If Trumpcare Fails

Maybe now he can focus on another one of his pet projects — the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York State so the Central Park Five can be executed for a crime they did not commit. I have a feeling that one would pass both houses of Congress and their constituents would be happy happy.

“Trump didn’t do this on purpose, it was just blind luck” said the increasingly nervous man for the 68th straight time.

Maybe Trump gave Ryan just enough rope.

But if Trump believes that “no deal” is better than a “bad deal”, then one would think he’d be advocating no vote at all. The optics of Trumpcare (or, as I’ve seen it referred to as, the Republican Insurance Plan) failing in a very public vote in a GOP-controlled House are far worse than the optics of just no vote, at all. That would allow Trump to move on to other things without the millstone of a failed vote around his neck.

Or maybe it’ll pass. I can easily see enough “moderate” Republicans ultimately supporting the bill for the right bribes.

I am hoping Trump wants this awful deal to fail. This is a deal that has only 17 % popular support (56 % strongly against), there is absolutely *no* constituency beyond Congress clamoring for this deal (and yet note, how the pro-capitalist ideologues are trying to push it out in 1/10th the time spent on passing Obamacare). I’m not thinking even the PTB in the insurance industry and medical service providers like this bill (fewer insured, fewer paying customers). The original bill was awful enough, the most recent version (stripping many currently-required essential services away) is even worse.

For all the dire warnings of “death spiral” of the private insurance industry under Obamacare, to me it’s hard to imagine that Ryancare wouldn’t make this worse (more people lose insurance, more people have to rely on emergency room care, providers raise prices to pass the cost of this to those having insurance, insurance companies raise premiums to recoup costs, higher premiums in turn lead to more people unable to afford insurance, etc). A “death spiral” of private insurance might in the long run be a good thing (forcing Medicare-for-all) but a lot of people would suffer before that necessity became obvious (and given how corrupted our leadership is across the board, and how insulated they are from the distress facing ordinary Americans, I’m not 100 % sure even then).

Ian is surely correct that a failed vote is the best political outcome for Trump.

I am fairly certain that Trump sees it that way as well.

It’s really amusing to see how many are willing to just read their own personal wishes into a confusing situation, though. 🙂

I concur with RC’s remark above, Mandos postulate that Trump is so-ooo Stu-pid that he can’t figure out what is best for himself is foily.

Oh, and one other thing, we are talking about GOPcare vs GOPcare, Obamacare is the early 90’s Heritage-Plan*/RomnyCare, watching “liberals” laying themselves down on the wire to defend the thing would be humorous, were it not so pathetic.

* A plan that was meant to forestall true healthcare reform, alas, unneeded at the time, thanks to Hillary’s ministrations.

Trump called to have the bill pulled. No vote on it. Even he knows what a disaster it is to vote on something you know will fail to “take names”. Anyone who thought such a strategy was smart like five minutes ago just because Trump seemingly employed it can stop now. Or wait, that was his strategy all along!!! Remember, he can never fail.

Stewart, well never say never with Trump: Bob Acosta of CNN is reporting his sources say Trump wanted the vote anyway, and that Ryan begged him not to force one. So we have finger pointing and circular firing squads. Trump or Ryan, the answer is clear: Trump wanted a vote, Ryan knew it’d be a disaster. Matt Fuller reports that there was maybe 170-180 votes for it.

@ Mallam

Other sources, like NPR, are also reporting that Ryan went to the White House and asked Trump in a private meeting to call off the vote for now.

That sounds to me like Ryan needed to avoid the vote, and promised to do something for Trump in exchange later on.

Before you dance on the graves of those who got it ‘wrong,’ remind yourself that delaying the vote was never part of the question.

It’s always hard to predict what weasel pols will do, they are so addicted to their secrecy and kabuki, but when the facts change, the analysis also changes, n’est-ce pas?

They decided to have this political disaster on a Friday afternoon, not surprisingly. While Dems and the MSM crow about this over the weekend the country will be mostly paying attention to other things, and Trump will be playing golf and cooking up his next distraction. Fun times ahead.

Ian,

as others have pointed out, “walking away” is not having the vote, not letting the vote take place. Government and law-making is not doing casino deals. It is not a question of whether Trump is “stupid” or otherwise, it is that “doing government” is a different skill from the things that Trump has done before. It is that there is a parliamentary entity who is not precisely a negotiating partner, not precisely a competitor, not precisely a subordinate entity (not at all, technically), etc, etc, and actions that take place in that parliamentary entity are not precisely business deals. (A very neoliberal idea, that.)

I can, however, well believe that Trump might have wanted to *avoid* the vote. But at least from the comments here, I see that there are conflicting stories about who wanted to avoid what.

If Trump wants to “retaliate” against GOP congresscritters who voted against the bill, he would be retaliating against the people who *stopped* what is rightly known as a truckload of horse-hooey. ie, that would show that *this is the bill he wanted*. It is certainly possible that he wanted any bill to pass, and he wanted to move on to “more important” things like trade. Having a bad bill go through Congress under *his* name and then *fail* cannot bode well for his performance on “more important” things.

Having it *pass*, even though it is a bad bill is strictly better than failing on a bad bill. Even if the bill is bad.

I mean it’s great that the bill has not been put through, for those who would have been hurt by it. Whether the ACA will collapse on its own is another matter — since the ACA must be administered by, you know, the administration, they have some power to sabotage it, I gather.

The only people for this bill were capitalist ideologues who believe in magical free market unicorns which solve all problems, and for many of them, this bill wasn’t pure enough.

Yes, one ignores at one’s peril that these people exist and have power and have an influence on politics apart from that of corporate paymasters due to cultural narratives deeply embedded in American society. The true believers in the magical free market unicorns, they are real, and you cannot ignore the existence of Rand-worshippers.

And no, I have not read “The Art of the Deal” nor do I spend a lot of time considering Trump’s business smarts as a serious topic, in the same sense that reading homeopathy textbooks and trying to imagine how it works is low on my list of priorities — despite that homeopathy is a huge industry pulling in a lot of revenue! So, clearly, homeopathy is doing something right in something, but in the context of “how does it work as medicine?”, I suggest it’s not really a high-priority item, because, you know, it doesn’t.

In the same way, I will wait until something about Trump works as politics and as policy. Surely something about him works as politics — he got elected over Clinton, after all — but everything after that seems not to have gone to his advantage, neither in politics nor in policy. On the other hand, while the ACA is clearly suboptimal, look at the clever Chinese finger-trap design, almost precisely crafted to make it difficult for the GOP to get rid of it in one blow — partly because it is better than not having it!

But, as I keep saying, it’s early yet, maybe the 11-dimensional chess will take hold and he is actually steering the ship towards single-payer. Let’s all hold our breath…

Mallam; I could put a lot of links that call bullshit on your claim ~ “ObamaCare DID NOT spring from the right wing “think tank” Heritage Foundation”, but I like this one because it has you and right winger Hannity on the same page…which often the case with Hillary supporting nut jobs.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/ellen-qualls/aca-gop-health-care-plan-1993/

Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks: Koch Brothers Sabotage Trump’s Big Plans. Koch’s Americans For Prosperity have gathered $300 million to $400 million for next election cycle and are openly telling Rethugs in Congress anyone who votes for the RIP bill (Republican Insurance Plan) will not get a cent, but their primary opponents will, and those who vote against RIP will be rewarded.

When is the mighty God-Emperor going to bitchslap the Koch Brothers into quivering submission?

“…”

What’s that? I missed that? When what freezes over? 😈

As Mandos says (echoed by Michael Moore tonight) now the Pence Trump administration will now attack the ACA via administrative means, to try to make it implode (as a few commentators noted, the AHCA not only tried to undercut Medicaid’s funding, but also tried to undercut Medicare’s funding to push both towards a contrived fiscal “crises” that only could be “solved” by massive cuts):

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/think-gop-health-insurance-overhaul-021354571.html

And while I usually can’t stand the likes of Ezra Klein, he seems to echo Ian’s comments about Trump failing his base, and says that Ryan, Prince, and Preibus essentially ran this:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/24/15039664/paul-ryan-donald-trump-ahca

Donald Trump promised to be a different kind of president. He was a populist fighting on behalf of the “forgotten man,” taking on the GOP establishment, draining the Washington swamp, protecting Medicaid from cuts, vowing to cover everyone with health care and make the government pay for it. He was a pragmatic businessman who was going to make Washington work for you, the little guy, not the ideologues and special interests.

And then it became Ryanism.

So, to echo Lisa’s contention (also Ian’s to a degree) that Trump isn’t big on policy, when he climbed into bed with the R establishment and courted the Cruz vote by brining Pence onboard the die for this betrayal was cast. Forget all the populist rhetoric, the show is going to be run by Ryan, by Pence, by Mnuchin, by Price. There is a correspondence with Obama, you could forget all the “hope and change”stuff when it became apparent that Timmeth and Larry were calling his shots. Trump supporters to maintain otherwise are beginning to sound just as tribalist and removed from reality as the Obamacrats who told each other that the “real Obama” was all-out doing the best he could to fight for them.

You have to hand it to the Freedom Caucus, though. If the “bold progressive” Dems had half their backbone to buck their own leadership over principle, Obamacare would have been far better.

Someone told me recently that The Art of the Deal was ghost written. I can well believe it. Long form writing takes both time and discipline. Can anyone see Trump for hours at a time tapping away at his computer? Me either. I can see Trump bloviating to a professional writer either taking notes or recording a few interviews, and then said writer going off to try to turn a mass of self-glorifying contradictions into something semi-coherent.

I say this because the deal, Ryancare, was not something he had ever shown any interest in previously. As mentioned above, he contradicted and betrayed his promises to his followers. He then did a shit awful job of trying to get it enacted. He bald-faced lied to his supporters. He was clueless about divisions within his own party. And fundamentally he failed to deal, to negotiate, or to persuade. It was “this or nothing”, “my way or the highway”, “there is no Plan B”. Some art of the deal.

Trump just lies. I mean I can not think of a politician in the last 30 years who doesn’t. But it is the nature of Trump’s lies. Perhaps it is the offhandedness of his lying. He won’t just tell you matter of factly that day is night. But that it is all his doing (and you can thank him now) and it’s wonderful, amazing, and great. Except what he is describing is a steaming mass of shit.

I have said before that Trump’s actual personnel and policies (in so far as policy can be applied to anything Trump does) are the polar opposite of his populist positions. I see Trump as talking the populist talk but walking the richman’s kleptocratic walk. Trumpcare/Ryancare would have slammed poorer Americans while favoring richer Americans. You look at his tax cuts which might be the next item up on his to-do list and it is more of this. Millions for the rich, crumbs for everyone else. Ditto with his public-private infrastructure spending, another one of his legislative priorities. Whatever happens, the rich must get their cut. I initially thought it would take a couple of years for his supporters to turn on him. But if things keep up as they are, his Presidency could implode a lot faster. Of course, that would leave us with a President Pence and an even greater crisis of legitmacy.

Hugh illuminates our present ruling class quite well, missing few details.
I find it very illustrative of the Usian’s willingness to suck hind tit.
I also see posting as more an exercise in self flagellation, as opposed to anything
resulting in meaningful change or action.
How many years have I, for one wasted, ranting/raging against the tides of governmental
edicts and politicians empty promises?
Too many for sure; but, do carry on if it makes you feel empowered and purposeful in your
endeavors; no matter how futile and empty…

@ Hugh

“His only function is inadvertent. He sharpens the contradictions of our ruling order. He not only shows how awful he is. He shows how awful both the Democrats and Republicans are.”

Exactly. Trump greatest value, to me, has always been his potential to destroy both parties. I view the destruction of the Dem party to be most essential, because only after that can we ever hope to get a party that actually represents regular folks.

But the possibility of also seeing the Republican party destroyed is just delicious gravy. Two birds with one stone. Priceless lol.

RC:

I believe the ACA will implode, and is already well on its way to doing so. The exchanges are disappearing, without competition the whole thing fails.

No quarrel with that . That’s why the the public option, or allowing people to buy-in Medicare, was so critical. My point was that Trumpcare doesn’t fix the problem, it only makes it worse. The lack of competition (mostly in red states) is largely because, following the model devised by the internet/cable companies, there is collusion among insurance providers to divvy up the country into blocks to restrict competition. You’d need *more aggressive* antitrust action and *more* aggressive regulation to fix that, and Trump is promising less.

As it stood in the recent bill Trumpcare required almost *nothing* covered by negotiations end–not outpatient care, not hospitalization, not lab tests, not rehab, not drugs, not preventative services, not mental health care, not pediatric care, not pregnancy, maternity, or prenatal care. Why then would anyone bother carrying any insurance at all if your insurance company reads back the fine print to you on what you thought was covered when you get the bill? You want to see a system implosion? You need look no further.

But here’s a quick patch: let anyone who’s been denied coverage, or faces premiums that exceed a certain percentage of their disposable income (after deductions; say, 10 %) automatically eligible for Medicare and/or Medicaid. Let the insurance industry’s greed to insure only the healthy and/or the young cut their own throat.

Exactly. Trump greatest value, to me, has always been his potential to destroy both parties. I view the destruction of the Dem party to be most essential, because only after that can we ever hope to get a party that actually represents regular folks.

I was hoping that Trump could remake the Republican party, kicking and screaming, into something less awful at least on economic policies. The great lesson of Trump’s win is that it demonstrated conclusively that the average Republican voter isn’t gung-ho about tax cuts for billionaires, lowering the corporate tax rate, repealing gay marriage, ending public education, deregulating Wall Street, ending or privatizing Medicaid and Medicare, or privatizing Social Security. The average Republican voter sees the country’s in a world of hurt, that their town of Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, but blame this on those new brown people coming in and think the solution to it all is electing Mr. Potter mayor (Democrats, by contrast, think that electing a *Ms. Potter* or a black or brown Mr. Potter solves the problem).

Trump didn’t need to go this route. I think Lisa has had it pegged right–his first disastrous mistake was selecting Pence and sucking up to the Cruz vote. He didn’t need the Cruz vote to win, if he had outflanked Clinton to her left in the general he might have won not only the electoral vote, but the popular vote too. He could have appointed non-ideologues and non-crooks to his cabinet. But he didn’t, as it turns out he’s no FDR after all, and his failure represents maybe as epic a chance for American revival as Obama’s failure to do the right things in 2009. In both cases the people they surrounded themselves with determines policy.

As for the Democrats–ugh. So far, the battle for trying to push the Clintonistas and Obamacrats out hasn’t gone so well. I agree with you that’s the real battle that counts.

Good point, Ché Pasa, about maybe it being just as well. Once upon a time, I was all for Single Payer or Medicare for All if you will, but now? Not so much. Not because it’s not the most effective way on paper, because it is, but because what is effective on paper would never make its way to reality once it passed through the crucible of the Permanent Government. It would be transmogrified into something that would be deleterious to The Little People and beneficial to The Rich — as is ALWAYS the case and that mechanism is now worse, but even more effective, than ever. Worse for The Little People means better for The Rich. That’s the equation and it’s as tried and true as the Theory of Relativity and maybe even more so since it’s more than a theory — it’s as factual as factual can be.

Still, it keeps nagging me — the phenomenon that is Donald Trump and his purpose. Not his purpose as in what his intentions are as if his intentions are anything but self-agrandizement and economic enrichment, but rather his purpose symbolically and whether that symbolic purpose was strategic on the part of those who wish to use the phenomenon that is Trump as a foil to further an even more pernicious agenda than just the boring ol’ Banality of Evil to which we’re accustomed.

Meanwhile, the Keystone Pipeline has been approved and its time to start constructing it. There will be no Gridlock in Congress over this because, applying our tried & true equation, it benefits The Rich at the expense of The Little People.

Trump Approves Keystone Pipeline

It’s interesting that the State Department is part of this process. If any issue related to energy is National Security, then how can Oil & Gas Concerns still be “private” and “for profit?” One would think the risk is too great to leave such matters in the hands of politically inexperienced CEO’s who are only interested in maximizing shareholder wealth. Instead, we have Rex Tillerson, a former energy company CEO, as Secretary of State and what a fine job he’s doing and what a fine job he’ll do.

The Trump administration gave the Keystone XL pipeline its key federal permit Friday, clearing a major hurdle for the project that former President Obama rejected in 2015.

“In making his determination that issuance of this permit would serve the national interest, the under secretary considered a range of factors, including but not limited to foreign policy; energy security; environmental, cultural, and economic impacts; and compliance with applicable law and policy,” State said.

I think the message is becoming more clear as to what the End Game is if Trump is a purposeful strategic foil and I think that End Game may be the utilization of a Pull Strategy by creating a pretext whereby The Unwashed Masses so yearn for decisive change of any sort that they are willing to accept a suspension of rights and the bold & unwavering assurance of Autocracy.

On Implosion:
If the Republicans let the existing health insurance system collapse, Trump will be able to say “I told you so”, but he is too lazy to do anything one way or the other about it. He doesn’t care. If the main-streamers decide to help the collapse, and somehow elude detection, that only helps the main-streamers coalesce a little as a force. To that extent Trump will welcome the result so he can move on to other things. However, Congress-critters are more vulnerable than Presidents, so the Dems should make a big show of trying to enter bills to repair the existing system and make the Republicans block them. It is not as though they haven’t done this for years already, but they have done it in a media blackout. The spot-light is on now, the contrast is higher. The Republicans can be painted as a group out to crush the have-nots now–and they should be.

StewartM;

I was agreeing with most of your comment until I came to this:

“The average Republican voter sees the country’s in a world of hurt, that their town of Bedford Falls has become Pottersville, but blame this on those new brown people coming in”

Patent nonsense; Trump won by carrying districts/counties in Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania that voted heavily for Obama, it was working class Obama voters that sent Mr Trump to the White House, not bigots. Until Democrats get that through their thick skulls, that [D]’s fail at the polls because their neoliberal/globalist-[neocolonial] policies have failed [for forty years], they will continue their death spiral. Not that [D]’s care.

They immigration issue [in the USA, not Europe] isn’t culture or skin, Mexicans don’t bow five times a day to Mexico City, Rome or some other 8th century power center in the hopes of realizing a new world empire. But Mexicans do take working class jobs that are in short supply and they do boost rents in working class neighborhoods and they do so in massive numbers. If working class people were getting raises for the last forty years and could quit a job where they were mistreated and get a better job, much of what you perceive to be “racism” would disappear.

To the elitists in the Democratic party it’s far easier to blame the victims of their self-serving policies by labeling them “racist”than address the basic needs of the working class.

The wealthy and the powerful don’t have a right to be represented as the wealthy and the powerful, meaning anything that’s legislated shouldn’t favor in any way the wealthy & the powerful as a designated group. Government shouldn’t be used to maintain or increase the disparity in wealth, yet a strong argument can be made that Government should instead seek to level the playing field and engender an egalitarian environment where all people can flourish and thrive and when I say flourish and thrive, I’m not necessarily talking about what’s in your wallet, but rather the means and access to live a purpose-driven life with minimal impact on the habitat that sustains and supports all life, human or otherwise.

Mind you, trying to *make* Obamacare fail due to, you know, administrative neglect, especially when one clearly has no intention of replacing it with something that covers more people, is, well, even more evil than passing Trumpcare.

@ S Brennan

They immigration issue [in the USA, not Europe] isn’t culture or skin, Mexicans don’t bow five times a day to Mexico City, Rome or some other 8th century power center in the hopes of realizing a new world empire. But Mexicans do take working class jobs that are in short supply and they do boost rents in working class neighborhoods and they do so in massive numbers

As I have argued, even given worst-case assumptions, immigration is NOT the huge job-killer it is made out to be. It is outweighed massively by other factors (fiscal policy, the Fed’s policy, outsourcing, Wall Street deregulation, lack of overall regulation of business, etc). Moreover, the Reagan economy’s policy of winking at illegal immigration (thundering against any legalization route, while quietly doing little to stop it) is the worst-case immigration scenario (it allows employers to hire illegals, then abuse them). Blaming immigrants for unemployment woes is a huge distraction created by the PTB, a “shiny! shiny!” to point attention away from their misdeeds which do far more harm.

Trump voters to a significant degree buy this lie. No, they don’t all do, and that doesn’t mean that they are inherently bigoted per se against immigrants as people but many of them mistakenly think that they are “stealing their jobs” and (based on Trump’s own policy positions in the campaign) are less bothered a lot of the crap that really kills jobs. They blame the brown people, but not Mr. Potter. And I’m talking as someone who lives in Appalachia, the home of lot of white working-class angst, and works in a technical field.

SBrennan:

And you feel so sure that the media has so indoctrinated others that you fail to offer the further argument used; that Mexicans are able to create jobs through their employment. And that is indeed true, but ignores the bloody obvious, anybody who takes a job does exactly the same thing, there is nothing unique about an immigrants ability to create economic activity outside of their numbers creating inflation on life’s necessities.

?? People who take productive work (and Mexicans do just that for the most part) *create* goods and services. So yes, while they bring their demand too, their participation in the economy is not inflationary. (There is unproductive work that is inflationary, sure, because it creates no goods or services, but this work isn’t being done by Mexicans). Nor are there a limited number of jobs that can only exist at a given time, and the US is hardly filled up with housing. Would you say we were running out of space and we were driving up housing costs unbearably during the baby boom, when our population was growing much faster? Even allowing that US housing costs ares soley determined by population density, the US is ranked 179th in population density, far less crammed than Germany, Denmark, the UK, all Asian countries (including China) and more on par with Sweden and Norway.

So much of inflation that does exist does so because we don’t regulate markets but allow collusion and gamed markets. It’s not caused by too much demand, indeed the paradox is that with an economy that has such diminished purchasing power like ours we still have any inflation at all.

As for your links–sure, immigrants make up most of our population growth. Without it, though, we’d have a declining, aging, population, and that’s not ideal either. Japan is not the model you want to follow at least not in the short run (though for the world population to stabilize, immigration helps everyone achieve a soft landing). The US population growth rate (0.7 %) is still considerable below the world average (1.11 %). Moreover the point your argument–that this benefits China–is refuted by the fact that wages as share of GDP in China *fell*–yes, fell–after China joined the WTO, only rising recently again but not back up to pre-WTO levels. Global capitalism ain’t been so great to the Chinese either.

The real reason we have a crappy economy does not have anything to do with immigrants. The minimum wage, for starters, should be at least $12/hour, if not $15, just to keep up in purchasing power with what it was back when I was young. The Fed shouldn’t be calling 5 % unemployment and the current % workforce participation “full employment” (though to be truthful, we should be careful about that latter number, because we actually had lower workforce participation when real wages were higher and one breadwinner could achieve a middle-class income). We shouldn’t be letting our infrastructure (public and private alike) deteriorate because a deregulated Wall Street demands companies return unrealistic and unsustainable profits each and every quarter (Ian’s post “Burning Down the House in order to heat it” is what many American businesses now do). That by itself is a huge factor in making the US “uncompetitive”, not immigration.

And StewartM; to your other Corporate media talking point:

======Don’t believe the headlines about Japan’s economy======

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/19/dont-believe-the-headlines-about-japans-economy/?utm_term=.b0b87fb8549d

“…if this is really a recession, it is the strangest one in history. Unemployment, after all, is still only 3.4 percent. The r-word just doesn’t seem appropriate when everyone who wants a job can find one. Indeed, as you can see above, Japan’s share of working-age adults who are, in fact, working has shot up from 80.5 percent to 83 percent today, two recessions notwithstanding…maybe it means looking past the demographics and at the economy itself.

If the word “recession” is going to tell us what we need to know, it has to be able to distinguish between an economy that’s shrinking because retirement-age people don’t want jobs, and one that’s shrinking because working-age people can’t find jobs. Otherwise, we’ll keep hearing how Japan’s 3.4 percent unemployment is a failure since the country has a lot of old people.

It isn’t. Not even close.”

Of course neoliberal economist like the religion/philosophy department they sprung from have an extremely rigid worldview that does not allow for reality.

BEEP BEEP! 😛

“The right thing to do, is the wrong thing to do, no good deed goes unpunished.
The wrong thing to do, is the right thing to do,
This all the sages have admonished.
Whether your god is dollar, franc, or kreugerand,
Bow down before the invisible hand.”

https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-fall-and-rise-of-house-salim.html

IMHO Mandos has it nailed down here.

The biggest issue for Trump is he not only manufactures the conservative kool-aid in an industrial-sized vat, he long ago began dipping into its supply. Not hard for him to do with his mental issues; that is to believe his interests and the country’s interests are one in the same. Add on top of that the ideas of running a country like a company and a nice dollop of trickle-down econ 101. Put all those together and you have an excellent template for what is happening day to day in this WH. The failures aren’t outliers or foibles, they’re the naturally rotten fruit of a very diseased tree.

Running a govt is not running a business. Although some segments would benefit from competition and an analysis of costs, it just doesn’t work. Prisons don’t make money, militaries don’t really make money, the goal of healthcare is not increased profitability (we are already firmly in the grip of that system and that’s the problem – it doesn’t work.)

Trump doesn’t even understand how our govt works, Bannon tried to order house reps to vote for the AHCA on Friday. They laughed in his face and then voted as they wished. They are not employees of the WH, Trump can’t seem to grasp this simple fact.

I think it’s all over except for the impeaching. I just can’t figure out if the corruption that brings him down first is domestic or foreign based.

Poor Zot, he and the other snowflakes thought they were so close to convincing the rubes they actually had the goods on Trump or Putin but that fantasy is fading away. Months of investigations with no evidence produced and no charges because of no evidence.

Trump’s staking out Mike Flynn, like a sacrificial goat, not only gave the Clintonites a false sense of power but led to the illegal behavior in the Obama WH and the IC that is now making news. It’s telling how easy it was for Devin Nunes to get reams of information directly from the source about this abuse of power just by asking for it in a public forum, he bypassed the gatekeepers.

Trump and his team know exactly who are his opposition/enemies among the house republicans and although he failed to force them to vote and declare their divided allegiance for the record he is already moving to use his WMD, his feared tweet, to single them out for special treatment.

There will now be a true need for a special prosecutor to prosecute the actual documented crimes committed at Obama’s WH. The Clintonites can continue chasing their tails and sniffing Putin’s spore but it is a fools pursuit.

@Mandos: I would have said he sounds like “Baghdad Bob”, but you say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to…

However, I think he’s sincere. The canine loyalty which Caesar Disgustus receives from all the Peters of the USA may prove to be his greatest asset.

I invite Peter to stand in front of an avalanche. It’s just a bunch of snowflakes right?

I’ll tell you what though, let’s go ahead and have two independent investigations into Trump and Obama. Let’s see who gets indicted first. And if both, then the more the merrier IMHO.

The world is overpopulated. Most developed countries should be seeking decline. This is obvious to me. Apparently not to everyone.

@Mallam

I agree with Bruce, the world doesn’t need to have more babies overall, it’s just that the optimal solution is to allow immigration to everyone to achieve “soft” demographic landings across the globe. I am of the opinion that *people* need to be more free to move around, while capital should be restrained in its movements–almost the opposite of today, where the movements of people face far more restraints than capital.

“Peter” is actually Steve Bannon. It must be true, I read it on the Internet.

I know Trump will be able fulfill at least one of his campaign promises, the most important one: the mass deporation of illegal aliens, once Palantir Technologies’ Investigative Case Management (ICM) comes online for ICE in September. You may think deporting 11 million illegal immigrants is impossible. However, the power of ICM will make it very feasible. Immigration enforcement is THE issue that won him the election. As long as he keeps that one promise and cracks down hard on illegal immigrants, his supporters will be very happy.

“Actually it does< Mandos. Sorry to burst yer bubble."

One of the major factors in the lamentable rise of the Right in the USA over the past few decades is the rise of the “my mythology is just as good as your science” attitude.

Nowadays, people feel entitled to their own “facts”.

*sigh* I’ll leave this to somebody with more medical knowledge than I have, but–

I don’t need to hold a Ph.D in political science to know that Nazi or Communist ideology is horse manure.

Likewise, I don’t need to hold a medical degree…