Last Call For Trumpsgiving, Trumpmas, And A Trumpy New Year

House Republicans are acting like kids in a candy store these days with you know, total Republican dominance of the country.  Actually, they're acting more like "kids in a candy store with a flamethrower making sure the candy for other kids besides themselves gets burned to ashes."  So if you voted for Republicans and were expecting them to give a damn about you and your family being a working American and such, well, here's your latest Thanksgiving turkey.

Weeks before the 115th Congress even begins, House Republicans are laying the groundwork for a major push to repeal President Barack Obama’s most recent regulations, using the Congressional Review Act. The 1996 law allows the House to reverse regulations enacted within the previous 60 legislative days — and the Senate to pass a repeal by simple majority instead of the upper chamber’s typical 60-vote threshold.

While Obama is still president, the Republican controlled-Congress has no chance of repealing his regulations. But once Trump is inaugurated, that all changes.

Another boon for the right: The 1996 law is written such that the 60-legislative-day clock resets at the beginning of each Congress for all rules enacted in the 60 legislative days prior to the final day of congressional adjournment. That will give Congress months longer to tear up regulations issued late this year.

That’s why leaders are already seeking to leave town early in December, essentially stopping the clock and enabling themselves to repeal as many 2016 rules and regulations as possible. Many believe the chamber will be gone no later than Dec. 9.

House Republicans are currently in the process of making lists of regulations that fall within their time frame and could potentially be repealed early next year. One of the major ones they’re eyeing is Obama’s overtime rule that requires companies to pay time-and-a-half to employees who make under roughly $47,000.

The rule is set to go into effect Dec. 1 and will be a top priority for Republicans to reverse, multiple sources said.

Oh, so you were one of the millions of hard-working Americans slated to finally start getting overtime pay when your boss makes you work 60 hours a week?  Too bad, you voted Republican.  That's going away and you're back to being screwed out of pay.

But hey, you'll get it for a couple of weeks, right?  Merry Christmas!

The Siege Of Standing Rock

I haven't really gone into too much detail about the ongoing battle at Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota over the Dakota Access oil pipeline because of the election, but this is a major civil rights battle that is happening right now in America that has been going on for weeks.

Tensions over the Dakota Access oil pipeline flared again Sunday when North Dakota law enforcement used water cannons to disperse a group of about 400 protesters trying to move past a barricaded bridge toward construction sites for the controversial project.

As temperatures in Cannon Ball, N.D., dropped into the 20s, police in riot gear sprayed anti-pipeline activists with a hose mounted on top of an armored vehicle and formed a line to prevent them from advancing up the road, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Protesters also reported being pelted with rubber bullets, tear gas and concussion grenades during the standoff, which lasted until late Sunday night.

A grainy Facebook Live video from the scene shows throngs of people gathered around the Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806, with flood lights shining down on the grass and road below, and a haze of smoke and water vapor rising near police vehicles.

The clashes began around 6 p.m., when protesters attempted to remove burned out trucks that had been blocking the bridge since authorities and activists faced off there in late October. Police have since set up wire and concrete barriers on the bridge, which is about a mile south of where the pipeline developer plans to drill.

Protesters, who call themselves “water protectors,” have argued that the barricade prevents emergency services from reaching the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and a nearby camp they have used as a staging ground for demonstrations.

Authorities responded after protesters moved one of the trucks blocking the roadway. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department said that by 8:30 p.m. an estimated 400 people had arrived to try to “breach” the bridge and had set dozens of fires in the area. The department called the situation an “ongoing riot,” saying protesters were “very aggressive” and had attempted to “flank and attack the law enforcement line.” At least one person was arrested, the department said.

One of the protest organizers, Dallas Goldtooth, said protesters started small fires in the area to help warm people who had been sprayed with water in the freezing cold. He told the Tribune that some activists tried to remove the burned out trucks to expose the heavily-armed authorities behind them.

“Folks have a right to be on a public road,” Goldtooth said. “It’s absurd that people who’ve been trying to take down the barricade now have their lives at risk.”

Another organizer, Tara Houska, told the Tribune that more than 200 people had been hit with tear gas, pepper spray or water from the hose.

“They’re using everything and anything,” she said. “This has been weeks and weeks of those vehicles on the road for no apparent reason, and it’s a huge public safety risk. It’s putting enormous pressure on the Standing Rock Sioux community and people who live and work in the area.”

The water protectors of Standing Rock have been blocking pipeline construction for weeks now in order to save the reservation's water supply from the oil companies.  I talk about Black Lives Matter a lot, but it's very easy to forget there are many marginalized groups in America and tribal groups are definitely fighting for basic human rights in this country on a daily basis.  They are shot and killed and beaten by law enforcement as well.

Imagine if Flint's water crisis was made worse by dropping a pipeline through the middle of town and bulldozing houses and buildings around it while still doing nothing about the water supply, and you're starting to get the picture of what's going on in Standing Rock.

This is something President Obama needs to intervene in.

It's Always Those People Who Are At Fault

Understand that if the Democratic party actually takes the advice of Columbia professor Mark Lilla here, they are done and the party of Trump will rule for a generation.

One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

The moral energy surrounding identity has, of course, had many good effects. Affirmative action has reshaped and improved corporate life. Black Lives Matter has delivered a wake-up call to every American with a conscience. Hollywood’s efforts to normalize homosexuality in our popular culture helped to normalize it in American families and public life. 

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good. In large part this is because of high school history curriculums, which anachronistically project the identity politics of today back onto the past, creating a distorted picture of the major forces and individuals that shaped our country. (The achievements of women’s rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights.)

No.

The very "identity groups" that Lilla is denigrating here are the voters that turned out for Hillary Clinton by the largest margin.  Abandon them at your own peril, Democrats.  And while Democrats are busy eating their own and people like Lilla are complaining about the state of education in America, Republicans are busy doing things like this.

Despite concern from LGBTQ activists, a Texas state senator's office says a bill addressing parents' right to full disclosure of school information would not force schools to "out" students who identify as sexual minorities, her chief of staff said.

Sen. Konni Burton, R-Fort Worth, filed Senate Bill 242 on Thursday for the 2017 Texas Legislative session that begins Jan. 10 in Austin.

The two-page bill states that a parent is entitled to all of a school district's written records about their child's "general physical, psychological or emotional well-being (except information related to child abuse). An attempt by a school employee to conceal or encourage a child to withhold information is grounds for discipline, the bill states.

Equality Texas, a nonprofit organization that works to secure equal rights for sexual minorities through legislation and education, on Friday issued a statement opposing Burton's bill.

"Until kids are not kicked out of their house for being gay or transgender, and until kids are not being beaten by parents for being gay or transgender, we owe it to kids to protect them," said the statement from Steven M. Rudman, Equality Texas board chairman. "We believe Sen. Burton's legislation would essentially destroy protected communications between a student and an educator...."

Some also worry that the bill would also put lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) Texas youth at risk of being placed in so-called "reparative therapy," which is based upon the premise that homosexuality is a mental health problem, according to the progressive website TheNewCivilRightsMovement.com.

"That is an unfortunate interpretation," said Elliott Griffin, the senator's chief of staff, on Friday.

Nothing in the bill should be construed to mean that a child could be forced into reparative therapy, he said. "I have no idea why they would draw that conclusion."

And let's remember the next vice-president is a big fan of "reparative therapy" and thinks all LGBTQ folks need to be "fixed".   Making common cause with the Trump administration and the people who voted them into power will come at the expense of the most vulnerable in our society.  And I refuse to do it.

StupidiNews!

• In a papal announcement on Monday, Pope Francis has granted all Catholic priests the power to forgive abortion.
• A police officer in San Antonio was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside the city's main police headquarters, police are still hunting the suspect.
• Iraqi military forces are close to severing the last supply lines to the ISIS stronghold of Mosul as militias gather to retake the city.
• President-elect Trump's "repatriation" corporate tax holiday plan will most likely benefit the investor class and not job creation as he has claimed in the past.
• President Obama says once again that he has no plans to pardon Edward Snowden, despite the NSA leaker's raising of "legitimate concerns" in US intelligence operations.

Last Call For Healthy Data Journalism

I know at this point that we're supposed to consider the data-driven pollster model dead (because garbage-in, garbage-out as far as people who said they weren't going to vote for Trump overwhelmingly breaking to him) but if the polls do have a last gasp, it's this: The Economist has found that the biggest indicator of Trump voters wasn't being non-college educated and white, the most likely Trump voters are Americans who are the least healthy.

The two categories significantly overlap: counties with a large proportion of whites without a degree also tend to fare poorly when it comes to public health. However, even after controlling for race, education, age, sex, income, marital status, immigration and employment, these figures remain highly statistically significant. Holding all other factors constant—including the share of non-college whites—the better physical shape a county’s residents are in, the worse Mr Trump did relative to Mr Romney.

For example, in Knox County, Ohio, just north-east of Columbus, Mr Trump’s margin of victory was 14 percentage points greater than Mr Romney’s. One hundred miles (161 km) to the east, in Jefferson County, the Republican vote share climbed by 30 percentage points. The share of non-college whites in Knox is actually slightly higher than in Jefferson, 82% to 79%. But Knox residents are much healthier: they are 8% less likely to have diabetes, 30% less likely to be heavy drinkers and 21% more likely to be physically active. Holding all else equal, our model finds that those differences account for around a six-percentage-point difference in the change in Republican vote share from 2012.

The data suggest that the ill may have been particularly susceptible to Mr Trump’s message. According to our model, if diabetes were just 7% less prevalent in Michigan, Mr Trump would have gained 0.3 fewer percentage points there, enough to swing the state back to the Democrats. Similarly, if an additional 8% of people in Pennsylvania engaged in regular physical activity, and heavy drinking in Wisconsin were 5% lower, Mrs Clinton would be set to enter the White House. But such counter-factual predictions are always impossible to test. There is no way to rerun the election with healthier voters and compare the results. 

The public-health crisis unfolding across white working-class America is hardly a secret. Last year Angus Deaton, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, found that the death rate among the country’s middle-aged, less-educated white citizens had climbed since the 1990s, even as the rate for Hispanics and blacks of the same age had fallen. Drinking, suicide and a burgeoning epidemic of opioid abuse are widely seen as the most likely causes. Some argue that deteriorating health outcomes are linked to deindustrialisation: higher unemployment rates predict both lower life expectancy and support for Mr Trump, even after controlling for a bevy of demographic variables.

Polling data suggests that on the whole, Mr Trump’s supporters are not particularly down on their luck: within any given level of educational attainment, higher-income respondents are more likely to vote Republican. But what the geographic numbers do show is that the specific subset of Mr Trump’s voters that won him the election—those in counties where he outperformed Mr Romney by large margins—live in communities that are literally dying. Even if Mr Trump’s policies are unlikely to alleviate their plight, it is not hard to understand why they voted for change.

Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana in particular were hit hard in the last four years over a growing opioid epidemic.  Various state plans were tried to address the problem with varying results: Kynect and Medicaid expansion in Kentucky being dismantled by Matt Bevin, Indiana's Medicaid-hybrid "everyone has to pay something" approach from Mike Pence, and Ohio's "quiet" Medicaid expansion pushed through by John Kasich.

But none of those programs could deal with the Ohio Valley's drug problem.  In fact, Mike Pence as Indiana's governor made the problem much worse when by fighting drug abuse he effectively destroyed Indiana's ability to deal with a massive HIV outbreak in 2015 when he discontinued the state's needle-exchange program.

In conclusion, the study found that Scott County's public health crisis -- which left 181 people in Southeastern Indiana HIV positive -- was caused by a "close network" of residents injecting opioid Opana and sharing needles. It suggests that Indiana and other largely rural states should focus on prevention measures such as more HIV testing, identifying networks of intravenous drug users, increasing access to treatment, considering syringe-exchange programs and education.

"Although the magnitude of the outbreak was alarming, the introduction of HIV into a rural community in the United States was not unexpected when considered in the context of increasing trends in injection use of prescription opioid (painkillers)," the study says.

Dr. William Cooke, the lone physician in Austin, Ind., the town at the epicenter of the outbreak, said Scott County had every indication for years that the spread of HIV was possible. Cooke pointed to poverty, high unemployment, a steady flow of opioids into the community, high hepatitis C rates and adverse childhood experience.

"If we knew there was a population at risk based on the indicators mentioned, why wait for HIV to hit?" Cooke said Thursday. "... That's what we see right now with Clark and all of these other counties."

Republican governors made things worse by refusing to embrace Medicaid expansion and Obamacare.  And the people hurt the most by those Medicaid decisions by Republican governors overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

Killing thousands through denial of health care dollars and programs paid off for the GOP.  Big time.

Chuck Is Not Harry And Never Will Be

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is sounding a note of reconciliation with Republicans in 2017, saying there are areas of common interest with Donald Trump.  Outside those common interests, not much will happen.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Chuck Todd,” Schumer said Democrats will not unilaterally oppose legislation Trump sponsors. But neither will Democrats compromise “for the sake of working with him,” Schumer said.

“Surprisingly, on certain issues, candidate Trump voiced very progressive and populist opinions,” Schumer said. “For instance, getting rid of the carried interest loophole, changing our trade laws dramatically, a large infrastructure bill.”

“I hope on the promises he's made to blue collar America on trade, on carried interest, on infrastructure, that he'll stick with them and work with us, even if it means breaking with the Republicans who have always opposed these things,” he said.

But Schumer said Democrats will fight to protect legislation President Barack Obama signed but that Trump has said he wants to dismantle.

“We're not going to repeal or help him repeal Obamacare,” Schumer said. “We are not going to roll back Dodd-Frank,” the 2010 law that imposed financial regulations on Wall Street after the 2008-09 crisis.

“We're not going to help him build his wall,” Schumer said of the president-elect's proposed border wall with Mexico. “We have a comprehensive immigration reform bill that builds in much tougher border security and it had bipartisan support than he's ever called for.”

The best Schumer can do here is stall and hope Trump is so bad that in 2018 the Democrats somehow gain three seats in the Senate and take control.  The odds of that are however very slim, as it's much more likely the Republicans will end up with the 60 they need to wipe President Obama's legacy off the map and along with it classic liberalism and the social compact.

That's because there are ten Democratic senators up for re-election in 2018 in states that Trump carried in 2016:

Bill Nelson in Florida
Joe Donnelly in Indiana
Debbie Stabenow in Michigan
Claire McCaskill in Missouri
Jon Tester in Montana
Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota
Sherrod Brown in Ohio
Bob Casey in Pennsylvania
Joe Manchin in West Virginia
Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.

The only Republican senator up for re-election in a Clinton state is Dean Heller of Nevada.  Needless to say, given Democratic performances in the last two midterms, if I'm Mitch the Turtle I'm feeling really, really good about my chances of getting 60 seats in 2019.

Getting the machinery going now to defend these seats and pick off Dean Heller in Nevada, and maybe, maybe Jeff Flake in Arizona, is probably a good idea.

As to Schumer, well, he's not Harry Reid, is he.

How To Steal An Election

That's a pretty bold claim in the blog post title, but that's the only possible conclusion at this point back home in North Carolina as even with a 8,000 vote lead in the governor's race, Democratic candidate and NC Attorney General Roy Cooper still has not gotten a concession from NC GOP Governor Pat McCrory.

Democrats and Republicans in this fiercely contested political battleground have regularly resorted to creative legal maneuvers and election-law changes in their efforts to wring every last vote from the state’s nearly seven million voters. But even by that standard, the disputed, hairbreadth race for governor is plowing litigious and acrimonious ground.

Scrambling to save the incumbent governor, Pat McCrory, Republicans said they were pursuing protests in about half of North Carolina’s 100 counties, alleging that fraud and technical troubles had pushed the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Roy Cooper, to a statewide lead of more than 6,500 votes. But Republican-controlled county elections boards, including one here in vote-rich Durham County, turned back some of the challenges on Friday.

The legal and political jockeying raised the specter of a recount, and it could ultimately climax in a political wild card: Mr. McCrory using a state law to contest the election in the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly.

“We’re supposed to have an inauguration on Jan. 7,” Theresa Kostrzewa, a Republican lobbyist, said Friday. “Are we going to have a governor? That, I think, is what most people are going to start wondering pretty soon.”

The governor’s race this year was among the most bitterly contested campaigns in the country. The state was a prime battleground in the presidential election, and it has been fractured by debates about voting, transgender rights, Medicaid and abortion. Republicans largely prevailed here on Election Day: Donald J. Trump won North Carolina by more than three percentage points, and Senator Richard Burr was re-elected by a larger margin — but Mr. McCrory struggled.

The contest’s aftermath has become a protracted spectacle. Mr. McCrory’s campaign said this week that there were “known instances of votes being cast by dead people, felons or individuals who voted more than once.” A spokesman for Mr. Cooper, Ford Porter, replied that the governor had “set a new standard for desperation.”

Understand that Pat McCrory is openly saying the election results in his state, with many of the counties controlled by Republican-led election boards, are fraudulent.  And there is a method to that madness: state law may allow McCrory to steal the election by giving it to the Republican-dominated state legislature to determine.

Under state law, the legislature could order a new election or, “if it can determine which candidate received the highest number of votes,” it may declare a winner. The law asserts that the legislature’s decision in such a contest is “not reviewable” by the courts.

Mr. Diaz said talk about legislative involvement “seems to be media-driven speculation, but we’re not going to discuss possible future steps that the campaign may or may not take.”

He added, “We are extremely concerned about the voter fraud revelations that are emerging across the state and intend to ensure that every vote is counted and counted properly.”

A lawyer for Mr. Cooper, Marc E. Elias, who also played down the possibility that the General Assembly might decide the election’s outcome, said Republican challenges were “calculated at nothing other than needless delay.”

“There is nothing,” he added, “that Gov. McCrory or his legal team are going to be able to do to undo what is just basic math.”

Believe me when I say this is McCrory's plan.  He knows he has a lot of power here as Governor, and with the General Assembly in his pocket, he knows that if he can stall here long enough legally that the NC House will have to step in for "the good of the state".  That's why McCrory is saying the election is fraudulent and that the contest will have to be determined by Republicans in the Assembly, because there "won't be a way to know" otherwise who truly won...and the Assembly decision is final by law.

The mechanism for theft of an election is in place.  And Pat McCrory is going to try to use it.

Sunday Long Read: We Burned It All Down

David Remnick at the New Yorker takes a long, hard look at the first two weeks of November through the eyes of President Barack Obama as he, like the rest of us, watched in shock as America voted to undo everything he has done.

When I joined Obama on a campaign trip to North Carolina just four days before the election, Hillary Clinton was hanging on to a lead in nearly every poll. Surely, the professionals said, her “firewall” would hold and provide a comfortable victory. David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that Clinton was a “one hundred per cent” lock and advised nervous Democrats to stop “wetting the bed.” In battleground states, particularly where it was crucial to get out the African-American vote, Obama was giving one blistering campaign speech after another.

“I’m having fun,” he told me. But, thanks in part to James Comey, the F.B.I. director, and his letter to Congress announcing that he would investigate Clinton’s e-mails again, the race tightened considerably in its final week. When Obama wandered down the aisle of Air Force One, I asked him, “Do you feel confident about Tuesday?”

“Nope,” he said.

But then, in Obamian fashion, he delved into a methodical discussion of polling models and, finally, landed on a more tempered and upbeat version of “nope.” He was “cautiously optimistic.”

There were reasons to be so. His Presidency, after all, had seemed poised for a satisfying close. As recently as early 2015, the Obama Administration had been in a funk. He had underestimated isis; Putin had annexed Crimea; Syria was a catastrophe. His relations with the Republicans in Congress, especially since the crushing 2014 midterms, were at an impasse. Then, in a single week in June, 2015: the Supreme Court ended years of legal assaults on Obamacare; the Court ruled in favor of marriage equality; and, at a funeral following the murder of nine congregants at a black church in Charleston, Obama gave a speech that captivated much of the country. Rather than focus on the race war that the killer had hoped to incite, he spoke of the “reservoir of goodness” in the living and the dead and ended by singing “Amazing Grace.” 

A sense of energy and accomplishment filtered back into the Administration. Long before Election Day, books were being published about its legacy: an economy steered clear of a beckoning Depression, the rescue of the automobile industry, Wall Street reform, the banning of torture, the passage of Obamacare, marriage equality, and the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the end of the war in Iraq, heavy investment in renewable-energy technologies, the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Iran nuclear deal, the opening of Cuba, the Paris agreement on climate change, two terms long on dignity and short on scandal. Obama’s approval ratings reached a new high. Clinton’s election as the first female President would complete the narrative, and Obama, his aides suggested, would be free to sit in the healing sun of Oahu and contemplate nothing more rigorous than the unrushed composition of a high-priced memoir.

Air Force One landed at Fort Bragg and the motorcade headed to a gym packed with supporters at Fayetteville State University. In shirtsleeves and with crisp, practiced enthusiasm, Obama delivered his campaign stump speech. His appeal for Clinton was rooted in the preservation of his own legacy. “All the progress that we’ve made these last eight years,” he said, “goes out the window if we don’t win this election!” He revived some of his early tropes, cautioning the crowd not to be “bamboozled” by the G.O.P.—an echo from Malcolm X—and recited the litany of Trump’s acts of disrespect toward blacks, women, Muslims, the disabled, Gold Star parents.

I was standing to the side of the stage. Nearby, a stout older man appeared in the aisle, dressed in a worn, beribboned military uniform and holding a Trump sign. People spotted him quickly and the jeering began. Then came the chant “Hil-la-ry! Hil-la-ry!”

Obama picked up the curdled vibe and located its source. “Hold up!” he said. “Hold up!”

The crowd would not quiet down. He repeated the phrase—“Hold up!”—sixteen more times, and still nothing. It took a long, disturbing while before he could recapture the crowd’s attention and get people to lay off the old man. What followed was a lecture in political civility.

“I’m serious, listen up,” he said. “You’ve got an older gentleman who is supporting his candidate. . . . You don’t have to worry about him. This is what I mean about folks not being focussed. First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech. Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military, and we’ve got to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly, and we’ve got to respect our elders. . . . Now, I want you to pay attention. Because if we don’t, if we lose focus, we could have problems.”

That night in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Trump informed his supporters that in Fayetteville Obama had been abusive to the protester: “He spent so much time screaming at this protester and, frankly, it was a disgrace.” Either Trump was retailing an account he’d found online in the alt-right media or he was knowingly lying. In other words, Trump was Trump.

And now, in two months, Trump will be President.

We all underestimated the inchoate rage of Trump voters, people who are our relatives and loved ones, people whom many of us still consider to be our friends and neighbors.

In the end, they voted for Donald Trump.  We're all going to pay a price for that.

But some of us will pay a much, much higher price than others.  And many of the people who did vote for Donald Trump are willing to pay that price if it hurts some of the rest of us even more.  They're okay with that.

And the worst part is that they still will call themselves your friends.

Last Call For Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't.

The people of Kentucky voted for Matt Bevin by a considerable margin last year, a man who promised to end Medicaid for 450,000 Kentuckians.  The only thing standing in his way was the Obama administration's Health and Human Services department, and Democrats in the Kentucky House.  Last week many of these same Kentuckians voted for, by an even larger margin, to get rid of both of those checks.

Now, some of them are worried they might lose their Medicaid.  They should be terrified.

For Freida Lockaby, an unemployed 56-year-old woman who lives with her dog in an aging mobile home in Manchester, Ky., one of America's poorest places, the Affordable Care Act was life altering.

The law allowed Kentucky to expand Medicaid in 2014 and made Lockaby – along with 440,000 other low-income state residents – newly eligible for free health care under the state-federal insurance program. Enrollment gave Lockaby her first insurance in 11 years.

"It's been a godsend to me," said the former Ohio school custodian who moved to Kentucky a decade ago.

Lockaby finally got treated for a thyroid disorder that had left her so exhausted she'd almost taken root in her living room chair. Cataract surgery let her see clearly again. A carpal tunnel operation on her left hand eased her pain and helped her sleep better. Daily medications brought her high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol level under control.

But Lockaby is worried her good fortune could soon end. Her future access to health care now hinges on a controversial proposal to revamp the program that her state's Republican governor has submitted to the Obama administration.

I guarantee you Lockaby and her neighbors voted for Bevin last year and Trump this year.  And I bet that even if Lockaby herself did find it in her heart to vote for Jack Conway or Hillary Clinton, her neighbors saw the health care she was getting and figured she was one of those people who needed to be out there working like they are. They definitely voted for Bevin and Trump to take health care away from her. I'm willing to put actual money on the table that at least one of Frieda Lockaby's neighbors said "I know she's healthy enough to find a job, she's living off the government, and that's not fair.  That's why I voted for Trump."

Bevin has threatened to roll back the expansion if the Obama administration doesn't allow him to make major changes, such as requiring Kentucky's beneficiaries to pay monthly premiums of $1 to $37.50 and require nondisabled recipients to work or do community service for free dental and vision care.

Budget pressures are set to rise next year in the 31 states and the District of Columbia where Medicaid was expanded as the federal government reduces its share of those costs. States will pick up 5 percent next year and that will rise gradually to 10 percent by 2020. Under the health law, the federal government paid the full cost of the Medicaid expansion population for 2014-2016.

In a state as cash-strapped as Kentucky, the increased expenses ahead for Medicaid will be significant in Bevin's view — $1.2 billion from 2017 to 2021, according to the waiver request he's made to the Obama administration to change how Medicaid works in his state.

Trump's unexpected victory may help Bevin's chances of winning approval. Before the election, many analysts expected federal officials to reject the governor's plan by the end of the year on the grounds that it would roll back gains in expected coverage.

A Trump administration could decide the matter differently, said Emily Beauregard, executive director of Kentucky Voice for Health, an advocacy group that opposes most waiver changes because they could reduce access to care.

"I think it's much more likely that a waiver could be approved under the Trump administration," she said. "On the other hand, I wonder if the waiver will be a moot point under a Trump administration, assuming that major pieces of the [Affordable Care Act] are repealed."

Lockaby is watching with alarm: "I am worried to death about it."

You should be. Donald Trump won every single county in Kentucky except for Fayette and Jefferson, where Lexington and Louisville are, respectively.  Trump won Clay County 87%-11%. They voted overwhelmingly to take everything away from those people.

It turns out "those people" are Frieda Lockaby herself.

They Livin' It Up In The Hotel Trumpifornia

What a nice surprise, bring your alibis.

About 100 foreign diplomats, from Brazil to Turkey, gathered at the Trump International Hotel this week to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.

The event for the diplomatic community, held one week after the election, was in the Lincoln Library, a junior ballroom with 16-foot ceilings and velvet drapes that is also available for rent.

Some attendees won raffle prizes — among them overnight stays at other Trump properties around the world — allowing them to become better acquainted with the business holdings of the new commander in chief.

“The place was packed,” said Lynn Van Fleit, founder of the nonprofit Diplomacy Matters Institute, which organizes programs for foreign diplomats and government officials. She said much of the discussion among Washington-based diplomats is over “how are we going to build ties with the new administration.”

Back when many expected Trump to lose the election, speculation was rife that business would suffer at the hotels, condos and golf courses that bear his name. Now, those venues offer the prospect of something else: a chance to curry favor or access with the next president.

Perhaps nowhere is that possibility more obvious than Trump’s newly renovated hotel a few blocks from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Rooms sold out quickly for the inauguration, many for five-night minimums priced at five times the normal rate, according to the hotel’s manager.

To many of the guests at the reception Tuesday, accepting an invitation to tour the $212 million hotel and check out the $20,000-a-night, 6,300-square-foot “town house” suite seemed like a good idea. They spoke admiringly about the renovation and left with a goody bag of chocolates and a brochure. It listed the choices of accommodations and meeting rooms and expounded on the location’s “striking prominence” at historical moments such as the Inauguration Day parade.

“Believe me, all the delegations will go there,” said one Middle Eastern diplomat who recently toured the hotel and booked an overseas visitor. The diplomat said many stayed away from the hotel before the election for fear of a “Clinton backlash,” but that now it’s the place to be seen.

If Clinton, Obama, or any other Democratic president owned a hotel in DC, and still owned it after being elected president, it would be a wall-to-wall scandal for weeks, if nor months or even years that would be constantly brought up to bludgeon them for such an obvious "crony capitalism" move that you'd find in a fictional banana republic.  I know there are folks out there who are old enough to remember Jimmy Carter's peanut farm, for example.




For Donald Trump, having foreign diplomats stay in his hotel in DC is not even in the top 10 awful things he's done this week.

The Gaslight Express, Con't

Another day, another article on "Why White Voters Abandoned The Dems" and the answer once again is "Black Lives Matter".

Many of the voters in Rust Belt states who cast ballots for President Barack Obama in 2012 flipped parties and paved the way for a Donald Trump victory in 2016 because they felt "betrayed" by Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At least, that's the takeaway from Chris Clayton, agricultural policy reporter for DTN.

"I was a little surprised," Clayton tells NBC News' Chuck Todd in the latest edition of "1947: The Meet the Press podcast." "It wasn't so much that she lost the rural counties - that was expected, but it was by how much she lost the rural counties." 

Hillary Clinton failed to earn enough votes to rack up an Electoral College victory in states like Iowa and Wisconsin that Obama won. According to Clayton, that's because many rural voters felt threatened by the increased prominence of organizations like Black Lives Matter; a fear that was reinforced by conservative news sources on cable television and talk radio. 

"Some of the negative [news] about Trump that may have been coming from other places [in the media] - they didn't see it," Clayton says. "They were really focusing on the negativity on Hillary Clinton." 

Clinton struggled with rural women in particular who felt a "great disdain" for the former First Lady - and they felt disrespected by D.C.-based media organizations that might have perceived them as being uneducated. 

"A lot of farmers - they might not have college degrees, but they are very astute business people," Clayton says. "They have to understand so many things to run the business that they do. To be continually portrayed as not that smart became very offensive to a lot of people."

Make no mistake: Black America and in particular Black Lives Matter is being set up as the scapegoat for why Clinton lost, and it will be the first thing that Chuck Schumer and his merry crew in the Senate will jettison their support for going forward.

When that happens, Democrats are going to have a real problem on their hands, not an imagined one.

So What Actually Comes After Obamacare?

There are a lot of theories on what happens to replace Obamacare when Republicans eagerly kill it next year, but they know that they own whatever remains.  Still, that has an actual process too, and Vox's health care writer Sarah Kliff goes over the various proposals.

If there’s one thing Republicans have been clear about for the past six years, it is that the top of their agenda includes repealing Obamacare. 

But Obamacare repeal would leave an estimated 22 million Americans without coverage and wreak havoc on the individual insurance market. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Republicans can’t just repeal Obamacare — they need to replace it with something. 

It turns out Republicans have a lot of choices: There are at least seven different replacement plans that Republican legislators and conservative think tanks have offered in recent years. I’ve spent the past week reading them, and what I’ve learned is this: 

• Yes, Republicans have replacement plans. It is true that the party has not coalesced around one plan — but there are real policy proposals coming from Republican legislators and conservative think tanks. There is a base that the party can work from in crafting a replacement plan.
• There is significant variation in what the plans propose. On one end of the spectrum, you see plans from President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with virtually nothing. On the other end of the spectrum, there are plans from conservative think tanks that go as far as to keep the Affordable Care Act marketplaces and continue to give low-income Americans the most generous insurance subsidies.
• If we can say one thing about most Republican plans, it is this: They are better for younger, healthy people and worse for older, sicker people. In general, conservative replacement plans offer less financial help to those who would use a lot of insurance. This will make their insurance subsidies significantly less expensive than Obamacare’s.
• Economic analyses estimate that these plans reduce the number of Americans with insurance coverage. The actual amount varies significantly, from 3 million to 21 million, depending on which option Republicans pick. They will near certainly provide more coverage than Americans had before Obamacare, but also less than what exists currently under the health law.

I’ve spent the past week talking to authors of Republican replacement plans, economists who support them, and economists who oppose them. I’m focusing here on the two plans that are likeliest to be the most influential in the coming replacement debate: Better Way, from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and the Patient CARE Act, from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who chairs the Senate Finance Committee.

Kliff goes on to explain the differences in these multiple plans, but on the spectrum that the GOP has, it's only a question of how much worse the replacement will be than the current Affordable Care Act. Paul Ryan's plan would eliminate health care coverage for at least 18 million people, and Orrin Hatch's plan would cause anywhere from 4 to 9 million people to lose coverage.

Other plans are either better or worse than this, but again, it's only a question of how many people lose coverage and all the plans get rid of the ACA's medical bankruptcy protection.  Nearly all the plans get rid of covering pre-existing conditions in some way as well.

In other words, it's a question of how badly this goes, and how quickly it happens.  If you thought Obamacare was bad, all the Republican alternatives are going to be worse.

But emails, right?

Last Call For Profiles In Courage, Con't

If you thought for a second that "moderate" Republican and "moderate" Democratic senators would ever come together to stop one of their bretheren in the august body like avowed racist Sen. Jeff Sessions from becoming Trump's Attorney General, then you're a bigger fool than I can ever help you with.

Sen. Jeff Sessions is looking like a safe bet for Senate confirmation as attorney general — despite the Alabama lawmaker’s controversial past.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a potential swing vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, will support Sessions, a spokesman said Friday. That's a key pickup, given Flake's moderate views on immigration and social issues, and his opposition to Donald Trump during the campaign. Then moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) said he would support Sessions as did moderate Republican Susan Collins of Maine, all but clinching his elevation.

If Sessions can clear committee, he’ll likely win a floor vote to become the nation’s top law enforcement official, GOP Senate insiders said. Republicans will likely have 52 votes in the next Congress, and Trump's Cabinet picks can't be filibustered because Democrats unilaterally changed Senate rules three years ago to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for most nominations.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Sessions’ long history as a senior member of his committee bodes well for his confirmation prospects.

“He knows the Justice Department as a former U.S. attorney, which would serve him very well in this position. With this background, I'm confident he would be reported favorably out of the committee,” Grassley said in a statement.

The new top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, declined to take a hard line against Sessions despite their divergent views. She said the GOP senator will go through a “full and fair process.”

There will be no more than token resistance to Sessions being confirmed, and then the Department of Justice will become an extremely powerful weapon the Trump administration will use against people of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ-Americans at every opportunity.

An avowed racist like Sessions in charge of the DoJ's voting rights and civil rights division will set the country back decades.

Which, of course, was Trump's campaign promise from the beginning.

You have to admire Trump's strategy: making sure his first major cabinet choice is a twenty-year Senate veteran who has all sorts of favors to be called in, and will easily win confirmation from a sea of colleagues who have known him for years.  That of course will make resistance to the rest of Trump's cabinet selections that much harder.

And make no mistake, nobody is more eager to make a truncheon out of the DoJ to be used against people like me than this vile chancre of an asshole.

After nearly a quarter-century away, Mr. Sessions — now known simply as Jeff — is poised to return to the department to clean house as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, with a mandate to carry out the “law and order” agenda Mr. Trump promised on the campaign trail.

If he is confirmed, Mr. Sessions, who is considered one of the most conservative members of the Senate, will most likely push for wholesale changes and hard-line stances on immigration, terrorism, crime, drugs and guns. Democrats fear he could wipe away progress in civil rights, changes in sentencing and police accountability.

“The Justice Department is likely to be one of the most transformed departments in the cabinet in a Trump administration, and with an Attorney General Sessions, you’d obviously see a very strong law-and-order figure at the top,” said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor.

“Much of his self-identity is as a prosecutor — a real, in-the-trenches prosecutor,” said Mr. Turley, who testified before Mr. Sessions at a Senate hearing last year about the Obama administration’s use of executive authority.

Mr. Sessions, 69, was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump in February, when many Republicans were still shunning the businessman. He has since become a close adviser.

Expect his first target to be Obama-era criminal justice and sentencing guideline recommendations, followed by getting rid of those nasty restrictions on police using military equipment against citizens.  In fact, I expect the first batch of citizens to find out the hard way will be Black Lives Matter protesters in 2017.

Don't expect Democrats to save us in 2017 from Trump.  We'll have to save ourselves.

Terms Of Internment

I know that the Trump camp along ago approached cartoon/comic-book levels of open, nihilistic villainy, but now these assholes control the entire federal government and nearly two-thirds of the states, and it's telling that they boldly cite WW II-era Japanese internment camps as a positive precedent for the policies they want to implement.

A Donald Trump supporter cited the United States’ use of internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II as precedent for Trump’s rumored registry of Muslim immigrants. 

“It is legal, they say it will hold constitutional muster. I know the the ACLU is going to challenge it, but I think it will pass,” former Navy Seal and Trump supporter Carl Higbie said in an interview on Fox News with Megyn Kelly.

“And we’ve done it with Iran back— back a while ago, we did it during World War II with Japanese, which, call it what you will it may be wrong—” he said as Kelly jumped in.

“Come on, you’re not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps,” she said. “You know better than to suggest that, that’s the kind of thing that gets people scared, Carl.”

“No, no, no, I’m not proposing that at all, Megyn, but what I am saying is we need to protect America first,” he said. “I’m just saying there’s precedent for it, I’m not saying I agree with it, but in this case I absolutely believe—“ 

“You can’t be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is going to do,” Kelly responded. 

“Look, the president needs to protect America first, and if that means having people that are not protected under our Constitution have some sort tor registry so we can understand- until we can identify the true threat and where it’s coming from, I support it,” Higbie said.

But that's exactly what they're doing, Megyn Kelly.  And it won't stop with Muslims entering from outside the US, either.  History has shown us that.

And yes, people like Carl Higbie should scare the ever-loving crap out of you.  These people run our government, our Congress, and pretty soon our courts.  They will get to decide what's constitutional or not.

These guys aren't even pretending anymore, they're outright fascists.

The Gaslight Express, Con't

Nikole Hannah-Jones writes about her home state of Iowa and why white voters that made Barack Obama a household name by winning him the Iowa primary in 2008 turned their backs on the Democrats for Donald Trump.

Gretchen Douglas is a corrections officer from Marshalltown. The 53-year-old had been a Democrat her entire adult life and describes herself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. She’s a supporter of unions and gay rights and abortion rights and said she doesn’t want to breathe dirty air. She proudly talked of her daughter’s success as a chemist, mentioning that not long ago the only options for women were teaching and nursing. She holds a degree in accounting and can tell you exactly the share of the national debt she and her husband carry. 

Even as the recession caused Iowa to shed hundreds of state jobs, Douglas managed to hold onto hers. But in 2012, for the first time in her life, she registered as a Republican, and last week she voted for Trump. Douglas told me she had switched parties because she felt Obama had been irresponsible with spending, causing the national debt to soar. She said Democrats were spending too much on social programs for people who did not need them. 

“I don’t want to throw Granny out in the snow, and I think the least of our brothers should be taken care of,” she said. “But I think that those who can work should.” Douglas said there was a time in her life where she was struggling, and so she applied for welfare for herself and her young children but was denied. She didn’t think that was fair, but she worked hard and turned her life around. But these days, she said, “I kind of think for some social programs there is no stigma.” 

Douglas never mentioned race, but polls including a recent one of Trump supporters have shown that white Americans’ support for entitlement programs declines if they think black people are benefiting. And the longer Douglas talked, the more she revealed other reasons she had voted for Trump. 

When Obama was elected, she hoped he would “bridge race relations, to help people in the middle of Iowa” see that black people “are decent hardworking people who want the same things that we want.” She said people in rural Iowa often don’t know many black people and unfairly stereotype them. But Obama really turned her off when after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions. And then came the death of Michael Brown, shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo. 

“I’m not saying that the struggles of black Americans aren’t real,” Douglas told me, “but I feel like the Michael Brown incident was violence against the police officer.”
The Black Lives Matter movement bothered her. Even as an Ivy League-educated, glamorous black couple lived in the White House, masses of black people were blocking highways and staging die-ins in malls, claiming that black people had it so hard. When she voiced her discomfort with that movement, she said, or pointed out that she disagreed with Obama’s policies, some of her more liberal friends on Facebook would call her racist. So, she shut her mouth — and simmered.

Trump clearly sensed the fragility of the coalition that Obama put together — that the president's support in heavily white areas was built not on racial egalitarianism but on a feeling of self-interest. Many white Americans were no longer feeling that belonging to this coalition benefited them. A recent study by sociologists from Harvard and Tufts found that white Americans believed that they experienced more discrimination than black Americans. Trump spoke openly to those Americans, articulating what many Iowans felt but could never say. It was liberating. 

“Trump was crass, and he was abrupt,” Douglas said. “But I felt like he was going to take care of the things that mattered for me, and honestly I was very worried about our country.”

And she voted for Donald Trump.

As I said before, what I'm afraid of is that the next two years will be Democrats scrambling to try to win back Gretchen Douglas. When push came to shove, Gretchen Douglas decided that the racist who would "take care of her" was better than the black guy or the woman or the party who supported them.  She was never a Democrat, only a potential Republican who finally showed the country who she really was.

And trying to win her will absolutely come at the expense of people of color.  That I can guarantee you.