October 31, 2020:

October 30, 2020:

October 29, 2020:

October 28, 2020:

September 9, 2020: It's Health Care Stupid, Heartless Response, Not Promising Much

Citing work done by longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, Washington Post columnist Helaine Olen reports what Greenberg has found:

“Last month, longtime pollster Stan Greenberg listened to a number of focus groups conducted in working-class and rural areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine and Ohio. They were heavy on people who supported President Trump in 2016, and many were now leaning toward voting for Joe Biden in 2020. But if Democrats want to gain these voters, they’ll need to do better on one key issue.\

'In today’s working class and rural communities, health care is everything,” Greenberg wrote, in recent piece in the American Prospect. “The health care system is failing them, and they want someone to fix it.'

And they will vote for whomever promises to do just that — and abandon those leaders when they don’t deliver, Greenberg warns. It’s why they voted for Trump in 2016, and why they turned on the Republican Party in 2018. (It’s also, I should add, one reason people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but turned on the Democratic Party in 2010. As I’ve long observed, people seem to conflate the phrase “Affordable Care Act” with their own situation.)

As for now, it’s the covid-19 pandemic, but it’s more than that. It’s the epidemic of opioid deaths — which appear to be rising significantly this year — and the increasing costs of coverage, both of insurance, co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses. It’s the impossibility of navigating our health-care system and managing to emerge financially intact.

These long-running crises are more pressing than ever. More than 4 in 10 working-age Americans experienced inadequate health-care coverage at some point in the past year — either because they lacked health insurance or were forced to pay such a high percentage of their income in the form of deductibles and co-pays that they might as well have been. The percentage of people with a deductible of $1,000 or more has doubled since 2010 and now stands at 46 percent, according to a recent Commonwealth Fund survey. In particular, 40 percent of Latinos reported lacking insurance either at the time of the survey, or at some point within the past year, something to keep in mind when wondering why, as a group, they are much more likely to die from covid-19 than White Americans.

Over and over again, people sitting in the focus groups Greenberg listened in on talked about medical bills in the tens of thousands of dollars, and how the high deductibles made health insurance plans all but unusable — one person had a $16,000 deductible — and arbitrary denials that made their often hard lives even more precarious. One women discussed not being able to afford an EpiPen for a grandchild suffering from allergies after her insurance company refused to authorize it.

Biden says he plans to improve on the Affordable Care Act, increasing subsidies as well as demanding that Medicare negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over the price of drugs, something currently banned by law. He also says he will offer up a “public option” — a Medicare-like government offering that competes with private insurers — and expand Medicare to cover people 60 and up.

But how serious Biden, who has been a faithful servant of corporate interests for the entirety of his legislative career, is about fixing the monster that is our health-care system is entirely unclear. The medical industrial complex is adamantly against the public option, for starters. Biden says he’s committed, but when the Hill recently asked the Biden campaign whether officials would immediately present legislation on a public option, or start with smaller health-care fixes, the newspaper received no response. And as Libby Watson noted at the New Republic, at the Democratic convention, even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) didn’t mention the public option during his appearance.\

One of the conundrums of the Democratic primaries — when Medicare-for-all loomed large — was that a large number of people supported substantive health-care reform but often didn’t vote their preference. They’re supporting Biden over Trump, in many cases, because they want to see Trump gone, not because they support his position on health-care reform.

Moreover, Biden’s health-care pitch, much of which rested on the shaky premise that Americans loved their workplace health insurance, increasingly feels like something out of a time warp. Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs since mid-March, and the pace of weekly layoffs is picking up.

Republicans certainly have no answer. When a constituent with cancer recently called Sen. Thom Tillis’s (R-N.C.) office asking about the high cost of health insurance and her fears she would lose hers, the response was heartless. “Sounds like something you’re going to have to figure it out,” the staffer told her, while comparing the need for health insurance to a “new dress shirt” she shouldn’t buy if she couldn’t afford.

But if the Democrats don’t come up with a solution that actually helps people — if they don’t put a stop to surging premiums and deductibles, not to mention arbitrary denials and surprise medical bills and the entire cornucopia of financial horrors that comes with accessing the most necessary and needed health care in the United States, it seems likely voters will, once again, move on. If Biden is elected president but fails to deliver, don’t be surprised to discover that 2022 turns out to be a repeat of 2010.” (1)

The medical/insurance cartels are holding the country hostage. The awful truth is that not only are these cabals sucking nearly twenty five percent out of the national economy, but will will, when the time comes, hijack a huge percentage of the generational wealth when it changes hands.

Greenberg is right. As pointed out in these columns in 2017, Donald tRUMP ran to the 'left' of virtually the entire Republican field in 2016, promising affordable health care that would cover all, saying that “it isn't popular among Republicans”, and adding that the government would pay for it, because there would be great savings on the other side. A point reaffirmed by a study funded by the Koch Brothers, much to their chagrin.

Disgustus, of course, had already signed on to Paul Ryan's agenda meaning that his assurances were complete bullshit, but he knew they would resonate among the masses struggling under the weight of the burden and fearing for their well-being.

The question lingers? What if the Democrats had nominated Bernie? Sanders, famously, went on Fox News and held a town hall meeting. After presenting his argument in favor of government-run single-payer health care, the moderator asked the audience—a hand-picked FOX audience—how many supported the idea. Both the audience and the moderator were shocked when about 80 percent raised their hands. These were, by and large, tRUMP supporters responding to a populist appeal for an end to the exploitation of the sick and aged.

Biden, riding high in the polls, is an illusion. He is not building a coalition. Most of his support, as stated in the article, comes from an overweening desire by the American public to rid itself of the pestilence of tRUMP. The great 'coalition' of former Republicans, conservatives, Democrats and progressives will fracture on election night and Biden, should he be elected, will find himself with little genuine support backed by even less enthusiasm. Those on the 'right' will return to their errant ways, those on the 'left' will impatiently await the blows of cruel fate.

Biden's only saving grace is that at least he isn't promising much.

An Br'er Putin he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3rd

___________

1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/09/oft-forgotten-key-issue-2020/

September 5, 2020: Achieving the Unthinkable, Empty Shirt, The Future Won

Joe Kennedy III has lost. For the first time a Kennedy has lost in a Massachusetts Democratic primary.  He not only lost the election, but was crushed in a landslide, 56-44 per cent.  

The grandson of Robert F. Kennedy went about achieving the unthinkable, losing a contest that, earlier in the year, and leading in the polls by up to 17 points, looked like a cake-walk.  Indeed, many treated the Senator, who had labored over two decades in the House of Representatives, as a mere place-holder--someone to keep the seat warm until the young Kennedy decided to reclaim it.  It wasn't to be.  Not this time; not with this Senator. 

In his 'concession' speech, if one can call it that, the young congressman said that he was surprised that his 'name' dominated the contest. Really? For what other reason could there be for his upstart challenge to a sitting Senator from his own party?

Surely, it wasn't over the issues, for he and Senator Markey differ on very little—except, of course, the Senator is much more bold and progressive than his upstart challenger.

It is a bit ironic to run on the Kennedy name while presenting oneself as a pale imitation of the man you want to replace; for Markey had embraced The Green New Deal, as well as Elizabeth Warren's Wall Street reforms.  Indeed, he proved himself to be a pale imitation of his forebears; his grandfather, referencing Tennyson, once implored us To Seek A Newer World, this Kennedy, on the other hand, spoke of tired, old, solutions. 

 Kennedy, running to the 'right' of Markey, was much more circumscribed, revealing himself to basically be an 'empty shirt' proving, once again, the maxim that succeeding generations revert to the mean.

Of course, the Democratic establishment, principally House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, drawn by the magic of all things Kennedy, endorsed him. But the future, represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the up-and-coming New York Congresswoman who had authored, along with Markey, the Green New Deal said otherwise. The future won.

In one of Kennedy's Facebook postings I commented that he needs to drop the Roman numerals after his name, for it reeks of pomposity and privilege. In any case if one is to run on the legacy of youth, energy and all things Kennedy, one would expect an agenda of bold new ideas; one would expect a vision more about the future than the past. In old man Markey, the future won.

August 31, 2020: Robert Reich on tRUMP, Abject Worship, Front Row Seat

Trying to wrap his arms about the enormity of tRUMP and tRUMPism, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich posted this synopsis today on Facebook:

“One week ago, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police department, fired at least seven shots at the back of a Black man named Jacob Blake as he opened his car door, leaving the 29-year-old father of five probably paralyzed from the waist down.

After protests erupted, self-appointed armed militia or vigilante-type individuals rushed to Kenosha, including Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who traveled there and then, appearing on the streets with an AR-15 assault rifle, killed two people and wounded a third.

This is pure gold for a president without a plan, a party without a platform, and a cult without a purpose other than the abject worship of Donald Trump.

To be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control – leaving more than 180,000 Americans dead, tens of millions jobless and at least 30 million reportedly hungry.

So he’s counting on the reliable Republican dog-whistle. “Your vote,” Trump said in his speech closing the Republican convention Thursday night, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”

“We will have law and order on the streets of this country,” Vice President Mike Pence declared the previous evening, warning “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Neither Trump nor Pence mentioned the real threats to law and order in America today, such as gun-toting agitators like Rittenhouse, who, perhaps not coincidentally, occupied a front-row seat at a Trump rally in Des Moines in January.

Pence lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” earlier this year, implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Underwood was shot and killed by an adherent of the boogaloo boys, an online extremist movement that’s trying to ignite a race war.

Such groups have found encouragement in a president who sees “very fine people” supporting white supremacy.

The threat also comes from conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently nominated Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th congressional district and promoter of QAnon, whose adherents believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Trump has praised Greene as a “future Republican star” and claimed that QAnon followers “love our country.”

And from people like Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of Trump’s campaign advisory board, who was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention until she retweeted an antisemitic rant about a supposed Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land.

Clearly the threat also comes from hotheaded, often racist police officers who fire bullets into the backs of Black men and women or kneel on their necks so they can’t breathe. Needless to say, there was little mention at the Republican convention of Jacob Blake, and none of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.

And the threat comes from Trump’s own lackeys who have brazenly broken laws to help him attain and keep power. Since Trump promised he would only hire “the best people,” 14 Trump aides, donors and advisers have been indicted or imprisoned.

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani – who ranted at the Republican convention about rioting and looting in cities with Democratic mayors – has repeatedly met with the pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach, whom American intelligence has determined is “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”\

In addition, federal prosecutors are investigating Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine with two men arrested in an alleged campaign finance scheme.

Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who had been a major Trump campaign donor before taking over the post office, is being sued by six states and the District of Columbia for allegedly seeking to “undermine” the postal service as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail during the pandemic.\

Not to forget the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who spoke to the Republican convention while on an official trip to the Middle East, in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials of the executive branch other than the president and vice-president from engaging in partisan politics.

You want the real threat to American law and order? It’s found in these Trump enablers and bottom-dwellers. They are the inevitable excrescence of Trump’s above-the-law, race-baiting, me-first presidency. It is from the likes of them that the rest of America is in serious need of protection.

What do you think?”

I think we are in deep shit. We are witnessing the destruction of the republic from a front-row seat.

An br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

___________

1. https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/posts

August 30, 2020: Vacuous Nonsense, Empty-Handed, No Promises to Break

The proceedings have finally come to a merciful end. Disgustus has had his day. The quadrennial gathering of swine have labored mightily and delivered a rat. For the ReSCUMlickan Party, the Grand Old Prostitute, is babbling vacuous nonsense and has left the country—desperately in need—empty-handed.

Disgustus, famously, promises the best steaks but delivers tripe. No matter, the maggot hats rush to the rotting meat falling from the carcass. It is their usual fetid fare. But now, he promises nothing at all.

For the first time in living memory, perhaps the first time since political conventions came into being early in the 19^th century, a major political party has failed to produce a party platform. In doing so, they tell us more than they suspect, for they have brought forth candidates but no ideas, confessing by their actions, and in-actions, that they have, literally, no idea where to lead the country.

We know, from bitter experience, that they have no idea how to lead the country, now they openly confess that they don't know where to lead it. Finally, the truth is out. The ReSCUMlickan Party is intellectually, as well as morally, bankrupt.

What we are left with is all tRUMP, all the time; a political movement that now exists for no other reason than to make a pig's breakfast of what has been built and to worship the golden swine. Vandalism and The Vandal; at least this time around there will some measure of honesty, for there will be no promises to break.

Our great and powerful Oz takes no responsibility and promises nothing. An empty shirt posturing and preening like unto a living god.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 29, 2020: Litany of Lies, Conceal The Culprit, Just Another Screed

Caesar Disgustus, besmirching yet another monument—this time the executive mansion—by emptying the latrine of the body politic, onto the White House lawn. Addressing a sea of maggot hats our erstwhile emperor told the assembled that, among other things: He is doing a great job fighting the tRUMP virus; he is not. That we lead the world in testing: we do not. That he is introducing approved therapies to deal with the tRUMP virus; we are not. That we have built three hundred miles of wall on the Southern border; we have not. That Joe Biden wants to bulldoze the suburbs; he has no such plans. It was a litany of lies.

Disgustus, a pathological liar unable to utter any truth except by accident, must now resort to his only known talent: gross deceit. The record demands it. Like any two-bit criminal he must cover up the evidence in order to conceal the culprit.\

For the facts tell the story: The United States has 4 percent of the world's population but nearly a quarter of the tRUMP Virus cases killing nearly 20 percent of those taken by the tRUMP Virus. Only Brazil, also suffering from jaw-dropping incompetent leadership, comes anywhere close to the United States in the mishandling of the crisis. Under Disgustus, the United States leads the industrialized world in unemployment, business failures, skyrocketing public debt, and a looming housing crisis that threatens to cripple the economy.

One would think that, violating yet another political protocol, this time the use—or misuse—of the executive mansion, that our erstwhile Caesar would have made an effort to rise to the occasion and deliver a serious, deliberative effort. Instead it was the usual tripe, red meat for the attending maggots.

It was all part and parcel to virtually everything else he's done. Disgustus never surprises, he can always be relied upon to scrape the scum from the bottom of the barrel and then smear it all over the rest of us. 

.

His promise that there would be a vaccine by year's end must be taken with the same veracity that, you may recall, he told Chris Wallace at the end of June that he would have a replacement for Obamacare within two weeks. With a straight face he assured the reporter on national television that a bill was in the works and that he would sign it within a fortnight. Another of the over 15,000 bold-faced lies told by this scum in his less than four years stinking up Oval Office.

So the effort, held before over a thousand mask-less denizens, had the fact-checkers working overtime, finally throwing up their hands and declaring the whole mess just another screed delivered with the same, predictable mendacity.

And so, another political norm has been shit-canned, another guard-rail dismantled, as Disgustus defiles yet another national monument. First it was Mt. Rushmore, now the White House itself.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

August 28, 2020: The Real Fraud, Nowhere to Turn, Despise His Ass

“They're trying to rig the election” Disgustus bellows before an adoring crowd of maggot hats. In tRUMPspeak this means that he is trying to rig the election. The Daily Beast is reporting today that the tRUMP campaign, in full panic mode, is doing its utmost to restrict Democratic turnout in the upcoming election.

“On June 29,” writes David Lurie, “the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit demanding the voiding of the efforts of Pennsylvania's state officials to facilitate mail voting during the pandemic. Among other things, Pennsylvania is allowing the use of ballot drop boxes, so voters can avoid returning ballots through the mails. In light of revelations that Trump's recently installed Postmaster General (and fundraiser), Louis DeJoy, deliberately engineered new inefficiencies and delays at the Postal Service (Particularly in Philadelphia), the need for drop boxes is even more clear. But that's only made the Trump campaign more determined to prevent their use.” (1)

Referring to “fraud” no fewer than 51 times, the campaign filed a motion before Judge Nicholas Ranjan, a tRUMP appointee who, recognizing the centrality of possible fraud, demanded evidence. The campaign could provide none, claiming that, well, it just makes common sense. It makes “common sense” only in the minds of those about to be run out of office by angry voters.

Indeed, Lurie sites a study by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative stink tank, revealing that over 9 years there were only 15 cases of voter fraud in the 5 states that provide for mail-in voting, hardly enough to rig an election.

But note that our Caesar Disgustus and his minions are not opposed to all mail-in or absentee ballots (for Disgustus and his larvae regularly vote by mail), but are seeking to restrict this means of voting in heavily populated areas, where people are most likely, given the congestion, to vote by mail. These, of course, are heavily Democratic precincts.

And, like the voter I.D. Law in North Carolina which a federal judge ruled unconstitutional because it discriminated against minority communities “with laser precision”, so the attempt to suppress the vote by legally restricting mail-in ballots only in certain communities and precincts, is yet another attempt by the GOP and our Caesar Disgustus to suppress Democratic turn-out and steal yet another election.

The problem is a serious one, since DeJoy has engineered a near collapse of the Postal Service, removing and destroying 671 sorting machines, mostly from large metropolitan areas, and tearing out postal drop boxes from street corners. These are only the latest in a series of outrages as he has curbed overtime and allowed mail to pile up.

The polls tell the story: Between 68 and 80 percent of Americans tell pollsters that the country is moving in the wrong direction. North of 50 percent of the general population say that they won't vote for the swine under any circumstance. Normally the greater the likelihood that those polled will vote the better the polling numbers for the Republican. That is, as you look over the polling numbers, what one sees is that tRUMP  logs far more unfavorable numbers among the general population than among register voters; and far more unfavorable numbers among registered voters than among likely voters. Those in charge of the campaign know that they cannot expand the electorate; that to do so will mean crushing defeat. 

He knows that he now has nowhere to turn, for registering a new voter will, on balance, only add to his electoral defeat as, far more than the likely jury that will show up election day, the general public despise his ass. There is only one avenue left: suppress the vote. And that, is what he intends to do.

Yes, there are those who are now working hard to rig this election, but it isn't the Democrats. It's tRUMP.

An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Flush this turd, November 3^rd.

__________

1. https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-voter-fraud-proof-turned-022443280.html