[Almost] Back to Business As Usual in the GOP/Fox Universe

After yesterday's Twitter misstep by the current resident of the White House, he was attacked from both sides of the aisle for reverting to his true bullying misogynistic personality (with a healthy dollop of his professionally-unexamined female blood obsession). Among the Republicans who attacked the anti-Mika Brzezinski tweets was Ben Sasse of Nebraska who responded, "Please just stop. This isn't normal and it's beneath the dignity of your office."

This morning Senator Sasse was on Donald Trump's favorite show Fox and Friends and called for a change in strategy to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

A few minutes later, the president (whose own understanding of the mechanics of drafting and passing laws is less than rudimentary) tweeted this:

Looking at the time stamps on those tweets, it looks as though the official presidential statement in tweet form might have come before the Fox broadcast, but a CNN reporter retweeted by Sasse confirms the original sequence:

The sequence, however, is actually immaterial. The real point is that the GOP White House, the GOP Senate, and the GOP television network are all getting back on the same page and are rededicating themselves to working hard to achieve job one, removing health insurance from the poor and middle class in order to give large tax cuts to the very rich. Hooray! The world is back to normal!



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HOLD THE PRESSES! While I was writing this, it seems that a certain television addict in the White House switched the channel from Fox News to MSNBC, and got his tweeting back on track.

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

Trump Tweet Translator:
"#PresidentBannon needs to give me more things to do. It's not good for me to have too much time to watch TV. Sad." https://t.co/np3XL8Wlt0

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) June 30, 2017

How the GOP TrumpCare Bill Would Affect Me

There's nothing dramatic to my story, but since the Republican attempt to "repeal & replace" the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect every American if it passes, we should probably all share our stories.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm not quite as lucky as those the GOP health care bills are written for, those who earn over $250,000 a year who will get tax cuts if the Senate version of "WealthCare" passes. But still, I'm one of the lucky ones. I've never been seriously sick as an adult and I have consistently had health insurance from an employer since 1978. I'm less than four years away from becoming eligible for Medicare, but I may not make it that far in an industry and a corporation that are both undergoing regular job reductions. I've also thought about retiring voluntarily before my 65th birthday, but the only thing that keeps me from doing so is health insurance. Even though I have been a very light user of my health insurance (I've made it through the past forty years with one broken arm, a few stitches, and two 'annual' physicals), I don't feel I could let myself go uninsured. I wouldn't like paying for a private health plan under the ACA to close the gap before Medicare, but I could afford to do so. If I lose my job and the Senate version of TrumpCare (the Orwellian-sounding "Better Care Reconciliation Act") passes, my annual premium would rise from $6,800/year under the ACA to over $20,000/year to give tax breaks to millionaires. At that price, I probably would go without insurance until Medicare kicks in and hope for my health luck to hold out (even though I know that I'd have the first serious illness of my life as soon as I became uninsured). That, in a nutshell, is my undramatic story.

But this isn't a collection of individual stories; it's a national tragedy. Unfortunately, for many Americans it's a devastating story of life and death. For many others its a harrowing matter of personal bankruptcy caused by a single unforeseen accident or illness (an exceptionally American problem). For others, it's a common American story of feeling chained for life to a boring corporate job one hates when one would rather be taking a chance being a writer or artist or freelance plumber or food-truck entrepreneur, all because of our health insurance trap. Why can't the party that claims to love FREEDOM! more than any other value see that a modern (c.1948) government-run single-payer health plan would free companies large and small from acting as insurance agents and free the rest of us from our greatest financial uncertainty and from our dead-end bullshit jobs, freeing us to be more fully ourselves and worrying less about piling up money for that inevitable rainy day? I would have gladly gotten out of the way and given my desk to a young go-getter by now if we had a National Health Service, but US corporations are full of burnt-out pieces of dead wood hanging on for our Aetna or Cigna cards, hoping we never have to use them.

Even though Mitch McConnell had a setback today, keep contacting your Senators and Representatives and tell YOUR story, which is probably more compelling than mine. Let them know that Obamacare isn't perfect but it has insured millions more and greatly reduced medical bankruptcies; TrumpCare in both its House and Senate versions would increase the number of uninsured, increase the number of medical bankruptcies, reinstate lifetime coverage caps, etc. We should always be moving toward universal coverage, not further away.

This could be the most effective healthcare speech in the current Trumpcare 2.0 debate

Normally I'm not a fan of the American television and celebrity culture that has given us our current resident of the White House, but maybe that culture is also the best weapon to help bring him down too, or at least help neutralize his power to take away health insurance from those who finally gained it under President Obama.



Although if I ever watched late night television, it might be hard to decide between Kimmel and Colbert.

Today's True Blue Liberal Poll on Trumpcare

The House Republicans have finally announced their specifics for replacing The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with The American Health Care Act (Trumpcare). Supporters of Obamacare are appalled at the number of people who will lose coverage and at the way it targets women and older Americans for special mistreatment. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is appalled that Trumpcare is leaving even a few tattered remnants of Obamacare's patient protections; they are calling for a straight repeal of the ACA and a return to the status quo ante a black man in the White House.

Which leads to today's Twitter poll:

Here's a simple poll to determine whether you are a liberal or a conservative.

I believe that replacing the #ACA with #TrumpCare will...

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) March 8, 2017

The Donald Trump Show Continues on CNN Tonight (this time with sidekicks)

The Fairness Doctrine may no longer be law, and the Republican Party has made a point of opposing it, but, simply to be fair to the other fifteen Republican Presidential candidates who are not on CNN 24 hours a day, Donald J. Trump should not be allowed to speak at tonight's CNN Debate at Saint Ronald Reagan of Tampico's Holy Library (and decommissioned Air Force One hangar).

I don't think I'm overstating it too much to say that CNN has become The Donald Trump Network in the past couple of months. I have not flipped over to that section of the dial in weeks without either seeing a live Trump speech, analysis of his latest inflammatory remark, or phone interview with the man himself.

So, I flip to #CNN for a second and look who's doing his Il Duce impression during yet another live speech... pic.twitter.com/rQ9bBI8OAC

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 15, 2015

It was all well and good to joke about GOP debates as clown circuses in 2008, 2012, and earlier in 2016, but now that the chief clown is driving the Republican bus, it seems a little more serious, and dangerous, than that. And with the Fairness Doctrine dead in spirit as well as law, the candidate standing in the middle of the stage tonight will continue to be the center of attention. I expect more questions about the horse race, and what the other candidates think about Donald Trump, than about today's good Obamacare news, or about the death penalty on a day when Oklahoma may be executing an innocent man.
Issues?
If CNN wanted to talk about issues, they'd be showing Bernie Sanders' speeches.

Close Down the GOP! (their website is buggy)

On a whim, or out of an excess of masochism, I made my way over to GOP.com this afternoon and started clicking on random annoying pages and links.  When I "decided to contribute" and pressed the appropriate virtual button, I got stuck on the following blank screen with its frozen progress bar:

GOP.com on Internet Explorer, 25 October 2013

Based on the logic that they've applied to the growing pains of Healthcare.gov in its first month of operation, their political party needs to be shut down until they can get this fixed. At the very least, based on their party chairman's logic about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the GOP needs to fire Reince Priebus.

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In the interest of fairness, I should point out that the frozen screen up above that appeared in two tries with Internet Explorer was solved with a quick switch to Google Chrome where I was able to "donate" to the party of the rich and their dupes. But these complex interactions between browsers, operating systems, etc., are indicative of some of the growing pains the Obamacare site  is experiencing too. They will be fixed.

The Other Big News Of the Month: Banksy in New York

"All pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside."
-Paul Cezanne

Throughout this month of government shutdown and Obamacare's rollout, the city of New York is being treated to one new work by Banksy every day.  You can check on all the works presented around the city on Banksy's "Better Out Than In" website every day. Most, as would be expected, are static additions to walls and doors, but here's a video of today's rolling three-dimensional addition to the cityscape, "Sirens of the Lambs":


Brilliant. And thank god it's out on the streets and not stuck in one of the national museums that's been shuttered by the Tea Party since October 1.

As a bonus, here's another piece, from October 6, that appeared only as a video:

The Strategy of Distraction

Here's the media strategy of the RNC and the Tea Partiers regarding the government shutdown summarized in one twitterer's recent photos. Among many tweets of mine about the government shutdown over the last few days, I posted this one this morning:

Typical Fox News Viewer's View of #GOPshutdown:"Why did Obama and Reid go out of their way to shut down wheelchair ramps at WWII memorial!?"
— TrueBlue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) October 4, 2013

I received this (surprisingly free of grammatical and orthographical errors) response a moment later:

@TrueBlueLiberal why did Obama #shutdown WWII memorial which was open 24/7 before, but now he closes it? Take your rose colored glasses off
— Truth Teller (@LiberalLies2012) October 4, 2013

I went to this tweeter's page and found the following recent pictures:

The photo from October 3 shows the "Barrycade" and "Harrycade" representing the closing of the WWII Memorial, but the photos from September 30 say "SHUT 'ER DOWN! WE DON'T obama CARE!" and the other photos from late September show the thoughtful young 1950's white man in a conservative suit wondering "If there is a government shutdown who will spy on me, waste my money, and have contempt for me?"  If these pictures could speak a thousand words (and, of course, they do) they would tell us all about cognitive dissonance and the typical and predictable right-wing media response that focuses on weapons of mass distraction rather than core issues.  It was in full display last March when the only sequestration cut complained about on the right was Obama's Heartless and Personal Shutdown Of White House Tours Just To Punish The Children (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!). Now, of course, as one troll pointed out to me earlier this week,  President Obama and the Democrats are Nazis because they hate WWII vets.

It's not just one random twitterer with 29 followers playing up this single-note response to the current shutdown. Michele Bachmann has made multiple grandstanding photo-ops to the Memorial just down the Mall from the Capitol. Rand Paul has managed to combine GOP distractions in one sentence by saying they sent more security guards to the WWII Memorial than to Benghazi. The shutdown's poster boy Rafael Edward "Calgary Ted" Cruz released an official statement about Obamacare causing the Memorial's shutdown. And to prove that this distraction is an official party policy, Chairman of the RNC Reince Preibus (if that is a real name) has offered to have the party pay for five security guards to keep the Memorial open. Is the Republican National Committee willing to pay for scabs to keep all the other departments of the government working as well?

Finally, here's a video of one of the parade of GOP Congressional Grandstanding Photo Opportunists, Robert Randolph "Randy Robby" Neugebauer (R-TX) at the WWII Memorial berating a young Park Ranger for doing her job:

You can tell a lot about a person by the way he treats those he feels are "below" him. Not even the giant American flag in his breast pocket excuses his behavior.

Coming Up Next From the RNC/FOX Media Machine: Blaming Obama and Reid for the earthquake that closed the Washington Monument.

A Glimpse Inside the Right-Wing Echo Chamber

Here are the results as of 9:30 this morning of an extremely unscientific (think Creationism unscientific) NewsMax ("Independent. American.") poll about the current government shutdown engineered by Ted Cruz, the Heritage Foundation, and the Teabagger Caucus in the House.

If you have trouble reading the small type in the screen grab, the first question is "Should Congress risk a government shutdown in order to defund Obamacare?" and 63% say "Yes, cut all funding."

The second question is "Do you support a one-year delay for the 'individual mandate' in Obamacare?" and 47% say the ACA should be repealed totally and another 20% say the mandate should be delayed.

Finally, the third question asks the self-selected respondents who they would "hold most responsible" for the shutdown and 52% blame President Obama, 33% the Congressional GOP, and 14% the Congressional Dems.

It may seem silly to even glance at these polls, but these polls are the ones that the Tea Party Caucus is using to confirm their ideas (while ignoring the cognitive dissonance between wanting a shutdown in question one but blaming it on President Obama in question three). This is the "majority against Obamacare" they keep mentioning in their speeches. These are also the polls that had the right-wing universe shocked, SHOCKED, when the Romney Ryan juggernaut didn't win by a landslide last November.

A Reason to Celebrate on #GOPShutdown Day

Here's the page you'll be greeted with if you visit HealthCare.gov this morning:

Despite the efforts of the Tea Party and their stooge John Boehner to extort concessions they couldn't win through legislation, the courts, or the ballot box, the Affordable Care Act will start helping to insure unisured Americans today. They have shut down large portions of the Federal Government causing inconvenience to millions and pain to hundreds of thousands of workers, but HealthCare.gov is up and running.

  

Happy Birthday Obamacare!

A Remedial Civics Lesson For Teapartiers

People on Fox News and Teapartiers on Twitter need to stop referring to the Affordable Care Act as "A Bill".
It's "A Law" and it has been since it was passed by the 111th Congress and signed by the President in 2010.

A User-Friendly Obamacare Guide from WNYC

It seemed appropriate to share this on a day when the GOP House will be shutting down the US Government to save us from the Affordable Care Act:

All the Way with BHO? (redux)

[I originally posted this on October 1, 2011, but I felt it might be time to trot it out again and place it at the top of the blog. I don't feel like I need to add any specific references to today's debate about unleashing American weaponry against Syria.]

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.