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.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's cabinet selections continue, with Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA Director.
• Democratic state attorneys general are vowing to fight anticipated Trump policies, led by New York and Washington state.
• Puerto Rico's financial restructuring advisory board hopes to certify a plan to get the island protectorate back on its feet by the end of January.
• Divorce in the US has dropped to a 35-year low as marriages are increasing, buoyed by same-sex ceremonies across the country.
• Tesla Motors shareholders have overwhelmingly voted to approve a buyout of SolarCity as the tech company plans to bring solar roof shingles to American homes.

Last Call For Methinks You Doth Protest Too Much

One silver lining in the election of Donald Trump to head a GOP government: gleeful Republicans aren't even trying to cloak their authoritarian impulses anymore and are making it perfectly clear that they plan to use the power of government to crush those that they see as enemies.  We're now seeing the first small signs of this just a week after the election, and I expect them to grow larger, even in blue states like Washington.

A Republican state senator who campaigned for President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday he plans to propose a bill for the upcoming legislative session that would take a firm stand against what he calls "illegal protests."

Sen. Doug Ericksen of Ferndale said in a news release his bill would create a new crime of "economic terrorism" and would allow felony prosecution of people involved in protests that block transportation and commerce, damage property, threaten jobs and put public safety at risk, he said.

"I respect the right to protest, but when it endangers people's lives and property, it goes too far," Ericksen said. "Fear, intimidation and vandalism are not a legitimate form of political expression. Those who employ it must be called to account."

But some people believe the term "economic terrorism" goes too far.

"To call it economic terrorism is just another way to silence it and another way to gain popular support." said Seattle resident Molly Boord.

"Frankly, I'm appalled," said Seattle city councilman Miked O'Brien.

He was detained by the Coast Guard when he joined kayaktivists protesting a Shell oil rig last summer.

"To me (it) strikes a complete disregard of the US constitution and our First Amendment rights," said O'Brien. "Our country is based, in part, on the ability to have free speech and public dissension."

Public dissension against Trump will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the (new) law, if the GOP gets its way.  And it's hard to imagine them not getting a bill like this passed in states where they have total control soon.

Being able to round up hundreds, maybe thousands and charge them with felonies will of course require a new for-profit private prison regime to handle political dissidents (maybe the most Republican party thing ever) and of course the automatic loss of the right to vote in many states for being felons.

This will never pass in Washington state, but in say, Texas or Missouri or Florida or Ohio, where there are large blue cities and the possibility of months, if not years of protest against Trump that are in states dominated by the GOP, or more likely, Black Lives Matter protests after another police killing of people of color?

You'd better believe legislation like this is in the works.  How far it will get, well who knows at this point?

The Gaslight Express

I'm definitely afraid of the havoc that the Trump administration will wreak in just a few months.  But what I'm also afraid of is that the "new, improved" Democratic party will make a hard right turn in order to placate the "white working-class" voter and that will lead to then abandoning voters of color.

Real Clear Politics pundit Sean Trende all but blames voters of color for Clinton's loss last week in his version of the Democratic party "autopsy" report that Republicans went through in 2008.

I have little doubt that a belief that demographics would save them at the presidential level led Democrats to take a number of steps that they will soon regret, from going nuclear on the filibuster to aggressive uses of executive authority. But one thing deserves special attention. A good deal of e-ink has been spilled describing the ways in which the culturally superior attitudes of the left drove Trumpism. This too, I think, derived from a belief that history had a side and that progressives were on it, combined with a lack of appreciation of just how many culturally traditionalist voters there are in this country. 

Consider these factoids: In 2004, white evangelicals were 23 percent of the electorate, and they cast 78 percent of their vote for fellow evangelical George W. Bush. In 2012, they were 26 percent of the electorate, and gave Mormon Mitt Romney 78 percent of the vote. In 2016, Donald J. Trump, a thrice-married man who bragged about sleeping with married women and whose biblical knowledge at times seemed confined to the foibles of the two Corinthians, won 81 percent of their vote. Notwithstanding the fact that I have been assured repeatedly that these voters represent a shrinking demographic and that Republicans had maxed out their vote share among them, they were once again 26 percent of the electorate. 

Two points demand attention. The first, which “demographics-is-destiny” types typically gloss over, is that Trump received more votes from white evangelicals than Clinton received from African-Americans and Hispanics combined. This single group very nearly cancels the Democrats’ advantage among non-whites completely. This isn’t a one-off; it was true in 2012, 2008 and 2004. 

Second, you may wonder why this group voted in historic numbers for a man like Trump. Perhaps, as some have suggested, they are hypocrites. Perhaps they are merely partisans. But I will make a further suggestion: They are scared. 

Consider that over the course of the past few years, Democrats and liberals have: booed the inclusion of God in their platform at the 2012 convention (this is disputed, but it is the perception); endorsed a regulation that would allow transgendered students to use the bathroom and locker room corresponding to their identity; attempted to force small businesses to cover drugs they believe induce abortions; attempted to force nuns to provide contraceptive coverage; forced Brendan Eich to step down as chief executive officer of Mozilla due to his opposition to marriage equality; fined a small Christian bakery over $140,000 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding; vigorously opposed a law in Indiana that would provide protections against similar regulations – despite having overwhelmingly supported similar laws when they protected Native American religious rights – and then scoured the Indiana countryside trying to find a business that would be affected by the law before settling upon a small pizza place in the middle of nowhere and harassing the owners. In 2015, the United States solicitor general suggested that churches might lose their tax exempt status if they refused to perform same-sex marriages. In 2016, the Democratic nominee endorsed repealing the Hyde Amendment, thereby endorsing federal funding for elective abortions. Democrats seemingly took up the position endorsed by critical legal theorist Mark Tushnet:

The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. . . . For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won. 

Perhaps comparing evangelicals to the Japanese in World War II was a bit much, and helped push evangelicals into a defensive crouch. Before my Democratic friends warm up their keyboards to protest “but we’re correct,” let me say that on some of these issues I agree with you! My point here is descriptive, not prescriptive. An aggressive approach to the culture wars and the sneering condescension of the Samantha Bees and John Olivers of the world may be warranted, but it also probably cost liberals their best chance in a generation to take control of the Supreme Court. That’s a pretty steep price to pay. It may well be that Democrats would be better able to achieve their goals if they were less, for lack of a better word, fundamentalist about those goals. Henry Clay famously declared that he would rather be right than president; he at least got his way on the latter.

If Republicans were told to pursue Latino and black votes in 2008, the advice to Democrats is now to kick these groups to the curb and actively court white evangelicals, the only group that matters politically anymore.

It's terrible advice, but I'm afraid Democrats are winding up to do just that, and should they do so, they will be lost for a generation.

And so will people of color.  We've seen 18 months of the most racist presidential campaign in modern history, and the analysis is that not only Republicans won by directly appealing to the racism of white voters, but that to have any hope in the future as a political party, the Democrats must embrace the same message.

That is wrong, and I will fight that every step of the way.

The Obamacare Repeal Reveal Deal

Barring sudden change in heart by the GOP, Obamacare is dead and gone in 2017, folks.  What will come after it is now the important fight once Republicans decide how to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and move forward with their crusade.  And as Jon Chait reminds us, what will come after is most likely "absolutely nothing".

So how will Republicans handle it? One possibility is to compromise with Democrats. Republican staffers speaking to reporter Caitlin Owens said they would not use the repeal bill their party had sent to Obama endlessly for vetoes. (“We’re not going to use that package. We’re not dumb,” said one.) They described their approach as “more massive reform” and “a rewrite of Obamacare.” The plan they loosely describe would keep Obamacare’s structure, and change the law to make it friendlier to Republican priorities. They could strip out some of the essential benefits required by the law. They could allow insurers, who are now allowed to charge older customers no more than three times as much as they charge a young one, something more (like, say, five times as much). And they could change the subsidies in a more Republican-friendly way — which generally means making them more generous to the affluent and stingier for the poor. This kind of compromise would impose a lot of hardship on vulnerable people. (A good summary of the impact of these changes can be found here— it would hurt more people than it would help.) But it might attract some Democrats eager to sustain some kind of safety net for the health-care system. Republicans could satisfy the blood lust of their base by framing this as a “repeal” of the law and a replacement with a somewhat altered version. 

After he met with President Obama, Trump seemed to endorse a version of this strategy. “We’re going to do it simultaneously. It’ll be just fine. That’s what I do. I do a good job,” he said. “We’re not going to have like a two-day period and we’re not going to have a two-year period where there’s nothing. It will be repealed and replaced. It’ll be great health care for much less money.” As is often the case, Trump’s verbiage did not convey any clear and definable course of action. But to the extent meaning could be extracted, he was promising not to pass a quick repeal bill or to wreck the law completely. 

Yet such a course of action seems likely to enrage conservative activists, who could ignite a firestorm of protest against the sellout leadership capitulating to nefarious congressional Democrats. Indeed, much of the conservative movement has invested itself heavily into the notion that Obamacare is an act of singular evil that must be destroyed — the very impulse that prevented Republicans from negotiating on the law in the first place. 

And so a second course of action seems more likely. Republicans would quickly vote, through a reconciliation bill, to dismantle the law’s subsidies. They could do this in a massive reconciliation bill that also advanced other priorities, like a large upper-bracket tax cut, cuts in spending on anti-poverty programs, defunding agencies that regulate Wall Street, polluters, and so on. But the defunding of Obamacare would be delayed for two years, until after the 2018 midterm elections, to shield the GOP from the political impact. In the meantime, Trump could deliberately impair the law’s functioning through administrative action, so that the exchanges lost customers rather than gained them. 

This plan would give Republicans two more years to design their alternative. By 2019, they would likely have eliminated the filibuster over some other dispute. If not, eliminating the law might give them leverage to try to force Democrats to participate in some kind of ultra-threadbare replacement plan. The leverage would be that, if they fail to support it, Obamacare would disappear without anything at all taking its place. When thinking through the Republican Party’s incentives, the option that makes the most sense is the immediate repeal vote with a two-year delay before it takes effect.

In other words, defund Obamacare subsidies immediately, blame Democrats when the individual market and state exchanges collapse and red state voters get out the long knives to decapitate the remaining Senate Dems in 2018, and then come up with a "new" plan in 2019.

It's a smart plan.  Sure, it'll cost tens of millions of Americans health insurance and affordable care and some of them won't be around in 2019 as a result, but hey, it'll be Obama's fault.

Voters have repeatedly rewarded the GOP for behaving like this.  Why would they stop now?