Tag Archives: America

In Case You’re One of Those Citizens Who Want to Keep Track

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Amy Siskind, a former Wall Street executive, is documenting the odd and troubling things happening in Washington. She publishes a summary every week. Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote about her efforts:

[In November] Siskind began keeping what she calls the Weekly List, tracking all the ways in which she saw America’s taken-for-granted governmental norms changing in the [DT] era.

The project started small, read by friends and with only a few items a week.

By Week 9, though, the list had gone viral.

“It blew up — I had 2 million views that week,” she said. “People were responding like crazy, saying things like, ‘I’m praying for you.’ ”

As time went on, the list grew much longer and more sophisticated. Here are three of her 85 items from mid-June:

●“Monday, in a bizarre display in front of cameras, Trump’s cabinet members took turns praising him.”

●“AP reported that a company that partners with both Trump and (son-in-law) Jared Kushner is a finalist for a $1.7bn contract to build the new FBI building.

●Vice President Pence hired a big-name “lawyer with Watergate experience to represent him in the Russian probe.”

Now, in Week 32, every item has a source link, and rather than just a few items, there are dozens. (Her weekly audience usually hits hundreds of thousands, she said, on platforms including Medium, Facebook and Twitter.)

The idea, she said, came from her post-election reading about how authoritarian governments take hold — often with incremental changes that seem shocking at first but quickly become normalized. Each post begins with: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember”…

“It’s scary to look back on the early weeks and see what we’ve already gotten used to,” she said. Examples: a secretary of state who rarely speaks publicly, the failure to fill important positions in many agencies, a president who often eschews intelligence briefings in favor of “Fox & Friends.”

“We forget all the things we should be outraged about,” Siskind said.

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor and author of the PressThink blog, called Siskind’s efforts “a service that is thoroughly journalistic and much needed.”

The lists “help people experience the history that is being made and keeps them alive and alert to the dangers of eroding norms,” Rosen said.

In their user-friendly format, he said, they are “one way of dealing with an overload of significant news, a surplus of eventfulness that allows things to hide in plain sight simply because there are too many of them to care about”…

She posts the list on Saturday on Facebook and Twitter, and Sunday on Medium after working on it for 15 or 20 hours a week.

In a similar vein, The New York Times published a piece this weekend called “Trump’s Lies”:

Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office….

There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president — of either party — has behaved as Trump is behaving….

We have set a conservative standard here, leaving out many dubious statements … [but] we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.

We are using the word “lie” deliberately. Not every falsehood is deliberate on Trump’s part. But it would be the height of naĂŻvetĂ© to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying.

The list begins on January 21st (“I didn’t want to go into Iraq”) and ends on June 21st (“We’re one of the highest taxed nations in the world”). You won’t be surprised to see it’s a long list. If they provide the number of lies, I missed it.

The Times is actually late to this effort. Just as he did during the campaign, Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star is keeping a running list of false things DT says. The list was last updated on June 22nd. It was a big day because DT had a campaign rally in Iowa the night before (isn’t it strange that the President is holding campaign rallies when the next Presidential election is more than three years away? I bet Amy Siskind has mentioned this.)

The Star‘s list has 330 unique entries so far. There’s also a handy search mechanism that allows you to sort his false statements by topic. 

Dale also covered DT’s rally on Wednesday night (“It was just like old times”):

[DT] insulted Hillary Clinton. He insulted Chicago. He attributed a sensational claim to an unnamed buddy of his.

He floated a confusing proposal, promising to change welfare law to something that sounds identical to current welfare law. He executed a dizzying shift in rhetoric, applauding himself for appointing a former Goldman Sachs executive after railing against Goldman Sachs. And he revealed an unbaked plan — to turn his hypothetical giant wall on the Mexican border into a power-generating “solar wall” that would reduce the hypothetical reimbursement bill he still insists he will be sending to Mexico.

More than anything, though, he made things up.

By the way, members of DT’s adminstration and a few Republican politicians are trying to defend the Senate’s healthcare bill. They’re using the only available method: lying about it.

What People Need to Know About Medicaid

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Please share this 20-minute video, even with Americans who hate politics. It might reach people in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, Ohio or West Virginia who will call their relatively sane Republican Senators and demand that they vote No on the Better Healthcare Reconciliation Act, also known as the Senate healthcare bill or Trumpcare. We need to stop this abomination now.

Bad News, Good News, No News

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I was going to write more about consciousness, in particular about dreaming, but Senate Republicans finally let the rest of us see the healthcare bill they plan to vote on next week. Unless three of them vote No, it will almost certainly be approved by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. It will then be signed into law by the con man in the White House.

The bill would reduce government spending on health insurance by billions of dollars, which would lead to a harder life or a quicker death for millions of Americans. Most importantly its authors, however, the bill would give a big tax cut to the wealthiest 2% of the population and to favored corporations. Basically, the government will make health insurance more expensive or hard to get for lots of us in order for a few of us to be richer than they already are. You really need to be a Republican to appreciate the beauty of it.

Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat of Connecticut), who seems to be a nice, reasonable person, gives a helpful overview of the Senate bill in this brief video.

In other bad news: 

Except it’s not really news at all. It’s a blog post from Heather Digby Parton (“Digby”) entitled “Why Are They Doing This? Because They Can, or: How To Get Away With Murder”. It summarizes the present crisis and begins with a quote from another writer:

Jamelle Bouie answers the question as to why the Republicans are going forward with their Kill People for Tax Cuts bill [the AHCA] despite the fact that it’s the most unpopular piece of legislation in history:

“The 2018 House map still favors Republicans, and the party is defending far fewer Senate seats than Democrats. Aggressively gerrymandered districts provide another layer of defense, as does voter suppression, and the avalanche of spending from outside groups. Americans might be hurt and outraged by the effects of the AHCA, but those barriers blunt the electoral impact.”

“The grounds for political combat seem to have changed as well. If recent special elections are any indication—where GOP candidates refused to comment on signature GOP policies—extreme polarization means Republicans can mobilize supporters without being forced to talk about or account for their actual actions. Identity, for many voters, matters more than their pocketbooks. Republicans simply need to signal their disdain—even hatred—for their opponents, political or otherwise. Why worry about the consequences of your policies when you can preclude defeat by changing the ground rules of elections, spending vast sums, and stoking cultural resentment?”

“It seems, then, that we have an answer for why Republicans insist on moving forward with the American Health Care Act. Because they can. And who is going to stop them?”

[Now back to Digby:]

It appears they also have a foreign country helping them get elected, for which they seem to be very grateful.

They don’t fear the voters because they have managed to create an alternate universe for them in which everything bad that happens to them is the fault of hippies, feminazis, immigrants and people of color and everything good that happens is because of them. When liberals scream they laugh with delight because it means we are seeing justice at their hands.

And they’ve successfully created an electoral system than keeps them in the majority through undemocratic means. It’s a sweet scam. No wonder they are so confident. They have staged a silent coup and we just have to live with it.

Digby was probably having a pessimistic moment there at the end, because we don’t just have to live with it. What we need to do is pay attention, speak up and vote. But that will take time.

Now the good news. Senator Dean Heller (Republican of Nevada) came out pretty strongly against the bill today. He’s very worried about losing his job next year. That partly explains this:

“I cannot support a piece of legislation that takes insurance away from tens of millions of Americans and tens of thousands of Nevadans,” Heller said….[To win his vote] GOP leaders would have to “protect Medicaid expansion states” from the bill’s current cuts.

“It’s going to be very difficult to get me to a yes,” he said, noting that conservative [i.e. truly radical] Republican senators would likely be reluctant to add spending back to the measure.

Another Republican Senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, thinks the bill isn’t as cruel or “libertarian” as it could be, so he might vote against it. That would mean we’d only need one more Republican to jump ship in order to sink it.

Which might be what the Senate Majority Leader, odious Senator Mitch McConnell (also of Kentucky), is expecting to happen, according to an interesting column by Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post. It’s called “Cheer Up, Democrats!”. Although McConnell is a terrible person, Rubin points out that he isn’t stupid. He understands that hardly anyone likes his bill. He also probably understands that there is no easy way to repeal the Affordable Care Act, despite what the Republicans have been telling their deluded supporters all these years.

So McConnell may be trying to get health care off his plate as quickly as possible, even if the vote doesn’t go his way. That will allow him and his co-conspirators to get back to what they really want to do: cut taxes, kill regulations, put poor people in jail and destroy what’s left of our democracy. (That last part is no news.) 

What Should They Do About Him?

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Thirteen Republican Senators, all white men, have been meeting in secret to write a healthcare bill that would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with serious tax cuts for the rich. The thirteen are led by the odious Senate Majority Leader, the conscience-free Senator from Kentucky, who masterminded the successful theft of Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court. That means they’ll probably produce something 50 Senators will vote for. That’s all they’ll need to pass the bill, because the dimwitted religious fanatic who is Vice President will almost certainly break a 50-50 tie in evil’s favor.

The Senate Majority Leader announced a few minutes ago that a “discussion draft” of the bill will probably be made public this week. He wants to bring the bill to a vote in the full Senate a few days after that, before public outrage scares the pants or dresses off any of his colleagues. There are a few Republican Senators who might vote against the bill once they know what’s in it, but that will only happen if they’re afraid of losing their jobs, which won’t be the case unless voters in their states make a lot of noise. These are the Republican Senators who might be open to influence and weren’t invited to join the Gang of 13:

Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Jeff Flake (Arizona)
Dean Heller (Nevada)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)

These three might see reason but they were included in the Gang, so it’s unlikely:

Cory Gardner (Colorado)
Rob Portman (Ohio)
Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania)

I’d include the “maverick” Senator John McCain of Arizona in the first list but he only talks a big game and may be too senile to know what he’s voting for.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I really wanted to write about. Michael Gerson is a member of what would ordinarily be called the “Republican “Establishment. He used to work for the second President Bush and now writes for a living. Yesterday in The Washington Post, he wrote about how Republicans might put an end to Trumpism. First, he reviews the situation:

Trump has been ruled by compulsions, obsessions and vindictiveness, expressed nearly daily on Twitter. He has demonstrated an egotism that borders on solipsism. His political skills as president have been close to nonexistent. His White House is divided, incompetent and chaotic, and key administration jobs remain unfilled. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere. He has told constant, childish, refuted, uncorrected lies, and demanded and habituated deception among his underlings. He has humiliated and undercut his staff while requiring and rewarding flattery. He has promoted self-serving conspiracy theories. He has displayed pathetic, even frightening, ignorance on policy matters foreign and domestic. He has inflicted his ethically challenged associates on the nation. He is dead to the poetry of language and to the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service.

Trump has made consistent appeals to prejudice based on religion and ethnicity, and associated the Republican Party with bias. He has stoked tribal hostilities. He has carelessly fractured our national unity. He has attempted to undermine respect for any institution that opposes or limits him — be it the responsible press, the courts or the intelligence community. He has invited criminal investigation through his secrecy and carelessness. He has publicly attempted to intimidate law enforcement. He has systematically alarmed our allies and given comfort to authoritarians. He promised to emancipate the world from American moral leadership — and has kept that pledge.

For many Republicans and conservatives, there is apparently no last straw, with offenses mounting bale by bale. The argument goes: Trump is still superior to Democratic rule — which would deliver apocalyptic harm — and thus anything that hurts Trump is bad for the republic. He is the general, so shut up and salute. What, after all, is the conservative endgame other than Trump’s success?

This is the recommendation of sycophancy based on hysteria. At some point, hope for a new and improved Trump deteriorates into unreason. The idea that an alliance with Trump will end anywhere but disaster is a delusion. Both individuals and parties have long-term interests that are served by integrity, honor and sanity. Both individuals and the Republican Party are being corrupted and stained by their embrace of Trump. The endgame of accommodation is to be morally and politically discredited. Those committed to this approach warn of national decline — and are practically assisting it. They warn of decadence — and provide refreshments at the orgy.

So what is the proper objective for Republicans and conservatives? It is the defeat of Trumpism, preferably without the destruction of the GOP itself. And how does that happen?

That was quite a buildup. So what options does Gerson consider? Only to immediately reject each one of them?

  1. Create a conservative third party – a “bad idea”
  2. Challenge DT in the 2020 primary elections – “unlikely”
  3. If Democrats win the House in 2018, join the effort to impeach him – “theoretical”
  4. Help elect a Democrat in 2020 – “heretical”
  5. Wait for 2024 and hope for the best – “complacent”.

Gerson’s conclusion:

Whatever option is chosen, it will not be easy or pretty. And any comfort for Republicans will be cold because they brought this fate on themselves and the country.

That’s not very encouraging. Nevertheless, there are a few options that didn’t make his list:

  • Impeach the dangerous ignoramus right now
  • Invoke the 25th Amendment and put him in a home
  • Admit in public that he’s totally unfit to be President
  • Put country over party and resist him every step of the way.

I offer this list on the assumption that Mr. Gerson and other patriotic Republicans lack imagination and simply didn’t think of them.

“An Act of Both Unconscionable Heartlessness and Epic Cowardice”

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From Greg Sargent, “How the Republican Coward Caucus Is About to Sell Out Its Own Constituents — In Secret” (The Washington Post):

The fate of the American health care system now rests with a group of allegedly “moderate” senators, who are getting ready to approve a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.

“We aren’t stupid,” one GOP Senate aide told Caitlin Owens — they know what would happen if they made their bill public. Even Republican senators who aren’t part of the 13-member working group crafting the bill haven’t been told exactly what’s in it.

Today, we learned that in a break with longstanding precedent, “Senate officials are cracking down on media access, informing reporters on Tuesday that they will no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission.” Everyone assumes that it’s so those senators can avoid having to appear on camera being asked uncomfortable questions about a bill that is as likely to be as popular as Ebola….

This is how a party acts when it is ashamed of what it is about to do to the American people. Yet all it would take to stop this abomination is for three Republicans to stand up to their party’s leaders and say, “No — I won’t do this to my constituents.” With only a 52-48 majority in the Senate, that would kill the bill. But right now, it’s looking as though this Coward Caucus is going to be unable to muster the necessary courage.

To understand the magnitude of what they’re doing, let’s focus on Medicaid, because it was supposed to be a sticking point on which some senators wouldn’t budge, particularly those whose states accepted the ACA’s expansion of the program. But according to various reports, the moderates have already caved….

Last week The Hill reported that [Sen. Capito of West Virginia] now supports eliminating the expansion after all — just doing it over seven years instead of the three years that the House bill required. The Charleston Gazette-Mail in Capito’s home state noted that Capito had said she didn’t want to drop all those West Virginians off a cliff, but “Instead, she would drop them off a cliff on the installment plan — around 25,000 per year for seven years.”

Or how about Ohio’s Rob Portman? In his state, 700,000 people gained insurance as a result of the Medicaid expansion. He drafted a letter to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stating his opposition to the House bill because it didn’t protect those who gained insurance from the expansion. Now Portman also wants to phase out the expansion over seven years….

It’s important to know that the Medicaid question isn’t just about the millions who would lose coverage if the expansion is eliminated. Paige Winfield Cunningham reports today that Senate Republicans are considering even deeper cuts to Medicaid than the $880 billion the House bill slashed out of the program. They’d pay for the slower elimination of the expansion by cutting money out of the existing program, so they could get rid of all of the ACA’s tax increases — which mostly affected the wealthy. In other words, they want to cut Medicaid to give a tax break to rich people.

Just as critical, they want to end Medicaid’s status as an entitlement, meaning that the program wouldn’t cover everyone who’s eligible. States would get a chunk of money to spend, and if more people turned out to need coverage, tough luck for them. The states would be offered “flexibility,” which in practice would mean permission to kick people off the program and cut back on benefits. And don’t think this is just about poor people — over half of Medicaid dollars go to the elderly and disabled. That means that they aren’t just undoing the ACA; they’re making things substantially worse for tens of millions of America’s most vulnerable citizens than they were even before the ACA passed.

And they’re hoping they can do all this before anyone realizes what they’re up to, making this an act of both unconscionable heartlessness and epic cowardice. Their efforts to hide what they’re doing show that they are still capable of feeling some measure of shame. But it might not be enough to stop them.

All is not necessarily lost, since making it easier for relatively evil Republicans to vote Yes on the bill should make it harder for purely evil Republicans to vote Yes. So maybe the bill won’t make it out of the Senate. 

Assuming, however, that it passes the Senate, the bill will go to a conference with the House Republicans. Since the average House Republican is even more evil than the average Senate Republican, the bill could run into trouble in the conference. If the members of the conference can’t agree on the final language of the bill, it will die there. But it’s more likely that a final version of the bill will be sent back to the House and Senate for a vote.

That’s when all the Representatives and Senators (even the Democrats!) will get a chance to have their say on the bill. Assuming logic and morality don’t win the day, and simple majorities pass the bill in both houses, it will go to the President. If that sleazeball cares what’s in the bill, he’ll veto it, since it won’t be anything like the health care bill he promised. But we know how much we can count on him.

Even though we don’t know what will be in the final product (assuming there is one), it isn’t too soon to tell our members of Congress what we think of this monstrosity. There is no point in complaining to House Democrats, of course, since they have zero influence. But Senate Democrats can be encouraged to slow the process in the Senate as much as possible. As for Republican members of Congress, they deserve to be reminded that fewer than 20% of Americans approve of the Republican proposal (based on the last time they got a look at it) and there’s an election in 2018.