He’s a wonker.
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See, that works for me!
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I understand where you’re coming from.Still, the old bromide makes sense: The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
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Curse you, tiny toilet!
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I read through the GOP “file your tax return on a postcard” plan. You are way off base with ‘median’ – its a raw deal for the bottom 98%. Low, middle, upper middle, and “rich but not fuck you rich” income levels basically get a doubled standard deduction, but less other deductions. Fuck-you rich get huge tax cuts. And single parents get a big tax increase (literally – I am not making this up – it would eliminate the “head of household” filing category)
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Head of household is used when there isn’t a legally married couple with at least one dependent. Sounds like another tactic in the push to delegitimize any other form of family.
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What’s nuts about it is that the ACA is a pretty flawed piece of legislation. I do think there was room in there for some real improvement. And Trump actually did seem to understand at some level what the issues with it were - that it was not affordable and did not cover everyone. Instead, they had these whacknut fringe job “Freedom Caucus” people in there saying, “How can we screw women over more? How can we make this truly punishing to old people? How can we make it so the rich get really really really rich? How can we make it so fewer healthy people have basic coverage?” Seriously old white guys? You are so batshit cut off from your voters that you thought that’s what they wanted???
I am happy that they seem to be so incompetent that even with the majority and the president they cannot pull it together enough to pass one important piece of legislation that they all campaigned on for years. I feel safer, sure.
But really how are these people in office at all with instincts this terrible?
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Well, for the last eight years or so, most of the Republicans in the Congress haven’t really had to work that much. They’ve gotten by with reflexive opposition to everything Obama and the Democrats wanted to do, screaming about Obamacare and holding pointless repeal votes, and generally playing to the worst instincts of their base.
Now that they’re in charge, they’re finding it very hard to make policy, wrangle for votes and so on. For a lot of the House members, this is the first time they have to do their job and actually legislate!
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Here’s my doomsaying narrative:
When Turmp accidentally got elected, and realised he had, at a generous estimate, less than zero knowledge of how to be an elected politician, he didn’t have anyone else to call apart from the Republican establishment. Much like how, in your first week of college, you don’t know how to start making friends except by joining lame clubs and hanging out with people from your dorm.
Two months in, Turmp has fallen out with his first-week friends for good. But there is a social group that’s much more in line with his racist, fascist, batshist, anti-reality talk-radio outlook, and it’s only a matter of time before he starts hanging out with that group exclusively. Caught between Turmp and their fear of primaries from the right, “moderate” Republicans will bow to this new Axis of Teavil, and the executive and legislative branches will merge into a well-oiled death machine, rubber-stamping law after deranged law until civilisation collapses.
The only hope is that this alliance will fall victim to a “too many Hitlers” effect where the participants can’t cooperate because they each want to be seen as the primary destroyer of government.
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This is a great and telling quote from Rep. Joe Barton:
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So, is this the end? No. Sure, Trump has little interest in revisiting this particular tar baby any time soon. Even though he HAS talked about negotiating with Democrats in the future, that doesn’t matter. The president can’t introduce legislation and Ryan wouldn’t schedule a vote on anything that Democrats would agree on. And Ryan DOES care about this. But I don’t think that his main concern is the individual markets that have gotten much of the attention. He desperately wants to gut Medicade, preferably by turning it into some sort of block grant so that the states will have to take the blame for the actual cuts. This was his chance to do that while waving around “market based solutions,” to the individual market like the magicians other hand. He’ll be back with another plan to block grant Medicade, probably next year.
Trump is weakened by this, because it destroys the sense of inevitability that does so much to secure votes. “It’s going to pass with or without your vote,” is great to get recalcitrant legislators to stop trying to keep negotiating for a better deal. But the inevitability of this particular legislation was suspect from the beginning because just about everybody realized that this particular iteration had no chance in the Senate.
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I think it’s a huge problem. I don’t agree that just because people in academia are more left leaning that it’s okay for Republicans to create a “safe space” where they aren’t exposed to legitimate facts. There is a whole group of people in the country who are completely divorced from reality.
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Well, they didn’t help.
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Yeah, you don’t have to worry about that. Trump may make a comeback from here – he’s shown himself to be unexpectedly resilient, weathering scandals and gaffes that should have wrecked the careers of better men – but even in the unlikely case that he does so and throws his lot in with the Tea Party types, a “well-oiled death machine” it will not be. You don’t get well-oiled anything when everyone involved is some combination of incompetent, incoherent, and terminally addicted to grandstanding and diffuse anger.
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I think the problem they’re facing is that improvements generally can’t come from shifting the ACA rightward. What we have right now is inadequate, And likely will need to be tweaked or replaced. But it is very much just about as good as the right’s market based approach can get. Fixes that practically work aren’t really going to be in line with, or come from. Small government, minimize spending, taxes be gone conservatives.
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This could go so many places . . . but I’m gonna put it here, since the commenter who posted it over at Pajiba dedicated it to Paul Ryan. I had never heard of this before, and it’s glorious 
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He’s going to need votes from someplace if he thinks he can bypass conservatives.
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Just because we can’t change people’s minds doesn’t mean their minds don’t change. Trump’s approval just keeps going down. Authoritarian followers will leave a strongman who doesn’t seem strong. People who voted in desperation for a candidate promising any kind of change will become angry when they see no change coming. People who think that wealth is proof of merit believe that in the abstract only and are willing to make exceptions for individuals when they really get to know them.
Every reason to vote for Trump can be worn away at, but it might take time. The 17% of people who said they liked the healthcare bill just because Trump told them too are probably unreachable, but that’s a long way down from the 37% who still support Trump.
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Christ, what a facist. The subtext is all text with these motherfuckers.
In a tweet on Sunday morning, Trump lashed out at both the Freedom Caucus and the conservative groups, saying their actions had left “Democrats smiling in D.C.”
Priebus said it was a “real shame” that conservative lawmakers decided not to get behind the healthcare bill.
“And I think the president is disappointed in the number of people he thought were loyal to him that weren’t,” he said.
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