I don’t care which party has the right ideas — or which party has the wrong ideas. I am very, very, very interested in civility.
Never Forget. This is the same man that had the audacity to wear a tan suit.
Chris Cillizza: [Trump] is producing the greatest reality show ever.
Soledad O’Brien: It’s not accurate. It’s not funny. It’s not clever. It’s not analysis. It’s facile. It shows an actual lack of understanding of reality tv (can’t believe I’m typing that). It’s mediocre. It’s a time when viewers need to understand what’s going on at the highest levels of govt.
The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper’s harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying.
In other settings the media normalization of the coming shit storm might be charming or even amusing.
First, we have the “that will never get 60 votes in the Senate” crowd. People, there will be no filibuster when the new Congress convenes in 2017; the only possible hope for a retained filibuster is that Mitch McConnell cynically enjoys power more than actually governing and wants a safety hatch of “someone to blame” (namely: Democrat minority in the Senate) for the outcomes of GOP policy decisions.
Similarly, we have the “what might they do” thought pieces. People, we know what they’ll do. They have an incurious leader that has repeatedly expressed his complete lack of interest in the policy details of even his own policy proposals. Assuming Ryan remains Speaker, we know what he’ll do. He’s been talking about it for years in explicit, legislative terms.
One notable example, “Medicare,” as a name for a program will still exist, but it will be converted to a fixed payment with which program recipients can attempt to go buy insurance on the open market. From Day One of the program, said payment will be insufficient to actually, you know, buy coverage on the market, but you can rest easy in the knowledge that the payment will never increase. But: Medicare is still there, folks! Nothing to see here, and I fully expect it to be reported in exactly those terms, because it’s been reported in exactly those terms every time he’s talked about it. Again, this is not a secret. It’s right there in the Plan for America.
Ryan’s broader proposed budgets actually contains no non-military discretionary spending at all, so the fact that Medicare will at least remain in name only is going to be characterized as a big liberal victory, I guess.
As far as Obamacare (or, really, the ACA): also toast. All the media assurances about “but the GOP will have to do the hard work of coming up with a replacement before repealing coverage” for the ~20M folks that were uninsured pre-ACA: Again, super-funny in other circumstances, media elite. The GOP has had the better part of a decade to suggest a replacement for the ACA and has offered nothing. If anything, they will drop in a high risk pool plan with capped lifetime benefit limits. The more likely outcome is the ACA is replaced with nothing. Is it any wonder that drug company stocks spiked on news of the election?
What a Democratic party should do: there’s no stopping most of it (see: filibuster, lack of), but the better long range strategy is to induce the healthcare death spiral. The community rating and associated benefits of the ACA are extremely popular. With heavy heart the Democrats should offer to gut the unpopular parts of the ACA, namely the mandate and the “Obamacare” portion, which actually subsidizes coverage for people unable to afford it on their own. We need to face the fact that the poors are in for quite the kicking over the next four years, no matter what, and but also work to keep the massively popular parts of ACA in force. The GOP, ever attracted to bad policy like cats to catnip, will be unable to resist, because: hey, popular! And so the Democrats shall have ushered in single payer health care, courtesy of the poison pill; briefly, the community rating forces coverage but eliminating the mandate allows people to buy healthcare only when they really need it, thus slowly burning the medical insurance establishment to the ground. Once there is no functional insurance infrastructure, the only remaining option is single payer. Good thing we still have that Medicare name sitting around and largely going unused.
Mostly, The Democrat needs to be planning based on gaining some seats in 2018, but then creating a wave election in 2020. You’re not going to be in control of any lever of govenment until at least 2018. Plan accordingly. Make small changes around the edges that, longer term, create a death-spiral situations to which your policy provides a positive (and ultimately the only) answer. They’re going to destroy most of the ACA no matter what, you can at least work to keep the popular parts that also happen to inexorably drag our healthcare system towards single payer.
There is zero doubt that this sort of approach creates real pain and suffering in the short term. But we’re going to get that pain and suffering no matter what. May as well make it worth something.
You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it’s perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there’s no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.
Ryan directed the Congressional Budget Office to score his budget plans back in 2012. The score of his plan showed the non-Social Security, non-Medicare portion of the federal budget shrinking to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050 (page 16).
This number is roughly equal to current spending on the military. Ryan has indicated that he does not want to see the military budget cut to any substantial degree. That leaves no money for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, The Justice Department, infrastructure spending or anything else. Following Ryan’s plan, in 35 years we would have nothing left over after paying for the military.
Just to be clear, this was not some offhanded gaffe where Ryan might have misspoke. He supervised the CBO analysis. CBO doesn’t write-down numbers in a dark corner and then throw them up on their website to embarrass powerful members of Congress. As the document makes clear, they consulted with Ryan in writing the analysis to make sure that they were accurately capturing his program.
[T]he Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the earth remains there will be seed time and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.’ My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.
So why support negotiations? First: They just might work. I haven’t met many experts who put the chance of success at zero. Second: If the U.S. decides one day that it must destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, it must do so with broad international support. The only way to build that support is to absolutely exhaust all other options. Which means pursuing, in a time-limited, sober-minded, but earnest and assiduous way, a peaceful settlement.
And: I basically agree. Except for all that stuff about “Second.” There is no “Second” choice available; unless, that is, you support a nuclear Iran. Our only tenable option is “First:” negotiate in good faith and hope it works. Otherwise you get a nuclear Iran. In fact, the fastest way to a nuclear Iran is if “the U.S. decides one day that it must destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Doing so, even assuming we temporarily succeeded at it (a prospect that is itself is vanishingly unlikely unless we choose to do so by exterminating all human life in Iran) will only cause them to First re-double, triple, or quadruple their weaponized nuclear efforts, and furthermore do so in sufficiently distributed, fortified, and or completely secret facilities as to obviate any attempt at said facilities’ destruction without resorting to “destroy all human life in Iran” methods.
So, that’s it. Negotiate. Period. The end. Our only choice also happens to be the best choice. It is not a sign of weakness, it is not a capitulation. It is quite literally the only option remaining that does not include the words “results in a nuclear Iran.” Only the GOP seems incapable of seeing this.
“Context” is not a safe word that makes all your other horse-shit statements disappear. And horse-shit is the context in which Richard Cohen has, for all these years, wallowed. It is horse-shit to claim that store owners are right to discriminate against black males. It is horse-shit to claim Trayvon Martin was wearing the uniform of criminals. It is horse-shit to subject your young female co-workers to “a hostile work environment.” It is horse-shit to expend precious newsprint lamenting the days when slovenly old dudes had their pick of 20-year-old women. It is horse-shit to defend a rapist on the run because you like The Pianist. And it is horse-shit for Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, to praise a column with the kind of factual error that would embarrass a j-school student.
Richard Cohen’s unfortunate career is the proper context to understand his column today and the wide outrage that’s greeted it. We are being told that Cohen finds it “hurtful” to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen’s feelings. I find it “hurtful” that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally “hurtful” that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends. I find it hurtful to tell my students that, even in this modern age, vending horse-shit is still an esteemed and lucrative profession.
Lemkin 