Can you believe it? For seven years the Republicans talked about nothing but repealing Obamacare. That was their entire agenda. They bred and raised their spawn on that theme. And now, with all three parts of government under their control, with everything going their way – they blow it. That’s right. They had it all set up and ready to go except they didn’t. With seven years to prep their campaign they still came up with zilch. This is what those of us not of the ultra-conservative persuasion have been saying about Republican legislators for the last twenty years. They are great at stopping everything. They are a fabulous hole in the ground but they just suck at getting anything done. Now they have conclusively proved all of the above. This is not to say that the Democrats are any dream team but maybe the smart money ought to go toward electing more Democrats than Republicans next time around, just to see if we can get this constipated government on the move again.
If there is one obvious fault with our democratic system it is currently on display in the nonsense over the healthcare vote. Just watching various politicians making fools of themselves makes it obvious that while they all have a very strong political agenda, none of them have any sense of governance. These people were elected to run the most powerful country in the world but they act like corner hawkers for a strip joint.
There are four separate and opposed groups involved in this fight. The President, who has promised a “great” plan that will “make America healthier,” and cover everyone and his brother at no cost, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House and the ultra conservatives who simply wants to get rid of health care and give the rich a big unneeded bonus in the process, the Freedom Caucus who do not want anything that smacks of Obamacare but don’t know how to structure something that could work financially and finally the Moderates, who would like to create a viable healthcare plan but only if they can also save their rich friends money.
Yesterday, the House was supposed to vote on the mess that Paul Ryan had conned Trump into backing but they could never get their heads close enough together to count the needed votes. Trump then proclaimed that they had to vote one way or another by two PM on Friday or he was pulling his support. It’s probably a smart move on his part, one of the few smart moves he’s made since he got to the White House. This is Ryan’s bill and it doesn’t come close to delivering anything like what Trump promised his voters. Of course nothing other than Obamacare on steroids could do that but Trump isn’t informed enough to understand it.
Right now the best thing that could happen for Trump and strangely enough for the American people is for this bill to crash and burn forever and for Trump to walk away from it. The GOP whined for seven years that they were going to repeal and replace but no one in that sleazy body ever bothered to do the work required for the replace part. So seven years after they started whining about it, with a chance to finally do something about it, they come up with squat. Trump’s only chance at success for any of his other initiatives is to dump Ryan and his plan and move on to tax and regulation reform or even to the dreaded infrastructure that he has promised but that the GOP so fears.
It was a mistake for Trump to start with this. His ego made that mistake and we can only hope that he can contain his ego on the next move and let what there is of the big head control the little head. Yes, this column despises Trump, thinks that he is a disaster as a President for any number of a hundred different reasons, most of which have to do with the man rather than any policy but this blog also realizes the need for him to succeed if this country that we all love, is to succeed.
The Freedom Caucus, the Republican’s new version of the Tea Party promised for seven years to get rid of the plan named after a black President but their problem has always been that they don’t want any kind of healthcare. Just look at the items that the Freedom Caucus wanted to cut from the current healthcare system and tell me that what’s left has anything to do with healthcare:
Ambulatory patient services
Emergency Services
Hospitalization
Maternity and Newborn care
Mental Health & Substance Abuse
Prescription Drugs
Rehabilitative Services
Laboratory Services
Preventive and Wellness Services
Pediatric Services
Another words- they want t cut healthcare! They really don’t want to provide healthcare to those that need it.
With the death of Ryan’s healthcare bill it’s now up to someone to pull the widely spaced sides together. Charley Dent, ® PA seems to have the right idea. He understands that there is a lot of good in Obamacare and a lot that must be changed if it is ultimately to be successful. The Republicans refused to admit that the bill was just too bad and didn’t do what a healthcare bill must do. On top of that the GOP was so hyped on what a great closer Trump was that they overlooked the fact that the bill was a stinkeroo and were shocked when Trump couldn’t close it. I’m sure no one was as shocked as Trump because he thinks he’s omnipotent.
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And lest you imagine that this blog’s attacks on Donald Trump are going too far, just savor this fact for a second. The President of the United States and his advisors are under formal investigation by the FBI for collusion with a foreign government to fix our election, the election in which said President was elected to his current office. This is not conjecture. This is fact, testified to by James Comey, Director of the FBI, in an open hearing during the current Congressional hearings into the same subject. If this investigation comes to the conclusion that Trump was involved in these allegations he will be tried and possibly convicted of treason. The same is true for any of his associates. It is because of this unfortunate and involving circumstance that nothing that Trump does in office until this is cleared up will be valid and nothing can be allowed to progress. Why do I say that? Because any action Trump takes will, in the event he is guilty, be an obvious attempt to undermine the structure of the United States government and will immediately be invalid.
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Now that Trump has blown the healthcare bill, the pundits are all talking about how he has to get on to tax reform, the wall and infrastructure but how the hell is he going to do that? What he is facing is complete disagreement on financing, the basis of all national problems. The conservatives don’t want to spend it. They want to lower taxes but that means that there is no money to do any of the other things. You can’t build a multi-billion dollar wall if you have no money and you can’t fix roads, schools, the grid or anything else if you have no money. So where do you get the money? Trump wants to steal if from everything but the military just to give the Pentagon, our most wasteful institution a raise, but that doesn’t leave anything to spend on the wall or infrastructure – unless we raise taxes on everyone, but principally on the rich and the Republican Party has historically been against taxing the rich for anything.
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Scott Pruitt was on This Week lying about how the President is going to create new jobs in the coal industry. He also lies about where we are in our CO2 ratings. He says it’s about innovation in methodology when it’s actually about the fact that coal and oil are being phased out by the world and being replaced by clean renewable energy
Pruitt is just an apologist for a Trump led fossil fuel dominated crusade to make more money for rich oil companies and poison the air for the rest of us. Of all Trumps’ cabinet appointments, Pruitt is perhaps the most destructive and the most cynical. This disease in human form wants to kill you and your children so the already rich oil moguls can have even more of what they already have too much.
Pruitt keeps banging on the lie that this administration wants to provide jobs by keeping coal and oil as our energy sources. It’s a lie because alternative renewable energy provides a multiple of ten times the jobs that fossil fuel does. That has already been proven all across the world. So if jobs are the goal we should cut out all coal and oil production immediately and spend all our capital on wind, solar and fission.
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Trump just can’t keep from being an asshole. He loses the healthcare bill and goes out and blames everybody but himself. He sold himself to his dumb voters as the great negotiator but he couldn’t even negotiate a bill through his own party. Yes, these were the bums who were on his side, his own party, and still he couldn’t get them to agree. Then because he failed so miserably he went on the tube and blamed the Democrats. He is so out of touch with reality as to be in another dimension.
Then he sends out Mick Mulvaney who is almost as brain dead as he is himself. Mulvaney keeps telling us that the Democrats will get blamed for this failure. No Mick. You and Trump and the rest of the GOP will get blamed for the failure because you earned it. He tells us that the system is built for failure when all it would take to fix it is a little co-operation from those now in power. But those in power weren’t satisfied to have a system that helped the people get good healthcare. They wanted to save money for the rich and get even with Obama at the same time. Why? It is beyond understanding how they could be as stupid and obtuse as they have shown. Now Mulvaney and Trump tell us that they are moving on to tax reform. Good luck with that.
Tax reform to the Republicans means tax cuts for the rich. That’s as deep as they can think. That’s why tax reform will fail just as repeal and replace failed.
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Joy Reid laid out on Meet the Press, the three reasons why the healthcare bill failed for the GOP and Trump and she hits it right on the nose. She explains first that the Republicans put nothing into their effort. Obama and the Dems put eighteen months into crafting a bill, selling it first to the Democrats and then to whoever would listen. Then they put their careers on the line for it. They ended up losing 63 seats in the house as a final result but they passed the bill and gave America health care. They had a real reason for these sacrifices, a reason in which they believed.
The Republicans put all of 17 legislative days into their attempt to do what Obama did in eighteen months. On top of that hey weren’t all in. They certainly didn’t want to take a chance at losing their seats because that’s how they collect their graft, so it was screw the public. The GOP never gave a twit about the bill. All they really wanted was to get rid of Obama’s main accomplishment. If anything else had been true they would have constructed a law that made sense, which this one never did. This law didn’t create a better healthcare. It just took away the one we had.
The second part of Reid’s premise wa that the Republican’s have spent the last 34 years trying to erase their image as heartless vultures that eat the flesh of their constituents. They are known to be mean spirited toward the poor, callous to the elderly and racist to everyone else. All this time they have been hoping to change that image with “Compassionate Conservatism.” That ill-conceived concept was killed by this bill, which is as nasty and cruel as anything ever thought up by Herman Goring or Uday Saddam. The perimeters of this horrible piece of vampirism showed the Republicans up to be as evil and degenerate as humanly possible. They exhibit the soul of Pol Pot.
And the third part of why this bill failed and why it is so reprehensible is; it was really nothing but an attempt to jam through a giant tax cut for the already rich. Worse, it was a shot at doing that at the expense of the poor. Only “scumbags” would do something like that and so the GOP has gloriously reidentified itself.