existing conditions and the provision that allows young adults to stay on their parents’ plan through age 26, would survive. 

• The plan maintains the Medicaid expansion — for now. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to cover millions of low-income Americans. And, in a big shift from previous drafts of the legislation, which ended Medicaid expansion immediately, this bill would continue to that coverage expansion through January 1, 2020. At that point, enrollment would “freeze,” and legislators expect enrollees would drop out of the program as their incomes change. 

• The replacement plan benefits people who are healthy and high-income, and disadvantages those who are sicker and lower-income. The replacement plan would make several changes to what health insurers can charge enrollees who purchase insurance on the individual market, as well as changing what benefits their plans must cover. In aggregate, these changes could be advantageous to younger and healthier enrollees who want skimpier (and cheaper) benefit packages. But they could be costly for older and sicker Obamacare enrollees, who rely on the law’s current requirements. 

• The bill looks a lot more like Obamacare than previous drafts. A curious thing has happened to the Republican replacement plan as it has evolved through multiple drafts: it has begun to look more and more like Obamacare itself. The bill keeps some key features of Obamacare, like giving more help to lower-income Americans and the Medicaid expansion, around in a scaled-back form. This speaks to how entrenched the health care law has become since its enactment 7 years ago, and how difficult it will be for the GOP to repeal it entirely.

In other words, the legislation A) scraps subsidies for refundable tax credits, which Republicans hate anyway and won't help people actually pay for health insurance, because B) the legislation also gets rid of the individual mandate, which will drive costs up and C) also gets rid of a lot of other taxes that actually helped pay for Obamacare but D) it keeps the Medicaid expansion through 2020 but then it turns around and E) scraps those in three years and turns Medicaid into a per-capita block grant.

And it gets worse.  In short, the plan is a certified disaster.   LA Times' Michael Hilzik:

Reporters and experts will be poring over the new draft for days, but here are some key elements gleaned from a first reading. Further examination undoubtedly will unearth more issues with the bill. The chances are almost nil that closer examination will find much, if anything, good about it.

The proposal defunds Planned Parenthood. No federal funding can be made, either directly or indirectly, by Medicaid to a healthcare organization that “provides for abortions,” other than those done in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. That’s Planned Parenthood. It’s proper to note that Planned Parenthood doesn’t use federal funds to pay for abortions, as that’s already against the law. This measure shuts down funding for the organization just because it uses other funds to cover those procedures.

The bill effectively shuts down private health insurance coverage for abortion. According to a House Ways and Means Committee digest, the measure forbids spending federal tax subsidies on health plans that include coverage of abortion, even if the customer doesn’t get an abortion. This would dramatically shrink working Americans’ access to insurance-covered abortions, or would lead to insurers dropping abortion coverage from their plans, or both. Customers could buy separate policies to cover abortions, but couldn’t use the federal subsidy to help pay for them. Insurers likely would charge hugely discouraging premiums for such policies, as the market for them would be tiny.

The individual and employer mandates are eliminated. They’re not repealed exactly, but the penalties are repealed, which amounts to the same thing. Without a requirement that individuals carry health insurance, the insurance markets are almost certain to collapse. The repeal is retroactive back to the beginning of 2016, but the real problem is in the market starting this year. Individuals would be able to drop their coverage immediately, which will wreak havoc with the market starting right now. Aetna’s chairman and chief executive, Mark Bertolini, said recently that the individual market was entering a “death spiral” in which healthier customers dropped coverage, leaving sicker customers who know they need insurance facing an ever-increasing rates. This provision will do much to guarantee that will happen.

Essential health benefit rules are repealed. As of Dec. 31, 2019, ACA rules that required qualified health plans to provide hospitalization, maternity care, mental health services and other benefits would be sunsetted at the federal level. States would have the authority to set them instead. The impact on private, non-Medicaid plans would therefore vary by state. If a state removes maternity benefits, for example, that’s likely to make maternity coverage, among other services, immensely expensive, if available at all.

Income-based premium subsidies would be replaced by age-based subsidies, which will hurt working-class families in many states. Under the ACA, subsidies to help individual buyers afford premiums and (for poorer households) deductibles and co-pays were based on household income. The GOP measure will base them on the buyer’s age, instead, with older buyers receiving more help than younger. The GOP plan limits subsidies to $4,000 per individual; under the ACA, which also keys subsidies to the cost of benchmark insurance plans in the buyer’s home market, the subsidies theoretically could be several times higher. No family could receive more than $14,000 in subsidies, and no more than five family members could be eligible for subsidies.

And let's keep in mind that the House GOP plans to rush this through starting this week without a Congressional Budget Office score whatsoever (we'll get one eventually but still.)  It's a horrific bill and its fate appears to be to die screaming, but this is what the Republicans want to do in order to effectively give tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations: pass a health insurance bill that will do lasting harm to tens of millions of Americans.

This bill is a mess, period.  And this has nothing to do with Trump, this is the GOP in Congress being awful on their own merits.  How bad is this legislation?

Even our old friend Avik Roy hates it.

The American Health Care Act repeals nearly all of Obamacare’s taxes, save the postponement of the Cadillac tax. But Obamacare’s tax hikes comprised about 60 percent of its funding for the law’s coverage expansion. So the $2 trillion question is: does the AHCA explode the deficit, or is it relying on steep Medicaid cuts to keep the deficit in line? We won’t know until the CBO scores the bill. 

But, remarkably, House GOP leadership plans to move forward with marking up the bill on Wednesday without even having the CBO score available. It’s not clear why they’re proceeding without a score, but it means that members of the House Energy & Commerce and Ways & Means Committees will not have the information they need to make informed decisions about how best to revise the bill. 

The CBO is likely to score the AHCA as covering around 20 million fewer Americans than Obamacare. There are flaws in the way the CBO models health reform legislation, but the AHCA itself contains enough flaws that there can be little doubt that the plan will price millions out of the health insurance market. 

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. But not today.

Let that one sink in for a while.  This might actually be the worst possible version of the GOP Obamacare replacement.  And the GOP knows it.

The Doctor Is Out (Of His Mind)

Dr. Ben Carson, Trump HUD Secretary and apparently the world's worst history student, strikes again.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson referred to slaves as "immigrants" while speaking Monday to department employees. 

"That's what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity," Carson said. "There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."

Ben, "immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships" were in fact, you know, slaves.

You know what, I'm sure he's a gifted neurosurgeon, but the guy is a terrible, terrible civil servant, Cabinet secretary, and human being.  How could anyone, let alone an African-American, be this utterly tone deaf and blockheaded?  Did nobody pull his sleeve and get him to stop before he was able to finish this paragraph on "gosh slavery wasn't so bad, they had dreams too to keep them going!" or something?

Can we hire somebody to do that?

Thanks.

StupidiNews!

• Trump Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says he is indeed considering removing children from their parents when families are caught trying to cross the US border illegally.
• The Trump regime has announced a new immigration ban effective March 16th, but the order still singles out six predominantly Muslim countries for 90-day bans.
• North Korea is blocking all Malaysian nationals from being able to enter or leave the country after last month's assassination of Kim Jong Un's brother at Kuala Lumpur's airport.
• The move comes in response to US deployment of THAAD anti-missile systems in South Korea, months ahead of schedule after North Korean missile tests over the weekend.
• Mobile carrier Sprint says it's confident that the Trump regime will approve a merger with T-Mobile or another competitor soon, possibly even with cable giant Comcast.

Last For Motel, Hotel, Trump-A-Day Inn

The new center of the nation's political map is Trump's hotel in DC, where if you want in on milking the rubes and lobbying for billions, you need to pay-to-play and be seen doing business with The Donald.

At a circular booth in the middle of the Trump International Hotel's balcony restaurant, President Donald Trump dined on his steak — well-done, with ketchup — while chatting with British Brexit politician Nigel Farage. 

A few days later, major Republican donors Doug Deason and Doug Manchester, in town for the president's address to Congress, sipped coffee at the hotel with Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. 

After Trump's speech, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin returned to his Washington residence — the hotel — and strode past the gigantic American flag in the soaring lobby. With his tiny terrier tucked under an arm, Mnuchin stepped into an elevator with reality TV star and hotel guest Dog the Bounty Hunter, who particularly enjoyed the Trump-stamped chocolates in his room. 

It's just another week at the new political capital of the nation's capital. 

The $200 million hotel inside the federally owned Old Post Office building has become the place to see, be seen, drink, network — even live — for the still-emerging Trump set. It's a rich environment for lobbyists and anyone hoping to rub elbows with Trump-related politicos — despite a veil of ethics questions that hangs overhead. 

"I've never come through this lobby and not seen someone I know," says Deason, a Dallas-based fundraiser for Trump's election campaign. 

For Republican Party players, it's the only place to stay. 

"I can tell you this hotel will be the most successful hotel in Washington, D.C.," says Manchester, adding that he would know because he has developed the second-largest Marriott and second-largest Hyatt in the world. Manchester says Trump's hotel will attract people based on its location near the White House and Congress, the quality renovation and the management team. 

Then there's also the access. 

Although Trump says he is not involved in the day-to-day operations of his businesses, he retains a financial interest in them. A stay at the hotel gives someone trying to win over Trump on a policy issue or political decision a potential chit. 

That's what concerns ethics lawyers who had wanted Trump to sell off his companies as previous presidents have done. 

"President Trump is in effect inviting people and companies and countries to channel money to him through the hotel," said Kathleen Clark, a former ethics lawyer for the District of Columbia and a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 

If you want Trump's ear, you stay in Trump's hotels, eat as his restaurants, buy a membership to his clubs, and rub elbows with his people.  And they all want their cut.

This is how America does business now.