Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Enough Said

When Democrats win - everything is awesome!
When Republicans win - everything sucks!


10 comments:

KD said...

Dow zooms over 1,000 points since Trump victory "

Wealth creation is back in style.

opie said...

Great post CH. A very intellectual study of your bias and how low you have sunk. Oh well, cue a snarky comment. LOL

Commonsense said...

I don't think the liberal children will ever get over this DEVASTATING loss.

Indy Voter said...

A no-brainer.

opie said...

A no-brainer.

Just like most of the R's here.

Honest, decent, truthful Rev. said...

Why the Republican Health Care Plan is Likely to Fail

The replacement for the ACA is still under discussion, but the plans being developed by the soon-to-be Secretary of HHS, Tom Price, and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), have many elements in common. They also have elements in common with the plan actually implemented in Rhode Island.

In an article for Politico, the author of the Rhode Island plan, the state's former health insurance commissioner Christopher Koller, explains the plan and WHY IT FAILED.

There was a high-risk pool with limited enrollment times (so people could not enroll when they got sick and leave when they got better), a spread of three-to-one on premiums between younger and older enrollees, subsidies for low-income people, health savings accounts, and a requirement for the insurance companies that they had to accept anyone who applied. There was no mandate to buy insurance.

This is the core of the Price and Ryan plans, even if they differ on some of the details.

What happened? Young, healthy people didn't buy insurance and insurance companies were stuck with older, sicker customers. Consequently, most of them stopped offering insurance and simply left the state.

Koller's conclusion is that voluntary insurance doesn't work, especially when people know that hospital emergency rooms are not permitted to turn away sick people and just have them die on the street.

The Republican plans could deal with that by repealing the federal law requiring hospitals to provide free emergency care to people who can't afford it, but there would be a political cost to that.

So, Koller's conclusion is that the plan the Republicans are likely to (eventually) install as the replacement to the ACA will ultimately fail. (Tannenbaum)

Honest, decent, truthful Rev. said...

Donald Trump, Bully-in-Chief

The presidency comes with enormous powers of many types, both official and unofficial. Restraint is thus called for—or, at least, it has been for the last 228 years.

Donald Trump, who continues to demonstrate a thin skin and a lack of impulse control, has been upending that tradition. That has been particularly evident this week, as he took aim at anyone whom he perceives to be an enemy.

For example, the CEO of Boeing presumed to comment for an article critical of The Donald and his approach to China. Trump promptly responded by tweeting a misleading claim that Boeing was going to be fleecing the federal government to the tune of $4 billion for the next Air Force One. Boeing's stock took a temporary hit, and now they have announced they will be donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration.

Similarly, United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones criticized Trump for saving less than 1,000 jobs at Carrier when the President-elect's original promise was that he would save 1,400.

Trump fired back at Jones on Twitter, declaring that "Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!" Reportedly, Jones has received multiple death threats from Trump supporters.

As former labor secretary Robert Reich observes in a CNN editorial entitled "Has Trump no decency?", this is not only an unprecedented use of presidential power, it is also a dangerous one.

Yes, presidents all have their enemies, and yes, they all play the chess game of politics. But never has a president or president-elect presumed to engage so brazenly in this kind of score-settling. That is the stuff of third-world dictators and banana republics. And the problem is that there's no reason to think this behavior will abate.

Trump promises to stay off of Twitter, and to behave more presidentially, and then it goes out the window two days later.

The people who surround Trump—chosen, remember, primarily on the basis of loyalty—can't rein him in, and largely don't even try. And what he is doing is not illegal, at least not so far, so there won't be any judicial interventions.

We can only hope that being inaugurated flips a "now it's for real" switch of some sort, but it's hard to be optimistic about that possibility.
(Bates)
____________
Welcome to Trump's Brave New World.

Honest, decent, truthful Rev. said...

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2016/Pres/Maps/Dec09.html#item-7

He'll keep one of his day jobs.

Honest, decent, truthful Rev. said...

Trump Got Time's Man (Person)of the Year.

So did Hitler once.

But only Trump got two red horns sticking up out of his head.

Honest, decent, truthful Rev. said...

Obama Orders Report on Russian Hacking

President Obama has ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the November election, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to interfere in the electoral process, the Washington Post reports.

Said homeland-security adviser Lisa Monaco: “We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned.”

Obama wants the report before he leaves office on January 20.
__________

Will we discover that Putin won the election?