Tuesday, May 09, 2017
Trump has Twitter meltdown over Sally Yates' testimony to the Senate. ey look, Donald Trump is having a tantrum on Twitter again. This time, it's because a Senate hearing heard testimony that his top national security adviser had lied to his administration and had been “compromised” by the Russians.
The great American whitelash claims new victims every day. Lingering in the deepest corners of our national soul is the idea that this is and will always be a white nation. And we pay for this idea with our blood | Eddie S Glaude Jr | Opinion | The Guardian
"Our times are exceedingly dark. No matter what pundits or politicians – even so-called progressive ones – may say, racism remains a central feature of this society, and this fact isn’t simply about the victimization of black people.
Consider Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old freshman from the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, who is now dead. A policeman shot him in the head with a rifle and offered an account of the circumstances that was contradicted by video evidence. He now faces murder charges. Jordan’s family grieves in public for the loss of their child. It is an old, haunting ritual in this country."
The great American whitelash claims new victims every day | Eddie S Glaude Jr | Opinion | The Guardian
Republican Death Wish - The New York Times
"The obscene spectacle of House Republicans gathering last week in the Rose Garden to celebrate the House’s passage of a bill that would likely strip insurance coverage from tens of millions of Americans, while simultaneously serving as a massive tax break for the wealthy, had the callous feel of the well-heeled dancing on the poor’s graves.
Republicans had painted themselves into a corner. For seven years they had incessantly defamed the Affordable Care Act as nothing short of a dispatch from the devil. They told their constituents that they had a better plan, one that provided everything people liked about the A.C.A. and eliminated everything they didn’t.
As Donald Trump claimed in January, ‘We’re going to have insurance for everybody.’ He continued, ‘There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.’
That, like so much else coming from these folks’ mouths, was a lie.
The bill passed by the House eliminates popular features like guaranteed price protections for people with pre-existing conditions, by allowing states to apply for waivers to remove these protections. Instead of universal insurance coverage, regardless of whether one could ‘pay for it’ as Trump promised, the bill would move in the opposite direction, pricing millions out of coverage.
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The A.C.A. had made a basic societal deal: The young, healthy and rich would subsidize access to insurance for the older, sicker and poorer. But this demanded that the former gave a damn about the latter, that people genuinely believed that saving lives was more important than saving money, that we weren’t living some Darwinian Hunger Games of health care where health and wealth march in lockstep.
Charles M. Blow Politics, public opinion and social justice. Senators Save the Empire MAY 4 Trump’s Degradation of the Language MAY 1 Resilience of the Resistance APR 24 A Fake and a Fraud APR 20 100 Days of Horror APR 17 See More »
Prunella Arnold 13 minutes ago You said it, Mr. Blow. The gathering in the Rose Garden is obscene, a leering slavering death squadron, tantamount to a Biblical plague. The... RjW 13 minutes ago Ready, aim, fire them all...Repair/replace with a national single payer system! Jackie Thomas 13 minutes ago I guess it is back to seeing jars at the local convenience stores asking people to donate money for someone's very expensive medical... \
Once again, the party that is vehemently ‘pro-life’ for ‘persons’ in the womb demonstrates a staggering lack of empathy for those very same lives when they are in the world. What is the moral logic here? It is beyond me.
Let’s cut to the quick: Access to affordable health care keeps people alive and healthy and keeps families solvent. Take that away, and people get sick, run up enormous, crippling debt and in the worst cases, die. It is really that simple.
People may conveniently disassociate a vote cast in marbled halls from the body stretched out in a wooden box, but make no mistake: They are linked.
In House Speaker Paul Ryan’s feckless attempt to defend this moral abomination of a bill during his floor speech last week, he said, ‘Let’s give people more choices and more control over their care.’
But this so-called restoration of choice would be in practice, for many, a sentence to death.
Republicans like the Idaho congressman and House Freedom Caucus member Representative Raúl R. Labrador deny this most basic of truths. Labrador said last week at a town hall, ‘Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.’ It was a stunning expression of idiocy.
According to a 2009 study conducted by Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, ‘nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance,’ and ‘uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts.’
An analysis last month by the Center for American Progress estimates removing price protections for pre-existing conditions would mean that ‘individuals with even relatively mild pre-existing conditions would pay thousands of dollars above standard rates to obtain coverage.’
Republicans are likely to pay dearly for this outrage. Nate Silver expressed his thoughts in a piece headlined: ‘The Health Care Bill Could Be A Job-Killer For G.O.P. Incumbents,’ pointing out that the Republican bill is even more unpopular than the Affordable Care Act was when it was being debated, and if Republicans face the same electoral backlash that Democrats faced, ‘it could put dozens of G.O.P.-held seats in play.’ Silver acknowledges that there are ‘mitigating factors’ that could soften the blow for Republicans, but conversely adds, ‘There’s even a chance that Republicans could suffer a bigger penalty than Democrats did.’
On Friday, The Cook Political Report changed its ratings in 20 districts ‘all reflecting enhanced opportunities for Democrats’ and pointed out:
‘House Republicans’ willingness to spend political capital on a proposal that garnered the support of just 17 percent of the public in a March Quinnipiac poll is consistent with past scenarios that have generated a midterm wave.’
1263 COMMENTS Not only is the bill unpopular among voters, it’s also unpopular in the medical establishment. As The New York Times reported on Thursday: ‘It is a rare unifying moment. Hospitals, doctors, health insurers and some consumer groups, with few exceptions, are speaking with one voice and urging significant changes to the Republican health care legislation that passed the House on Thursday.’
Whatever eventually comes of the bill, the death threat it poses for many Americans may well be a death wish Republicans have just issued for their own careers. As House Democrats sang as their Republican colleagues made their self-immolating votes: ‘Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.’
I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 8, 2017, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Republican Death Wish. Today's Paper|Subscribe"
(Via.)
Sally Yates Tells Senators She Warned Trump About Michael Flynn - The New York Times
Sally Yates Tells Senators She Warned Trump About Michael Flynn - The New York Times: "
"WASHINGTON — Less than a week into the Trump administration, Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general, hurried to the White House with an urgent concern. The president’s national security adviser, she said, had lied to the vice president about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
‘We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible,’ Ms. Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday. ‘To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.’
But President Trump did not immediately fire the adviser, Michael T. Flynn, over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Mr. Flynn remained in office for 18 more days. Only after the news of his false statements broke publicly did he lose his job on Feb. 13.
Ms. Yates’s testimony, along with a separate revelation Monday that President Barack Obama had warned Mr. Trump not to hire Mr. Flynn, offered a more complete public account of Mr. Flynn’s stunning fall from one of the nation’s most important security posts.
Continue reading the main story The Trump White House The historic moments, head-spinning developments and inside-the-White House intrigue. How the White House Explains Waiting 18 Days to Fire Michael Flynn MAY 9 Trump Advisers Call for More Troops to Break Afghan Deadlock MAY 8 Trump Walks Back Threat to Defund Black Colleges MAY 8 Tiffany Trump Will Attend Georgetown Law MAY 8 Judges Weigh Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ Remarks at Appeals Court Hearing MAY 8 See More »
Nancy 3 minutes ago Sally Yates shows the men in the Senate what integrity means. She has twice acted heroically at a moment when we desperately need heroes. ... Jusme 3 minutes ago Lock him up. Arlee 3 minutes ago Donald Trump as well as Michael Flynn are Russian assets. There is only one explanation for Trump's behavior with his tax returns and with... SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT It also raised fresh doubts about Mr. Trump’s judgment in keeping Mr. Flynn in place despite serious Justice Department concerns. White House officials have not fully explained why they waited so long.
‘I don’t have any way of knowing what, if anything, they did,’ Ms. Yates said. ‘If nothing was done, then certainly that would be concerning.’"
Monday, May 08, 2017
Backlash against Trumpcare erupts across heartland | MSNBC
"WASHINGTON — Less than a week into the Trump administration, Sally Q. Yates, the acting attorney general, hurried to the White House with an urgent concern. The president’s national security adviser, she said, had lied to the vice president about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
‘We wanted to tell the White House as quickly as possible,’ Ms. Yates told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Monday. ‘To state the obvious: You don’t want your national security adviser compromised with the Russians.’
But President Trump did not immediately fire the adviser, Michael T. Flynn, over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Mr. Flynn remained in office for 18 more days. Only after the news of his false statements broke publicly did he lose his job on Feb. 13.
Ms. Yates’s testimony, along with a separate revelation Monday that President Barack Obama had warned Mr. Trump not to hire Mr. Flynn, offered a more complete public account of Mr. Flynn’s stunning fall from one of the nation’s most important security posts.
Continue reading the main story The Trump White House The historic moments, head-spinning developments and inside-the-White House intrigue. How the White House Explains Waiting 18 Days to Fire Michael Flynn MAY 9 Trump Advisers Call for More Troops to Break Afghan Deadlock MAY 8 Trump Walks Back Threat to Defund Black Colleges MAY 8 Tiffany Trump Will Attend Georgetown Law MAY 8 Judges Weigh Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ Remarks at Appeals Court Hearing MAY 8 See More »
Nancy 3 minutes ago Sally Yates shows the men in the Senate what integrity means. She has twice acted heroically at a moment when we desperately need heroes. ... Jusme 3 minutes ago Lock him up. Arlee 3 minutes ago Donald Trump as well as Michael Flynn are Russian assets. There is only one explanation for Trump's behavior with his tax returns and with... SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT It also raised fresh doubts about Mr. Trump’s judgment in keeping Mr. Flynn in place despite serious Justice Department concerns. White House officials have not fully explained why they waited so long.
‘I don’t have any way of knowing what, if anything, they did,’ Ms. Yates said. ‘If nothing was done, then certainly that would be concerning.’"
Sunday, May 07, 2017
Health Act Repeal Could Threaten U.S. Job Engine - The New York Times
"Another vulnerable slice of the population is workers who are a few years away from 65, when Medicare kicks in. “If there is a group that loses out the most, it’s near-seniors,” said Craig Garthwaite, director of the Healthcare Program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “Their health care is so expensive, but the tax credit in the House bill caps out at $4,000.”
Health Act Repeal Could Threaten U.S. Job Engine - The New York Times
Saturday, May 06, 2017
The Unrecognized Terrorism of Police Shootings
"The pain is immense. And yet it’s been there in our hearts for so long we’ve grown numb to it. But it’s that chronic pain in your spirit that'll really get to you. But how can you not be in pain when you’ve watched so many unarmed Black people killed at the hands of their own government? There are so many that it’s impossible to keep up. This week, Jordan Edwards joined The List, and the pain is exponentially greater because he’s one of hundreds in our collective mind. The List I’m speaking of is both personal and universal—there are names that are on everyone’s list, like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Oscar Grant, as well as names that are on my list that may not be on yours. I can’t forget about Aiyana Stanley-Jones, the seven-year-old girl killed as she slept in her home by police raiding the wrong house. Her story haunts me. I’m sure there are names on your list that aren’t on mine, maybe one that happened in your area that didn’t go national. But the fact that there is The List, a macabre roll call of unforgettable, avoidable deaths—that is unconscionable. And deeply painful. Because taken altogether, these are killings that have the impact of terrorism—this is violence against civilians that sends a message to others. The message is the Black body means little in this society. The List is so long that the stories come at you in droves, causing cognitive overload that makes it harder to process it all. This week we got one new story and two updates on older ones. Jordan Edwards—a cherubic 15-year-old boy with a 3.5 GPA and a spot on the varsity football team—was neither suspected of a crime nor armed when Officer Roy Oliver shot into a moving car—against police procedure—and killed Edwards. Edwards was a good kid, but it didn't matter. The penalty of Blackness outshone his character. "
A truly evil man from an evil Republican Party. Alabama congressman: “People who lead good lives” don’t have preexisting conditions - Salon.com
Mo Brooks is a truly evil man.
"President Donald Trump may be desperate to score a legislative win with Trumpcare 2.0, but if members of his own party keep coming across as insensitive to the needs of the less fortunate, that will be increasingly difficult for him to do.
Take Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday claimed that “people who lead good lives” don’t have to worry about dealing with pre-existing conditions — like a stroke, or heart problems or birth defects.
As Brooks told Tapper: “My understanding is that (the new proposal) will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool. That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people — who’ve done things the right way — that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
Alabama congressman: “People who lead good lives” don’t have preexisting conditions - Salon.com: ""
(Via.)
No Country for This Old Man - The New York Times
“In his three calamitous months in office, President Trump has visited a property that is part of his business empire nearly once every three days. And while Barack Obama had gone to nine countries in that amount of time, Trump has been to no other nation — though he just announced an overseas trip for later this month.
That’s not surprising, given Trump’s nativist biases and his need to curl up at night in high-thread-count sheets in his own properties.
But do you know how many times Trump, as president, has been west of the Mississippi? Zero. While most presidents are curious about the land and people under their rule, Trump treats the sunset side of the 100th meridian as a foreign country.
Yet, for something he has never seen from Air Force One, Trump is now trying to do historic and vengeful damage to a vast part of the country that he clearly knows nothing about. With one executive order, he set in motion a plan that could lift federal protection from some of the most stunning scenery and singular cultural landmarks in the world — land owned by the American public.
Timothy Egan The environment, the American West and politics. White House of Grifters APR 28 Poisons Are Us APR 14 The Soul of a Corporation APR 7 Trump’s Chumps MAR 31 The Elephant Hunter of Trump Tower MAR 24 See More »
With another stroke of the presidential pen, Trump issued a directive that could open oil drilling off the California coast, something that hasn’t been done since the disastrous Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969."
Friday, May 05, 2017
Dumb, dumber and just plain stupid. Nervous college campuses await new Georgia gun law | 11alive.com
"ATLANTA -- Georgia public colleges woke up Friday with new graduates celebrating – combined with a case of nerves over a new law signed Thursday by Governor Nathan Deal. The law allows holders of state permits to carry concealed pistols on campus
When he signed Campus Carry, Gov. Deal wrote "the path to higher education often travels through dangerous territory." The question at GSU a day later was whether the governor has made some of that territory even more dangerous."
Nervous college campuses await new Georgia gun law | 11alive.com
Is Political Hubris an Illness? - The New Yorker
President Trump, in the months since he entered the White House, has become a kind of international case study of mental health’s role in politics.
"President Trump, in the months since he entered the White House, has become a kind of international case study of mental health’s role in politics.
In February, 2009, the British medical journal Brain published an article on the intersection of health and politics titled “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?” The authors were David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary, who is also a physician and neuroscientist, and Jonathan Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, who has studied the mental health of politicians. They proposed the creation of a psychiatric disorder for leaders who exhibited, among other qualities, “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular form of incompetence when impulsivity, recklessness and frequent inattention to detail predominate.”
Owen and Davidson studied the behavior and medical records of dozens of American and British political leaders, from Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who took office in 1908, to President George W. Bush, who left office in 2009. Across that century, they identified a tendency among some otherwise high-achieving individuals to close themselves off from critics and to overestimate their odds of success. Neville Chamberlain wrongly believed that he could appease Hitler; Tony Blair supported the invasion of Iraq even after his envoy informed him that the plan had “no leadership, no strategy, no coördination,” among other defects. When a leader succumbs to hubris syndrome, the authors wrote, his experience at the top has distorted his personality and decision-making.
“The Greeks warned us about it,” Owen told me recently, when I called him at home, in Britain. “When you see it, you’ve got to be very conscious that you may be watching somebody who is intoxicated with power.” After training as a doctor, Owen spent thirty-two years in politics, heading the Foreign Office from 1977 to 1979, and he developed a fascination with the ways in which C.E.O.s, dictators, and parliamentarians who are otherwise successful in their professions can be warped by the pressures and self-glorification presented by power. “It takes one to know one,” he said, dryly. “For a lot of us who are in leadership roles, the problem with the word ‘narcissism’ is that it has a very Freudian linkage and, if you use it, people will shy away from it.”
Owen was only partly interested in establishing a formal diagnosis. (Hubris syndrome does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.) More fundamentally, he wanted to call out a kind of public cognitive bias, in which voters and shareholders are often slow to acknowledge signs of irrational behavior in their chosen leaders because that acknowledgment reflects poorly on the decision to put them there. “You get rumors or people are telling you that things aren’t going all that marvellously, and either you’ve made a wrong choice or something has happened to him,” Owen told me. He helped establish a charity, the Daedalus Trust, which raises public awareness of hubris syndrome in public life, and he encourages institutions—banks, schools, political entities—to assess leaders’ mental health on a fixed schedule. “Then it’s easier to spot an incipient intoxication of power,” he said.
President Donald Trump, in the months since he entered the White House, has become a kind of international case study of mental health’s role in politics. To his friends and allies, he elicits an array of anodyne, even appealing, adjectives: unpredictable, fearless, irascible, sly. Many of his counterparts in diplomacy, and in American politics, are rapidly shedding the euphemisms that they once used to express their appraisals, however. When Trump, after a confused viewing of a Fox News segment, urged people at a rally to look at “what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?,” suggesting that an incident—which no one could identify; nothing notable had happened the night before—had something to do with Sweden being overrun by refugees, Swedes reached a judgment. “They thought the man had gone bananas,” Carl Bildt, Sweden’s former Prime Minister and foreign minister, told Susan Glasser, of Politico, in an interview published this week. “It was a somewhat unsettling thing to see the president of the United States without any factual basis whatsoever lunge out against a small country in the way that he did.”
Though politicians often accuse each other of being crazy, Trump has inspired a more clinical and sober discussion. (In the magazine this week, I write about proposals in Congress to assess the President’s mental health.) In recent days, the discussion of Trump’s stability has entered a blunter phase. Over the weekend, Trump made a series of bizarre comments, including questioning the history of the Civil War, saying he was “looking at” breaking up banks (prompting a stock-market slide), and demonstrating unfamiliarity with basics of the health-care bill known as Trumpcare. The Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told an interviewer that it was “among the most bizarre recent twenty-four hours in American Presidential history,” adding, “It was all just surreal disarray and a confused mental state from the President.” Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman, told his television audience, “My mother’s had dementia for ten years. . . . That sounds like the sort of thing my mother would say today.”
In the Washington Post on Thursday, the conservative columnist George Will wrote, “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability.” After months of bemoaning Trump’s policies and incivility, Will is now bluntly warning of his instability. “Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion, that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances,” Will wrote. “So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.”
When I asked Owen if Trump meets the threshold of hubris syndrome, he replied that Trump was a hard case, because he reigned over a family business for so long before entering politics. “He has obviously got hubris, but did he acquire it in his business? What was he like when he was twenty? I refuse to put a label on him because I don’t know enough.” Owen added, “Watch him very carefully. It’s a phenomenon that needs to be analyzed, but it will not be very revealing to put labels on it that are inappropriate just because you desperately want to say, ‘He’s crazy.’ ”
Is Political Hubris an Illness? - The New Yorker
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