[!@#$%!]

allcaps TRUTHINESS hi

trump’s 10,000 lies set a record the other day

you’re amazing!

[Skuj]

GOP hitting Pelosi for calling Barr a liar. "It's beneath her office....."

But his lie is in black and white!! Compare what he said to congress about Meuller's feelings on the summary in April to Mueller's letter in March.

This isn't just a slip of the tongue. His trying to minimize the "snitty" letter speaks volumes.

[ilduclo]

more Sanders history

‘Anyone Ever Seen Cocaine?’ What We Found in the Archives of Bernie Sanders’s Long-Lost TV Show.
What a forgotten trove of videotapes reveals about the man who rewrote America’s political script.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...eo-2020-226761

Whatever good it did for Bernie Sanders at the time, “Bernie Speaks with the Community” is now 1,667 minutes of material for opposition researchers, health care insurance companies and Trump’s reelection campaign to pick through. Here’s a short, and surely incomplete, list of the things Sanders said on his TV show that his opponents could cut into a 30-second ad: The Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega “happens not to be a communist.” Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations who had recently visited Sanders, might have gotten cancer because of the “tremendous grief and suffering that’s going on in her own country” caused by the war. The Soviet Union’s economy is being “devastated” by military spending. And perhaps, as he proposed to a classroom of small children, Burlington should develop an exchange program with communist and socialist countries around the world. “I would like to see families—your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe—go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here,” he says. “If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what's going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot. And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown.”

[!@#$%!]

sure sure. but let’s not get lost with distractions


(encore)

The worst thing Barr did this week had nothing to do with the Mueller report
Catherine Rampell

The worst thing that Attorney General William P. Barr did this week arguably had nothing to do with possible contempt of Congress or the Mueller report.

It had to do with health care.

On Wednesday, amid the circus over alleged special counsel snittiness, the department that Barr oversees formally asked a federal appeals court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing access to health care for tens of millions of Americans.

If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.

The administration’s rationale was laid out in a policy brief supporting a lawsuit challenging Obamacare by 20 red states. Their logic: When Congress, as part of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, set the penalty for not carrying health insurance to zero, that effectively made it no longer really a “tax,” and therefore made it unconstitutional. Somehow, that rendered the rest of the law unconstitutional, as well — including lots of provisions having nothing to do with the mandate.

This reasoning has been rejected even by conservative legal scholars otherwise opposed to the law. But legal merits (and demerits) aside — which are likely to be ultimately adjudicated by the Supreme Court — it’s also not clear what political upside Republicans could possibly see in mounting yet another overt attack on Obamacare.

The GOP’s November congressional losses were largely motivated by voter rage over the party’s attacks on Obamacare, after all. Trump has, of course, more recently proclaimed the GOP the “party of health care,” and he and other party leaders continue repeating the obvious fiction that they’re cooking up “something terrific” to replace the ACA.

Yet Trump’s party has never been able to come up with (let alone pass) a viable replacement plan, even when it had unified control of government.

There are more productive things Trump and lawmakers could do to improve the health-care system that don’t involve dismantling the ACA. Obamacare, after all, did a lot to expand coverage and not nearly enough to improve affordability.

In fact, if Republicans are looking for more fruitful areas for improvement, they might contemplate a survey focused on employer-sponsored insurance plans that was released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Los Angeles Times.

About half of the U.S. population has employer-based coverage, including 60 percent of nonelderly adults. While most say they are generally satisfied with these health plans, many nonetheless struggle with the financial burden they impose — particularly the high-deductible plans that cover 4 in 10 people with employer-sponsored insurance.

Deductibles in employer-sponsored insurance have been rising since long before the ACA. They have nearly quadrupled over the past 12 years and now average $1,350 for a single-person plan. But separate survey data show that only half of nonelderly, one-person households report having at least $2,000 in savings available.

It’s no wonder, then, that many with “good” health coverage still report trouble paying for care. In fact, half of adults with job-based coverage say they or someone in their household has skipped or delayed getting medical care or filling prescription drugs in the past 12 months because of the cost.

Figuring out how to reduce out-of-pocket costs — including deductibles so high that they’re tantamount to not having insurance at all — turns out to be much more challenging than simply burning down the entire system. After all, requiring employers to spend more on health insurance might just end up hitting workers in the form of lower wages.

Even so, there are promising paths forward.

For instance, the latest version of a plan known as the Medicare for America Act — introduced Wednesday by Reps. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) — would create an expansive public insurance option to compete with the employer-sponsored system. The public option would cap premiums and out-of-pocket costs and have no deductibles. The bill would allow employer-sponsored plans to continue, as long as they covered a minimum average share of enrollees’ health expenses.

Other options might include refundable tax credits to offset out-of-pocket spending, as have been proposed by Democrats before.

Trump administration officials may not like these alternatives. Fine. But if they’re going to persist in trying to blow up the current system — through administrative sabotage, funding cuts and bogus court challenges — the onus remains on them to propose better ways to rebuild it.

[Bytor Peltor]

Robert Mueller had dinner in Georgetown tonight......looks like David McCallum aka “Ducky” from NCIS is on the job : )

 

 

 

[!@#$%!]

tv man, go read a book

[!@#$%!]

paul krugman’s newsletter from this morning

Tuesday, May 7, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman


Trade war, what is it good for?


Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

If you’re trying to understand why we may be on the brink of a full-scale trade war, with a huge expansion of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods and, inevitably, Chinese retaliation, it may help to remember what happened a few weeks ago, while Notre Dame was burning.

As you may recall, Donald Trump decided to tell French firefighters how to do their job, tweeting that they should use “flying water tankers” to douse the flames. The French civil defense department responded with a tweet — in slightly fractured English — that didn’t mention Trump, but pointed out that water-bombing could cause the entire cathedral to collapse.

What does this have to do with trade? What the water-bombing incident shows us is that Trump has strong opinions on everything, even when he is completely ignorant of the subject. Fortunately, when it came to French firefighting, he couldn’t turn those opinions into action. Unfortunately, when it comes to trade policy, he can: U.S. trade law gives the president enormous discretionary authority to impose tariffs.

Trump’s tweets over the past few days may well be featured in future economics textbooks as perfect illustrations of how people misunderstand the basics of international trade and trade policy. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it, since I’m the co-author of two textbooks.

First, Trump is still saying that because we run a $500 billion trade deficit with China — it’s actually $379 billion, but who’s counting? — that means we lose $500 billion. As some economists quickly pointed out, by this logic we all lose when we go shopping at our local supermarkets. After all, do the supermarkets buy anything from us in return? No!

Second, Trump keeps asserting that China is paying the tariffs he has already imposed. This could be true, if tariffs were driving Chinese prices down; in fact, the threat of more Chinese tariffs on U.S. agricultural exports is one reason grain prices have just plunged to a record low.

But enough time has passed for economists to look at the actual results of Trump’s trade policy so far, and the Chinese are not, in fact, paying the tariffs. As I wrote a couple of months ago, “to a first approximation, foreigners paid none of the bill, U.S. companies and consumers paid all of it.”

So if you’re trying to make sense of what’s happening on trade, you should start with the basic point that Trump has no idea what he’s doing, that there isn’t any coherent U.S. policy goal.

That still leaves the question of why what seemed to be a deal in the making may have fallen apart (or maybe not: this could all be theater.) Last week it looked as if China would mollify Trump by offering some “tweetable deliveries” — promises to buy U.S. products that would let him claim victory without leading to any substantive change in Chinese policy. Did the Chinese actually, as the administration claims, start to walk back some of their promises? Did a trade hard-liner get Trump’s ear? Did Trump hear that the likely deal would probably be panned by the news media? Nobody knows.

One thing is certain, however: If we do get into a full-scale trade war, for whatever reason, it will be very hard to end it, and the world economy will never be the same.

Heads up: I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. Next newsletter: May 28!

[ilduclo]

In keeping with the quality control of Trimp properties (rats, roaches and raw sewage at Trimp restaurants), we now have hazardous fecal coliform levels in Trimp swimming pools

 

https://qz.com/1612352/pools-at-trum...th-inspectors/

[Derek]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

more Sanders history

‘Anyone Ever Seen Cocaine?’ What We Found in the Archives of Bernie Sanders’s Long-Lost TV Show.
What a forgotten trove of videotapes reveals about the man who rewrote America’s political script.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...eo-2020-226761

Whatever good it did for Bernie Sanders at the time, “Bernie Speaks with the Community” is now 1,667 minutes of material for opposition researchers, health care insurance companies and Trump’s reelection campaign to pick through. Here’s a short, and surely incomplete, list of the things Sanders said on his TV show that his opponents could cut into a 30-second ad: The Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega “happens not to be a communist.” Nora Astorga, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United Nations who had recently visited Sanders, might have gotten cancer because of the “tremendous grief and suffering that’s going on in her own country” caused by the war. The Soviet Union’s economy is being “devastated” by military spending. And perhaps, as he proposed to a classroom of small children, Burlington should develop an exchange program with communist and socialist countries around the world. “I would like to see families—your mothers and dads and yourselves maybe—go to the Soviet Union and learn about that country, and people from there come to here,” he says. “If you actually had kids here who were from Nicaragua or from the Soviet Union, and they could tell you what's going on in their own country, boy, you could learn a whole lot. And then if kids from Vermont or Burlington were in those countries, they could tell those people what was going on in their hometown.”

No one cares about that shit tho and only makes him more likeable to a large chunk of people. Things like Biden's voting record and bill legislation will be much more harmful than Bernie's silly public access TV show which by the way rules:

 

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Derek

No one cares about that shit tho and only makes him more likeable to a large chunk of people. Things like Biden's voting record and bill legislation will be much more harmful than Bernie's silly public access TV show which by the way rules:

 

wow he had the same terrible posture way back when! and here i thought it was an age thing (like my great grandma)

i’m watching...

-

the goths start at 14’

he’s nice and lets them talk. even when they speak gibberish lolol

it’s like a social studies teacher

[Derek]

Imagine cracking his back for him and the proceeding sound wakes up every child and dog in the neighbourhood.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Derek

Imagine cracking his back for him and the proceeding sound wakes up every child and dog in the neighbourhood.

the walls of the indoor amusement park would fall hahaha

anywya that was a fairly nice cable access show. more “bernie listens” than bernie speaks. which is refreshing. i saw it all hahaha.

[ilduclo]

Originally Posted by Derek

No one cares about that shit tho and only makes him more likeable to a large chunk of people. Things like Biden's voting record and bill legislation will be much more harmful than Bernie's silly public access TV show which by the way rules:

I guess you're an idiot

[Derek]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

the walls of the indoor amusement park would fall hahaha

anywya that was a fairly nice cable access show. more “bernie listens” than bernie speaks. which is refreshing. i saw it all hahaha.

I'm glad that you're not buying into ilduclo's nonsense. That article was overly positive yet he chose to copy and paste the only negative paragraph. Sad!

[Derek]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

I guess you're an idiot

Hah look at this idiot who can't win an argument because he cherrypicks shit

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Derek

I'm glad that you're not buying into ilduclo's nonsense. That article was overly positive yet he chose to copy and paste the only negative paragraph. Sad!

ildouche doesn’t listen to anyone who disagrees with him. he’s got everyone on ignore. i guess he’s ignoring you too now.

me, i don’t care for cognitive closure. the whole point of a forum is to discuss shit.

[Derek]

And people say that progressives are the close minded speech nazis haaaaaa

[!@#$%!]

some are, lol

but anyway...

[Derek]

Exactly, they're hypocrites!

[Bytor Peltor]

Originally Posted by Bytor Peltor

BARR is bulletproof......

 

From last I heard eleven hours ago, not one Democrat has entered the Secure Room to read the 99.9% unredacted version.

A) they don’t want to know the truth
B) they already know the truth

Either way, all their grandstanding won’t change a thing!
(Shut Up Jerry)

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

Nancy Pelosi claims she has a Constitutional crisis on her hands, as Attorney General Barr has disregarded her "deadline" to reveal the full, unredacted Mueller report to Congress.

That this is the cheapest form of political grandstanding is obvious to anyone who understands that:

1) the Attorney General is not required by law to release ANY of the Special Prosecutor's report to ANYONE;

2) certain items contained within the Special Prosecutor's report are justifiability classified, such as grand jury testimony and intelligence which might reveal sources and methods of acquisition.

Kindly notice the fact that, through the two years of the Mueller investigation. President Trump never invoked Executive Privilege until Congress demanded that Attorney General Barr break the law to satisfy their demands

What Speaker Pelosi is attempting is something I learned about when I was a Trotskyist in college, to which Trotsky referred as his "Transitional Program", which consists In the raising of demands, in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation, which are immediately understood by the people to be necessary to the maintenance of human life and the proper functioning of society, yet beyond the ability of the ruling class to deliver, given the social crisis existing at the moment. In the case of the Russian Revolution, ending Russia's participation in the First World War proved to be just such a demand, and the success of the October Revolution was assured by the raising of this demand against the Kerensky government.

So, Speaker Pelosi is trying the same thing by demanding that the Attorney General break the law by releasing the unredacted Mueller report to Congress. But her demand on this point is nowhere near the critical importance of the Bolshevik Party's demand for exit from alliance with the Allied Powers in the First World War, nor is it understandable nor supportable by the broad masses of the people.

In the same vein, the Violence Against Women Act could easily have been extended by an easy bi-partisan majority, save for the fact that she refused to bring it up to a vote until it had expired, and then offered it up as a new piece of legislation containing an anti-Second Amendment poison pill which she knew Republicans could not possibly support. Besides the obvious question as to why the Violence Against Women Act needed a sunset provision, there remains the issue of Speaker Pelosi accusing Republicans of being in favor of violence against women, when her own deliberate policy of legislative sabotage caused the impasse.