Part of America Is Still Forgotten Under Trump

To win election, Donald Trump made great promises of "Making America Great" again to the part of the America's populace that is often described as "forgotten."  In addition, Trump used open racism and religious extremism to play on the prejudices and insecurities of these so-called forgotten Americans. namely working class whites without a college education.  They took Trump's promises as true and by a narrow margin in three states they voted for Trump and handed him an Electoral College victory.  Trump still panders to racists and religious extremists, but the economy that he brags about has largely left them behind and some of his policies - think his self-created trade wars - have been financially devastating, especially to Mid-West farmers. As the 2020 presidential campaign ramps up, the question of the hour is whether these voters will realize that they have been played for fools and while Trump may fly in for his rallies (where he often stiffs the localities for expenses incurred), but meanwhile the economic death spiral for many continues - even as the wealthy have reaped a bonanza in increased wealth. A column in the New York Times looks at this reality seeming lost on those Trump has forgotten outside of his Nuremberg style rallies. Here are column excerpts:

Trump declared in his State of the Union address that “our economy is the best it has ever been.”

Put aside the Trumpian hyperbole, and it’s true that the economy is strong — and that this is critical to Trump’s chances for re-election.

Yet we live in two Americas, and there’s another side of the country that Trump didn’t mention — one that helped elect him but that he has neglected since. In the other America, suicide rates are at a record high in the post-World War II era, and more Americans die every two weeks from drugs, alcohol and suicide — “deaths of despair” — than died in 18 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 These deaths are symptoms of a larger economic malaise for working-class Americans that predates Trump. It’s not his fault, but neither has he tried seriously to address it; in some ways, especially in health care, he has worsened it.
 Important new research finds that 20 million Americans, particularly those with low levels of education, describe all 30 of the last 30 days as “bad mental health days.”

“These men and women report in effect that every day of life is a bad day,” said David G. Blanchflower, a Dartmouth economist who conducted the research. Blanchflower noted that self-reported happiness in America has continued to fall.

One-third of Americans say that they have been in pain “often” or “very often” in the last four weeks.  Some of the pain probably results from a lack of universal health care. Millions of Americans endure constant toothaches in a way that doesn’t happen in our peer countries.

In effect, we have a bifurcated economy, marked by prosperity for millions of Americans and by a Social Great Depression for millions of others.

It’s strange to make a comparison to the Great Depression, for output is surging. But consider the effect on mortality: Even during the Great Depression, life expectancy rose strongly, while in three of the last four years it fell because of deaths of despair.

We’re used to thinking of a depression as geographic, but this one is demographic. Working-class Americans, often defined as those without a college degree, are caught in a dust bowl.

“The crisis is almost invisible for those with a college degree,” noted Anne Case, a Princeton economist who is an author, with her husband, fellow-economist Angus Deaton, of an excellent book coming out this spring about deaths of despair.

It is these working-class Americans, white and black alike, who have seen earnings collapse, family structure disintegrate and mortality climb. These Americans are earning less on average, adjusted for inflation, than their counterparts back in the 1970s.

“Our story of deaths of despair is essentially a long-run account of destruction of the working class,” Deaton said.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt worked hard to address the Depression with the New Deal. This time, Trump in some ways has exacerbated the pain — such as by chipping away at access to health care. Some 400,000 children have lost health insurance under Trump.

It’s true that unemployment has dropped . . . But Case says that even so, almost half of Americans aged 25 and over with only a high school diploma are no longer in the labor force.

Meanwhile, the central fact of America today is not its economic vigor but its profound inequity.

I noted that private wealth has increased by $800,000 per household. It’s similarly true that whenever Jeff Bezos walks into a room, average wealth there shoots up so that each person becomes, on average, a billionaire. Interesting, but not very meaningful.

  Of that $800,000 increase in wealth, very little - if any - is found in working class or middle class households.  No, instead, it has gone to the few top percentages of income households, thereby only increasing inequality. 

The GOP Has Its Own Obamacare Now

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Having been actively involved in politics for over twenty years, I continue to be mind boggled by the apparent death wish of congressional Republicans when it comes to passing measures that are viewed as abhorrent by the majority of voters.  The same group who railed against Obamacare for seven straight years are about to give Democrats a gift in the form of the Trump tax bill that will likely benefit Democrats for years and at almost the very same moment that Republicans lost their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates.  Due to a single vote no less.  Ed Gillespie campaigned on a similar give away to the rich and lost the Virginia gubernatorial contest by 9 percentage points.  All of this is lost on Paul Ryan who is near orgasmic over what he has showered on the 1%.  The Trump tax bill, together with Der Trumpenführer himself (a gift that goes on giving and giving), will likely see Democrats motivated and out for electoral revenge at levels not seen in decades.  A column in the Washington Post looks at how the Trump Tax Bill will likely come back to haunt Republicans, perhaps as early as November, 2018.  Here are excerpts (with a little editorialize by me):

Congratulations, Republicans. Now you have your own Obamacare.

Emerging from their caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday morning, House Republicans were jubilant about their tax bill, which was on course to clear Congress on Wednesday.

“It’s a total winner,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.). “And I never lie.” [except when his lips are moving]

Veteran Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) observed: “They’re pretty giddy in there.”

Rep. Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a urologist, announced: “This is good medicine for America.”

And for that prescription, added Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), “you don’t need a second opinion.”

Don’t you?  The deeply unpopular bill has the support of only a third of Americans, most of whom (correctly) perceive that it’s a giveaway to rich people and big corporations. “Any concerns that this won’t translate into a political win for Republicans?” ABC News’s Mary Bruce asked House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

“No concerns whatsoever,” Ryan replied. He blamed the bill’s unpopularity on opponents and the media spreading “mistruths” and said opinions will improve when people experience what’s in the bill. 

Where have I heard this before? Ah, yes, it was March 2010, as Obamacare was about to clear the House. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said people should look beyond the “controversies” surrounding the bill, to when people experience its “very exciting” benefits. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” she said.

Obamacare did much of what was advertised, and its popularity grew. But it didn’t do everything that was promised, and anything Americans didn’t like about the health-care system became the fault of Obamacare, even if unrelated to the law. Now, Republicans are making impossibly high promises, and if anything goes wrong — if the economy doesn’t boom, wages don’t soar and the middle class doesn’t rebound — it will be the fault of this legislation, soon to be labeled “the Trump Tax” by Democrats.

The parallels are eerie. . . . . Actually, the Trump Tax is in worse shape than Obamacare was. USA Today reported last week that the bill had “the lowest level of public support for any major piece of legislation enacted in the past three decades, including the Affordable Care Act in 2009.” In March 2009, the Quinnipiac poll foundopposition to Obamacare exceeded support by nine points; the latest Quinnipiac poll finds opposition to the tax bill exceeding support by 29 points.

Republicans worked hard to convince Americans that Obamacare was a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the poor. Democrats can now argue, truthfully, that the Trump Tax is a transfer of income from the middle class to the wealthy and big business. Under the law, the middle fifth of American households will see an average increase in after-tax income next year of $930, while the top 1 percent get an average increase of $51,140, according to the Tax Policy Center. The rich even get a greater proportional increase in after-tax income: 2.3 percent, compared with 1.4 percent for the middle class.

While the “forgotten man” Trump lured with phony populism gets little benefit, the things that bothered the forgotten man about the tax code — a tangled mess of loopholes for businesses, the rich and Wall Street — remain intact. This will be a “bigger albatross” for Republicans than Obamacare was for Democrats, argues Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson. “They own the tax code. When you are upset about taxes, you’re going to be upset about the Trump Tax.”

On top of that, Republicans now have claimed ownership of health care. The tax bill kills the individual mandate that underpinned Obamacare, which will leave 13 million additional people without coverage.

Tuesday morning, Ryan declared (falsely) that the bill would “especially” benefit middle-income families. He said it would “bid up” wages, repatriate jobs, provide economic growth of 3 percent a year and create upward mobility. The bill, he said, “is what it will take to help people who are struggling.”

 And yes, in the process of giving tax cuts to the wealthy, the GOP bill will cause 13 million to lose health care coverage.  I truly am hoping for a GOP bloodbath come November, 2018. 

Senate GOP Tax Bill Hurts Poor More than First Thought

The Congressional Budget Office ("CBO") has further analyzed the GOP Senate tax proposal and surprise, surprise - well, actually not surprising at all - the impact of the bill would hurt the poor more than originally believed.  Sadly, the bill is typical of the Republican Party's reverse Robin Hood agenda of taking from the poor and middle class and giving lavish tax cuts to the wealthy.  So much for Orrin Hatch's disingenuous lie that he works to benefit the poor and working class.  His rant at Sen. Sherrod Brown is definitely an example of he doth protest too much.  Here at the holiday season, the GOP is showing that its claimed deference to "Christian values" is nothing more than a charade. Indeed, Republicans like Hatch are little more than self-laudatory modern day Pharisees. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the new CBO analysis and its unsurprising consequences.  Here are article highlights:

The Senate Republican tax plan gives substantial tax cuts and benefits to Americans earning more than $100,000 a year, while the nation’s poorest would be worse off, according to a report released Sunday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans are aiming to have the full Senate vote on the tax plan as early as this week, but the new CBO analysis showing large, harmful effects on the poor may complicate those plans. The CBO also said the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, a potential problem for Republican lawmakers worried about America’s growing debt.

Democrats have repeatedly slammed the bill as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the poor. In addition to lowering taxes for businesses and many individuals, the Senate bill also makes a major change to health insurance that the CBO projects would have a harsh impact on lower-income families.

By 2019, Americans earning less than $30,000 a year would be worse off under the Senate bill, CBO found. By 2021, Americans earning $40,000 or less would be net losers, and by 2027, most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off. On the flip side, millionaires and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 would be big beneficiaries, according to the CBO’s calculations.

The main reason the poor get hit so hard in the Senate GOP bill is because the poor would receive less government aid for health care.

The CBO has calculated that health insurance premiums would rise if this bill becomes law, leading 4 million Americans to lose health insurance by 2019 and 13 million to lose insurance by 2027.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the other official nonpartisan group that analyzes tax bills, put out a similar report showing how lower-income families are hurt by the loss of the health-care tax credits. But the CBO goes a step further than the JCT. The CBO also calculates what would happen to Medicaid, Medicare and the Basic Health Program if the Senate GOP plan became law. The CBO is showing even worse impacts on poor families than the JCT did.

Republicans, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), have argued that their bill helps Americans across the income spectrum. . . .  They also argue that lower-income families are not losing any money in their wallets.

But Democrats and advocates for the poor say these lower-income Americans are going to be worse off if they no longer have health insurance.

Nowadays, like the Christofascists who dominate the GOP base, if a Republican elected official's lips are moving, the safest assumption to make is that they are lying.  The biggest irony is that evangelical Christians who park their sanctimonious asses in church pews each week are the ones most loyal to the GOP which pushes policies that are the antithesis of Christ's social gospel message.   It is long past time that the media stop giving these people deference and maintaining the myth that they are decent people. 

Democrats Lead by 10.7 Points in Generic Ballot Polls

The most recent RealClearPolitics average of available polling data provides encouraging news for Democrats vis-a-vis the 2018 midterm election.  In a generic poll, Republicans lag by almost 11 percentage points.  The rejection of Republicans seemingly stems from continued voter revulsion toward Donald Trump, but also is fueled by growing public rejection of the Republican Party's two main goals: (i) repealing the Affordable Health Care Act and leaving millions of Americans without health insurance, and (ii) passing a tax bill that will shower benefits on the wealthy and large corporations at the expense of average Americans.  Democrats need to be optimistic, but need to work harder than ever to make a GOP debacle a reality.  A piece in The Hill looks at the poll findings.  Here are highlights:

Republicans head into the holiday season with a daunting number hanging over their heads — 10.7 percent. 

Democrats lead their Republican rivals by 10.7 percent on the generic congressional ballot, according to the most recent RealClearPolitics average of available polling data. That mark is the highest that average has gone since just before the 2010 elections, where Republicans netted 63 House seats. 

It’s a gloomy sign for Republicans, and one that dovetails with President Trump’s sagging approval rating to boost Democratic optimism about taking the House and raises questions about whether Republicans will be able to take advantage of Democratic weakness on the Senate map.

[I]t seems clear we are heading in a bad direction” said former Republican National Committee spokesman Doug Heye.

“What we’ve seen so far this year that the constant is massive Trump unpopularity, a growing unpopularity, and we are starting to see that electorally. Knowing there’s never going to be a Donald Trump pivot in any sense, what would tell us that anything in this midterm is different?” 

Democrats are pointing to victories in the off-year elections earlier this month as a promising sign for 2018.

A resounding Democratic win in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, as well as strong showings among suburban voters, topped the headlines. But there was more promise down the ballot in other states, too. 

In Pennsylvania, Democrats cleaned up in most of the “collar counties” that make up the Philadelphia suburbs. Voters elected Democrats to serve on the Delaware County council for the first time since 1980. Democrats saw similar success in other nearby counties like Chester County, and local Democratic candidates specifically pointed to Trump as one reason for their success. Most of those suburbs are represented by Republicans. 

In Maine, voters in the more conservative 2nd Congressional District — home to Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R) — narrowly backed a state ballot question on expanding Medicaid, amid protests from Republicans. 

“In the legislative races where people don’t necessarily know who they are voting for — they just vote Republican or Democrat, which makes it a semi-generic ballot — we got our clocks cleaned,” he said.

Much of the Democratic enthusiasm has been organized around opposition to Trump, as well as concerted efforts to oppose the two Republican legislative priorities — a repeal of ObamaCare and the GOP tax-reform plan.

Democrats have used both GOP legislative pushes to accuse Republicans of taking the side of big business and the wealthy over the little guy. 

“The enthusiasm, surge in participation, and increased activism, a lot of it is its a real rejection of the Trump and Paul Ryan policies that are really toxic,” Kelly said. 

But while an uptick in Democratic enthusiasm is apparent, what’s unclear is whether that will be enough to win them the House.   Last week, Amy Walter, a writer for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, wrote that the generic ballot numbers look like “a wave is building” but that “Democrats have a narrow path to 24 seats — even with a big wave or tailwind.”

A few days later, Nate Cohn with The New York Times’ “The Upshot” pegged the race for the House majority as a “toss-up.”

Again, Democrats cannot be complacent and need to start mobilizing no to make sure Republicans experience an electoral blood bath in November, 2018. 

The Republican Created Health Crisis for 10 Million Children

GOP Senator Orrin Hatch

Recently GOP Senator Orrin Hatch ranted when Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown suggested that Hatch and GOP policies were harming millions of regular Americans.  Hatch basically lied and said that he had worked to benefit poor Americans throughout his career. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans are working to take from the poor and middle class and lavish tax cuts on the extremely wealthy and large corporations. A case in point is Republican refusal to renew funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a program that benefits poor children otherwise lacking health coverage.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest Republican travesty.  Here are excerpts:

Fifty-six days after Congress failed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), some American children are at risk of losing their health insurance. The deadline to renew the program’s funding was Sept. 30, and Congress hasn’t granted the program $15 billion to continue.

As a result, the popular state-level insurance program for low-income children and pregnant women is facing a funding cliff. While some states may be able to keep the program going through some of next year, half a dozen are projected to run out of funding by late December or early January.

States closest to the funding cliff are preparing to warn customers that funding might disappear, leaving kids in the lurch. There are a few options for those families who rely on CHIP once the funding disappears.

States decide if those families could be enrolled in Medicaid or covered through Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace offerings. But Republicans — Trump in the executive and members of his party in Congress and at the state level — have tried hard block access to both of those alternatives, by sabotaging Obamacare, eliminating support for enrollment, blocking Medicaid expansion, etc.

The program has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, but Republicans, in control of both chambers of Congress and steering a massive tax bill through a lightning-fast approval process, are now unable to the program the funds it needs to survive.

At the center of both House and Senate Republicans’ tax bills is a giant, unnecessary tax cut for corporations: a 20 percent corporate tax cut at a price tag of nearly $1.5 trillion dollars. The Senate has decided one way its bill will raise enough money to fund this is by repealing the ACA’s individual mandate provision, a move that would leave nearly 13 million Americans uninsured.

Trump’s tax proposal would sharply reduce the federal government’s ability to match state funds (the ACA expanded matching) and would cut billions from CHIP’s funding.

During a heated exchange with Sen. Sherrod Brown over the facts of the GOP tax plan, Brown highlighted that it doesn’t include any funding for CHIP, and any tax plan that truly wasn’t geared towards wealthy individuals would include that funding. Hatch replied sharply, “I’m not starting with CHIP.” 

Increasingly, voting Republican is to me a sign of one's moral bankruptcy.  Children don't matter, impoverished elderly do not matter.  No one matters except the wealthy and right wing Christian extremists.  

Is Trump Leading Republicans to Slaughter?

It is Thanksgiving Day - a day for family and friends and hopefully a little bit of love for one's fellow citizens.  Yet even as families gather, Congressional Republicans are taking only a brief respite from the effort to harm countless middle and working class families and the elderly through a tax plan that benefits the very wealthy and large corporations. Most Americans oppose the plan and groups like AARP - which represents the most dependable voters - are condemning the savaging of Medicare and other social programs.   Der Trumpenführer - who estimates show might enjoy a billion dollar benefit - is of course supporting the effort and is supporting alleged child molester Roy Moore because Moore's vote is "needed for the tax bill."  A lengthy piece in Newsweek raises the question of whether Trump is leading the GOP to a slaughter.  I for one, hope that such is the case.  When I left the GOP as the Christofascists (and the white supremacy they brought with them) were ascendant I concluded that only the ruin of the party could excise the cancer.  Here are article highlights:

The prophet led the faithful into the jungle, where he promised they would find salvation. . . . That place was called Jonestown, a village hacked out of the jungle of Guyana. The Reverend Jim Jones did not manage to turn the settlement into the earthly paradise he’d promised his parishioners. In 1978, after a shootout that left visiting U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and four other members of a visiting delegation dead, Jones ordered his followers to perpetuate one of the most grotesque acts of mass murder in American history. “How very much I've tried my best to give you a good life,” he opened his final sermon, laden with dark grievance, as 900 people prepared for their deaths. “But in spite of all of my trying, a handful of our people, with their lies, have made our lives impossible.”

 Time now for the necessary and obvious caveats. Jonestown was a horrific act of homicide. No matter how much you dislike Trump, he is not Jim Jones. His impolitic tweets at North Korean despot Kim Jong Un notwithstanding, he does not harbor a death wish, either for himself or for the country. He probably has more compassion than his critics are willing to concede. And yet his influence on the party he now leads may well prove the political equivalent of Jonestown. Having assumed control of the GOP, Trump may now destroy it: its national infrastructure, its fundraising capacity and, most of all, its support from the American public. A Gallup tracking poll in early October found that only 24 percent of respondents identified as Republicans. That’s the lowest level of affiliation for the party in two years, a lack of popularity that is especially remarkable because Republicans control both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government. But whatever the case, the GOP appears to have made a fatal mistake in allowing itself to be seduced by his populism. All the glories of Trumpism will belong to Trump, while all the failures will be passed off to a hapless band he sometimes calls “the Republicans.” “Republican leaders have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump,” says Will Marshall, founder of the centrist organization New Democracy. . . . . Attempts by others to mimic his convictions have been pathetic, transparent and unsuccessful. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, a creature of K Street boardrooms, ran a campaign of Southern racial grievance and anti-immigrant fearmongering. He lost by 9 points to Democratic Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam a few weeks ago. Many prominent Republicans believe their party has come to resemble the adherents of Jones, drifting ever further from reality. Trump, meanwhile, has shown no interest in reconciling the disparate factions of the GOP, hectoring leaders of his own party on Twitter as if they were obscure backbenchers . . . .

The GOP “will face obliteration in 2018,” says Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who served as chief strategist on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. When we spoke recently, Schmidt blamed the party’s fortunes on McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, a duo that he says “make Neville Chamberlain look like Churchill,” a reference to the British prime minister famous for capitulating to Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938.  “You were given the choice between war and dishonor,” Churchill said in response to Chamberlain’s cowardice. “You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Bruce Bartlett, who served as a senior adviser to Ronald Reagan, told me he wishes there were a Republican who’d utter a basic truth: “Our party is being killed by these idiots” in the Trump administration. And a few have, including Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee. They have both chosen to retire, however, aware that their anti-Trump positions would likely engender a ferocious primary battle.

Bartlett thinks fears of electoral defeat shouldn’t discourage critics. “It’s better for us to lose power for a generation than to continue this fraud.”

Many Americans dislike Trump’s vision for the nation, but they like the Republicans’ vision even less. Only 17 percent of Americans supported the Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. While the Republicans refuse to enact any tougher gun laws, Gallup finds that 60 percent of American support stricter gun laws. The vast majority of Americans rejected the Republican tax cut plan, with support as low as 25 percent in some polls. . . . It fell to Bartlett, the former Reagan adviser, to admit that correlations between tax cuts and economic growth were “a myth.” But once you’re in the jungle, the way out isn’t easy. The vacated Republican seats may entice Bannon-funded candidates who are true believers in Trumpism. That could turn the marriage of convenience between DJT and GOP into a suicide pact. Insurgent candidates such as former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, who has been accused of child molestation and sexual misconduct, could prove far more devastating than establishment incumbents who may not share Bannon’s nationalist vision but will maintain Republican majorities in Congress.

Speaking last weekend in Arizona, unaware that a microphone had been turned on, Flake admitted to a fear shared by most of his establishment peers: “If we become the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, we are toast.”

“It's increasingly hard to see how they recover from this,” says Charles Sykes, the onetime conservative radio host who has left the party and written about it in How the Right Lost Its Mind. “By pandering to the Trumpists, they have isolated themselves from the majority of voters. And this association with Roy Moore will be radioactive.”

Trump may do for conservatives what Stalin did for American radicals, forcing them to re-evaluate their convictions. The onetime eager socialists of City College in the century’s first decades became the neoconservatives who formed the backbone of the Republican Party through the George W. Bush presidency . . . . Trump may try to blame Democrats for this dour national mood, but voters aren’t likely to be fooled. “The Republican brand is shattered for the millennial generation and young people,” Schmidt told me. “It’s shattered for all time for Latinos, with African-Americans. And it’s shattered not because of Trump’s terrible behavior, but because of the absolute cowardice of the leaders of the Congress”. Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter that he intends to remain part of the loyal opposition to Trump. “I am staying a Republican,” he wrote. “Will not let GOP be taken over by Russian collaborators, racists, pedophiles and outlaws. Will oppose all elected officials who do not stand up for the rule of law.”

In response to that tweet, someone replied with the image of a tombstone for the Republican Party. The cause of death, the doctored tombstone declared, was Donald Trump.

The Increasingly Grotesque Republican Agenda

As a former Republican who was raised in a predominantly Republican family I am increasingly shocked by the ugliness of the agenda of today's GOP which seemingly puts little effort into the pretense that it is a political party that gives a damn about average American much less their families.  My late parents and grandparents would be shocked  at the willingness of today's congressional Republicans - and they are no better at the state level - to throw millions of Americans into the gutter while lavishing huge tax breaks on the disgustingly wealthy (analysis of the House "tax reform" bill passed today on a party line vote estimates the Trump family will receive over a billion dollars in benefits).  As for the Gospel message, in today's GOP, that is something that receives lip service in order to prostitute party elected officials to Christofascists (who in truth only cling to certain Old Testament passages to justify their hatred of others) while the core of the Gospel message is tossed in the trash or utterly ignored.   A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist who I suspect, like me, has disavowed GOP membership enumerates some examples of the ugliness of today's Republican Party.  Here are excerpts.

It turns out that electing President Trump was not the apex of Republicans’ political insanity. Since last November, consider the Trump GOP’s track record:

The GOP’s idea of health-care reform was trying to remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich. Having learned their lesson (not), Senate Republicans now support a tax bill that will remove millions of people from health-care coverage while giving tax cuts to the super rich — and to big corporations. Its tax plan contains permanent, huge tax breaks for corporations (e.g. reducing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent) and a new 25 percent rate for pass-throughs but temporary breaks for the middle class (e.g. the $300 “family flexibility” tax credit per filer).

The GOP’s environmental agenda includes climate-change denial (despite the government’s own confirmation that climate change is real and man-made), lifting the ban on importing elephant trophies (the first sons are avid big-game hunters and Christmas is around the corner) and trying in vain to save the coal industry. Trump’s GOP has made China look like a leader in global environmental issues.

The GOP president now embraces (literally, I think) autocrats like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, applauds autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after a stolen election, barely if at all brings up human rights in China and Saudi Arabia, and has not a bad word to say about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The GOP now opposes multilateral trade deals (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership) while China makes trade deals and the TPP countries forge a deal among themselves without the United States.

The GOP’s constitutional conservatism amounts to giving a totally unqualified nominee who hid a conflict of interest a lifetime federal court appointment. . . . . “Brett J. Talley, the young lawyer nominated by President Trump for a lifetime federal judgeship in Alabama . . . did not, however, identify any family members — including his wife, who is one of President Trump’s attorneys. . . . He’s actually one of four nominees rated “unqualified” by the American Bar Association.

The GOP president believes 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally based on no evidence whatsoever but doesn’t think the Russians meddled in our election despite the unanimous findings of our intelligence services.

The GOP-led Congress is content to tolerate Trump’s nepotism, massive conflicts of interest and possible receipt of foreign emoluments. It looks the other way as a president monetizes the office, hawking his properties at every opportunity.

This is not a party that can be described as coherent, sensible, respectful of the rule of law, dedicated to equal protection or grounded in reality — let alone conservative. Today’s GOP stands for a set of crackpot ideas, unworkable and unpopular policies and a president not remotely fit to remain in office. Some sunny optimists think the GOP can be saved. From our perspective, it’s not worth trying.

I completely agree with the last sentence.  The GOP is not worth saving.  I made this decision numerous years ago at this point and believe that the best thing one can do is work diligently to see the GOP defeated in every possible election.  As for "friends" and neighbors who continue to live in a fantasy world and pretend that the GOP is still the party of their grandparents and parents, I have a few words of advice: get your heads out of your asses.  

Today's GOP: Caught in Its Own Lies

For many years now, the basic agenda of the GOP has been based on lies.  This traces all the way back to Reagan era promises that tax cuts and trickle down economics would work.  It didn't and it hasn't, yet 37 years latter the same lie is being repeated over and over by GOP candidates and elected officials.  Here in Virginia, GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie is promising tax cuts that would leave a $1.4 billion gap in the budget just as was done in Kansas to disastrous effect.  Like Kansas, Gillespie has not solid plan for where replacement funds would come from.  More recently, of course, we had the Bush/Cheney lies that took the nation to war in Iraq, again with disastrous results.  This debacle has been followed by 8 years of Republican lies aimed at Barack Obama and his policies to the delight of racists within the GOP base.  Now, with the GOP controlling Washington until January, 2019 when things will hopefully change, the party is faced with trying to implement policies based on falsehoods that are becoming glaringly obvious to except the most deranged of the Kool-Aid drinking GOP base. The policies cannot work because they were false from the start.  A column in the New York Times looks at this growing problem of the GOP's own creation.  Here are excerpts:

On Saturday pretty much the entire medical sector — groups representing doctors, hospitals, and insurers — released an extraordinary open letter condemning the Graham-Cassidy health bill. The letter was written in the style of Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”: a series of paragraphs, each beginning with the bolded words “We agree,” pointing out the bill’s many awful features, from the harm it would do to people with pre-existing conditions to the chaos it would cause in insurance markets.

It takes a truly terrible proposal to elicit such eloquent unanimity from organizations that are usually cautious to the point of stodginess. So how did Republicans come up with something that bad, and how did that bad thing get so close to becoming law? Indeed, it still has a chance of being enacted despite John McCain’s “no.”

The answer is that Republicans have spent years routinely lying for the sake of political advantage. And now — not just on health care, but across the board — they are trapped by their own lies, forced into trying to enact policies they know won’t work.
Carl Hulse of The New York Times adds more detail: one big factor behind the push for Graham-Cassidy was anger among big donors, who wanted to know why Republicans had broken their vows to kill Obamacare. . . . . But repealing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the only thing Republicans promised; they also promised to replace it with something better and cheaper, doing away with all the things people don’t like about Obamacare without creating any new problems. Yet Republicans never had any idea how to fulfill that promise . . . . the base, both the grass roots and the big money, believed the lies. Hence the trap in which Republicans find themselves.

The thing is, health care isn’t the only issue on which lies are coming back to bite the liars. The same story is playing out on other issues — in fact, on almost every substantive policy issue the U.S. faces.

The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit. . . . as with health care, these lies will be revealed once actual legislation is unveiled. It’s telling that Republicans are already invoking voodoo economics to justify their as-yet-unspecified tax plans, insisting that tax cuts will pay for themselves by leading to higher economic growth.

At this point, however, few people believe them. The Bush tax cuts didn’t create a boom; neither did the Kansas tax-cut “experiment.”

Foreign policy isn’t usually a central concern for voters. Still, past lies have put the Trump administration in a box over things like the Iran nuclear deal: Canceling the deal would create huge problems, yet not canceling it would amount to an admission that the criticisms were dishonest. And soon the G.O.P. may even start to pay a price for lying about climate change. As hurricanes get ever more severe — just as climate scientists predicted — climate denial is looking increasingly out of touch. Yet donors and the base would react with fury to any admission that the threat is real, after all. [T]he bill for cynicism seems to be coming due. For years, flat-out lies about policy served Republicans well, helping them win back control of Congress and, eventually, the White House. But those same lies now leave them unable to govern.

Did John McCain Kill Obamacare Repeal?

As noted yesterday, the latest GOP effort to kill Obamacare is perhaps the most heinous to date as noted in a post yesterday.   I still remain disgusted with what the GOP has become and just how vicious its agenda has become.  Thankfully, John McCain has shown that a few in the GOP have not utterly thrown away their integrity and morality.  With his announcement yesterday that he will not support the latest Trumpcare travesty, with luck the GOP repeal effort is dead.  A piece in the New York Times looks at McCain's announcement.  Here are excerpts:

Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law and fulfill their longstanding promise to conservative voters.

For Mr. McCain, it was a slightly less dramatic reprise of his middle-of-the-night thumbs-down that killed the last repeal effort in July. This time, the senator, battling brain cancer and confronting his best friend in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, issued a statement saying that he could not “in good conscience” support the proposal by Senators Graham and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

“I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried,” Mr. McCain said. “Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will affect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it.”

With two other Republican senators likely to vote no, Mr. McCain’s opposition to the bill could be fatal. With Democrats united in opposition, Senate Republicans can afford to lose only two of their members.

A bill of this magnitude “requires a bipartisan approach,’’ Mr. McCain added.  Those concerns were compounded by the decision of Republican leaders to press forward with a vote next week before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could complete a full analysis of the Graham-Cassidy legislation. The budget office is expected to provide a preliminary fiscal assessment early in the week, but it indicated that it would not be able to complete an analysis of the bill’s effects on health insurance coverage or premiums by Sept. 30.

McCain has reminded us that sometimes one person can make a difference.  Each of us needs to remember this as we oppose the ugliness of what the GOP and Der Trumpenführer are seeking to do to America.  Another piece in the Times looks at why the GOP is so hell bent to harm millions:

As more than 40 subdued Republican senators lunched on Chick-fil-A at a closed-door session last week, Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else.

Mr. Gardner is in charge of his party’s midterm re-election push, and he warned that donors of all stripes were refusing to contribute another penny until the struggling majority produced some concrete results.

“Donors are furious,” one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. “We haven’t kept our promise.”

The backlash from big donors as well as the grass roots panicked Senate Republicans and was part of the motivation behind the sudden zeal to take one last crack at repealing the health care law before the end of the month.

This was not what Republicans had envisioned. Preparing for the 2018 midterm elections, they had thought they were in a strong position to maintain or expand their majority. Democrats must defend 25 seats — including 10 in states won last year by President Trump — while just eight Republican-held seats will be on the ballot. But their governing struggles — and attacks on congressional leaders by Mr. Trump — have soured their base, leaving the Senate majority feeling desperate.

Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, was even more blunt in a conversation with Vox. “If we do nothing, it has a tremendous impact on the 2018 elections, and whether or not Republicans still maintain control and we have the gavel,” he said.

Republicans say the fund-raising drop-off has been steep and across the board, from big donations to the small ones the party solicits online from the grass roots. They say the hostile views of both large and small donors are in unusual alignment and that the negative sentiment is crystallized in the fund-raising decline.

Republicans are also set to roll out their income tax overhaul plan next week in an effort to build support for it and find something the party can deliver to the president’s desk. They see the tax plan as their best opportunity to win back the allegiance of donors.

With health care repeal teetering yet again, the one thing they know for sure is that they need to show some accomplishments, and they need to do so fast.

What shocks me is that these Republicans seemingly fail to realize that perhaps some of the fund raising drop off is due to the ugliness of what the GOP is trying to pass. Not everyone is like the Koch brothers who happily want to restore the Gilded Age while the vast majority of Americans suffer.

Republicans Once Again Seek to Throw Millions Off of Healthcare Coverage

Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen - cohorts in cruelty

Apparently the zeal of Republicans to give a huge tax cut to the wealthiest Americans is never ending.  Hence, yet another effort to cobble together 50 votes for perhaps the ugliest GOP repeal and "replace" Trumpcare bill yet.  As with the previous GOP bills, this latest abomination would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose health care coverage and punish states that expanded Medicaid and sought to bring health care attainability to the working poor and others previously not qualifying for coverage.  Once again, it may be Republican women who may block the most cruel and heartless agenda of male Republicans in the U.S. Senate although that verdict is still out.  John McCain is remaining mum on his view of this latest example of the GOP's reverse Robin Hood effort to bring about a new Gilded Age.  The New York Times lets loose on Republicans in a main editorial.  Here are editorial excerpts:

Republican lawmakers have wasted much of the year trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a move that would deprive millions of people of health insurance. They’re back at it. Like a bad sequel to a terrible movie, a proposal whose main architects are Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina would in many ways be worse than bills that came before. It would punish states like California and New York that have done the most to increase access to health care and set in motion cuts to Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides insurance to nearly 70 million people, many of whom are disabled and elderly.

This is not an idle threat. President Trump wants this bill passed by the end of next week, before the expiration of a budget rule that allows the chamber to pass a health care bill with only 50 votes (and a tiebreaker from the vice president). It’s unclear whether the votes are there, . . .

It is hard to overstate the cruelty of the Graham-Cassidy bill. It would eliminate the mandate that even healthy people buy health insurance, end the subsidies that help people purchase coverage and stop the expansion of Medicaid. It would offer states block grants they could use to help people get insurance but would leave people at the mercy of individual state legislatures and, over all, would provide $239 billion less than what the federal government would spend under current law between 2020 and 2026, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Worse, the formula for determining state grants would penalize the 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the A.C.A. so as to provide more money to the 19 states that did not. This is a cynical attempt to win votes by taking money from generous states that are more likely to be governed by Democrats and giving some of it to representatives of stingier states that are more likely to elect Republicans.

Graham-Cassidy would further cripple Medicaid by putting a per-person cap on what the federal government spends on the program. Under current law, federal spending increases automatically to keep up with the rise in medical costs; a per-capita cap would leave governors, who are ultimately in charge of administering Medicaid, in the unenviable position of denying care to poor and older Americans.

The rush job proposed by Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Graham and endorsed by the president is deeply unfair and leaves other lawmakers with little time to understand what’s in the bill or its true costs. The Congressional Budget Office says it will not be able to determine the full impact of the legislation, including its effect on premiums and the number of people who have insurance, for several weeks.

The Senate should show a little patience; a better, more humane option awaits it. Senators Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, and Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, are working on a bill that would strengthen the A.C.A. by appropriating money for health subsidies that help low-income families; Mr. Trump has threatened to end those payments administratively. Mr. Alexander and Ms. Murray expect to produce their legislation this week.

 Let's hope that the Cassidy/Graham bill fails and that the Alexander/Murray bill moves forward.   Meanwhile, it is needful to remember that a hallmark of today's GOP is cruelty to the less fortunate not to mention the coddling of white supremacists. 

Is Obamacare's Repeal Finally Dead?

Out of all the Republicans in the United States Senate, only three had the decency and morality to vote "no" to Mitch McConnell's "skinny bill" that would have cause 16 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage according to the calculations of the Congressional Budget Office.  Thankfully, three Republican Senators was enough to kill this abortion of a bill hypocritically pushed by the political party that claims it is "pro-life." Pro-life now meaning opposition to abortion but a willingness to harm millions, including children and the elderly.  Once one passes from the womb, you are trash to be callously kicked to the curb unless, of course, one is lucky enough to be born to wealth.  The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party is near complete. Ironically, it took two women,  Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski - the latter of whom was threatened by Der Trumpenführer - and John McCain who is suffering from a life threatening battle with cancer - to stop the effort to harm millions so that the wealthy could reap a huge tax cut.  A column by conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin looks at what happened.  Here are highlights:

We’ve said it before, but the Senate has reached a new low point in a once revered body. . . . . To the rescue, however, rode two brave women and a war hero stricken with cancer.

Since the healthcare debate got underway, the Republican-controlled Senate has had a fundamental problem: It had no bill it could pass. We’re not talking about meeting the 60-vote threshold; they had not been able find 50 votes (plus Vice President Mike Pence’s tiebreaker) for any version of repeal and replace. So they hit upon the idea of passing an atrocious bill that would repeal the individual mandate, dumps 15 million people off healthcare insurance and raises premiums 20 percent. Then the kicker, as The Post reported Thursday:

In other words, millions more people wouldn’t have insurance, and it’d be more expensive for everybody else. It’s no wonder, then, that even the Republicans who are voting for this bill don’t want it to become law. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called it a “disaster” and a “fraud.”

Three senators actually held a press conference to say they’d vote for it — but only if they got an ironclad guarantee the House wouldn’t pass it. That’s right: They would only pass something they hate in order to kick the can down the road, with no prospect they can find a bill satisfactory to enough Senate Republicans. Really, gentleman, that’s your idea of responsible governance?

[A] final (we think) vote on the skinny repeal took place in the wee hours of the night on Friday. . . . In the end, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — in a sort of Hollywood ending — voted no along with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The bill died, and with it perhaps, finally, the quixotic vote to end Obamacare.

And what was the excuse for the rest of the Senate? They all had the power to stop a bill many openly trashed as a joke and conceded would do great damage. Nevertheless, all hoped someone else would do the dirty work of derailing it. I’m hard-pressed to think of another instance in which virtually all senators of one party (save three) declared their inability to make a critically important decision. 

It took three brave souls, one in the twilight of his career, to finally put their constituents and the country above partisan hackery.

How any one moral can still call them self a Republican is baffling to me.  How much more depraved and hate-filled must the GOP become before they will open their eyes and face the fact that the GOP all of us once knew is dead and gone.  The election of Der Trumpenführer was its death knell.