The proposal would reduce the US budget deficit by $119 billion
Reported by Khaleej Times 15 hours ago.
'23 million people to lose health insurance by 2026'
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↧
Mass. health insurers say they'll hike rates 'substantially' if Trump cuts subsidies
A state health insurance group wrote a letter to Gov. Charlie Baker and others Wednesday warning that if federal subsidies are cut off in coming months by President Donald Trump, insurers will "have no choice but to raise premiums substantially." The warning comes from the Massachusetts Association of Health Plans, which wrote the letter to Baker and Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders. Should the Trump administration eliminate the subsidies, insurers would lose an estimated $63…
Reported by bizjournals 15 hours ago.
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Thursday's Morning Email: What The Latest Health Care Numbers Mean For You
-TOP STORIES-
(And want to get The Morning Email each weekday? Sign up here.)
*CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE’S NEW ESTIMATE ON HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE AFTER OBAMACARE REPEAL BILL *Comes out to 23 million people losing insurance. And here’s where Senate Republicans stand on the health care bill negotiations. [HuffPost]
*MONTANA GOP CANDIDATE CHARGED WITH MISDEMEANOR ASSAULT *For reportedly “body-slamming” a reporter on Election Day eve. And here’s why this Montana race matters for candidates in the Trump era. [HuffPost]
*UK REPORTEDLY STOPPED SHARING INTELLIGENCE WITH U.S. ON MANCHESTER CASE *After U.S. leaks to the media. And here’s what we know so far on the possible terror network involved in the Monday attack. [HuffPost]
*RUSSIAN OFFICIALS TALKED ABOUT HOW TO SWAY TRUMP AIDES *“Three American officials told The New York Times that Russian officials discussed how to influence top advisers to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last summer. The report, based on intelligence gathered by U.S. spies, says Russian intelligence and political officials sought to sway Trump through Paul Manafort, his campaign manager at the time, and Michael Flynn, the retired general advising Trump’s campaign on foreign policy issues.” [HuffPost]
*ADVERTISERS HAVE BEGUN PULLING ADS FROM SEAN HANNITY’S FOX NEWS SHOW *Following controversy over his coverage of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Hannity is calling it “the kill shot.” [HuffPost]
*A U.S. WARSHIP SAILED WITHIN 12 MILES OF A CHINA-CLAIMED REEF *This is the first challenge of its kind to Beijing under President Trump. [Reuters]
*YES, THE POPE TROLLED THE TRUMPS *First, there was the photo. Then there was the question about Melania’s cooking. And finally, he gave Trump his encyclical on climate change. [HuffPost]
-WHAT’S BREWING-
*WHY TELEGRAM IS THE APP OF CHOICE FOR ISIS *“Since around 2015, analysts say there has been an exodus of extremists to the app in search of better privacy and the freedom from being shut down by moderators. “ [HuffPost]
*UBER: WHOOPS, WE ACCIDENTALLY SHORTED DRIVERS TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS* The average New York City driver should receive about $900. [HuffPost]
*‘I ATE MY PLACENTA AND DIDN’T FEEL ANY DIFFERENT’* What you need to know about placenta pills. [HuffPost]
*WE FINALLY HAVE A ‘GAME OF THRONES’ TRAILER* And it has some glorious dragon scenes, the return of our favorites and the usual warnings about winter ― 52 days people. [HuffPost]
*ELLEN HAS BEEN KILLING THE GAME LATELY *She announced she’ll be doing a standup special for Netflix AND gave Andy Cohen a custom RompHim, which was as great as you’d imagine. [HuffPost]
*UNDERSTANDING THE YOUTHS’ OBSESSION WITH SNAPSTREAKS *This is a real, albeit ridiculous, thing. [WSJ | Paywall]
-BEFORE YOU GO-·
Barack Obama threw some shade at the president, saying “we can’t hide behind the wall.”·
The internet memes for the “body-slamming” Montana candidate have been particularly brutal.·
Trump revealed the location of two nuclear submarines in his conversation with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.·
What you need to know about the “dubious” Russian document that influenced the FBI’s Clinton probe.·
The Boston Globe sent the Manchester Evening News pizzas to “keep them going.”·
Handholding watchers, rejoice: Melania and Donald Trump held hands while looking at “The Last Judgment.”·
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the “Dirty Dancing” remake is a cringe-fest.·
This accidental emergency test warning went out on TVs in New Jersey last night, and people sure are glad it was a test.·
This is a job posting to be a professional cat cuddler. You’re welcome.·
While you may know every word to Justin Bieber’s “Despacito,” turns out he might not.·
How to tell a new partner that you have a mental illness.·
We would like in on this pink pineapple trend, please.·
We love this teen who took his senior year photos in Taco Bell.·
Meet the first black female cop in this West Virginia town.·
Former playmate Dani Mathers gets three years probation in body-shaming case after she secretly recorded a nude 70-year-old in the shower area at an LA gym.·
A look at the New York City Amazon book store that would definitely put Meg Ryan’s “The Shop Around The Corner” out of business.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
(And want to get The Morning Email each weekday? Sign up here.)
*CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE’S NEW ESTIMATE ON HEALTH INSURANCE COVERAGE AFTER OBAMACARE REPEAL BILL *Comes out to 23 million people losing insurance. And here’s where Senate Republicans stand on the health care bill negotiations. [HuffPost]
*MONTANA GOP CANDIDATE CHARGED WITH MISDEMEANOR ASSAULT *For reportedly “body-slamming” a reporter on Election Day eve. And here’s why this Montana race matters for candidates in the Trump era. [HuffPost]
*UK REPORTEDLY STOPPED SHARING INTELLIGENCE WITH U.S. ON MANCHESTER CASE *After U.S. leaks to the media. And here’s what we know so far on the possible terror network involved in the Monday attack. [HuffPost]
*RUSSIAN OFFICIALS TALKED ABOUT HOW TO SWAY TRUMP AIDES *“Three American officials told The New York Times that Russian officials discussed how to influence top advisers to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last summer. The report, based on intelligence gathered by U.S. spies, says Russian intelligence and political officials sought to sway Trump through Paul Manafort, his campaign manager at the time, and Michael Flynn, the retired general advising Trump’s campaign on foreign policy issues.” [HuffPost]
*ADVERTISERS HAVE BEGUN PULLING ADS FROM SEAN HANNITY’S FOX NEWS SHOW *Following controversy over his coverage of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Hannity is calling it “the kill shot.” [HuffPost]
*A U.S. WARSHIP SAILED WITHIN 12 MILES OF A CHINA-CLAIMED REEF *This is the first challenge of its kind to Beijing under President Trump. [Reuters]
*YES, THE POPE TROLLED THE TRUMPS *First, there was the photo. Then there was the question about Melania’s cooking. And finally, he gave Trump his encyclical on climate change. [HuffPost]
-WHAT’S BREWING-
*WHY TELEGRAM IS THE APP OF CHOICE FOR ISIS *“Since around 2015, analysts say there has been an exodus of extremists to the app in search of better privacy and the freedom from being shut down by moderators. “ [HuffPost]
*UBER: WHOOPS, WE ACCIDENTALLY SHORTED DRIVERS TENS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS* The average New York City driver should receive about $900. [HuffPost]
*‘I ATE MY PLACENTA AND DIDN’T FEEL ANY DIFFERENT’* What you need to know about placenta pills. [HuffPost]
*WE FINALLY HAVE A ‘GAME OF THRONES’ TRAILER* And it has some glorious dragon scenes, the return of our favorites and the usual warnings about winter ― 52 days people. [HuffPost]
*ELLEN HAS BEEN KILLING THE GAME LATELY *She announced she’ll be doing a standup special for Netflix AND gave Andy Cohen a custom RompHim, which was as great as you’d imagine. [HuffPost]
*UNDERSTANDING THE YOUTHS’ OBSESSION WITH SNAPSTREAKS *This is a real, albeit ridiculous, thing. [WSJ | Paywall]
-BEFORE YOU GO-·
Barack Obama threw some shade at the president, saying “we can’t hide behind the wall.”·
The internet memes for the “body-slamming” Montana candidate have been particularly brutal.·
Trump revealed the location of two nuclear submarines in his conversation with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.·
What you need to know about the “dubious” Russian document that influenced the FBI’s Clinton probe.·
The Boston Globe sent the Manchester Evening News pizzas to “keep them going.”·
Handholding watchers, rejoice: Melania and Donald Trump held hands while looking at “The Last Judgment.”·
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the “Dirty Dancing” remake is a cringe-fest.·
This accidental emergency test warning went out on TVs in New Jersey last night, and people sure are glad it was a test.·
This is a job posting to be a professional cat cuddler. You’re welcome.·
While you may know every word to Justin Bieber’s “Despacito,” turns out he might not.·
How to tell a new partner that you have a mental illness.·
We would like in on this pink pineapple trend, please.·
We love this teen who took his senior year photos in Taco Bell.·
Meet the first black female cop in this West Virginia town.·
Former playmate Dani Mathers gets three years probation in body-shaming case after she secretly recorded a nude 70-year-old in the shower area at an LA gym.·
A look at the New York City Amazon book store that would definitely put Meg Ryan’s “The Shop Around The Corner” out of business.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 14 hours ago.
↧
CBO says 23 million would be without health insurance under GOP bill
A new Congressional Budget Office report shows the bill to replace Obamacare reduces federal deficits by $119 billion over the next 10 years, but it also leaves 23 million more people uninsured. The White House says history shows the CBO is "totally incapable" of predicting the GOP health care bill's impact. Nancy Cordes reports.
Reported by CBS News 13 hours ago.
↧
It Turns Out Critics Of The GOP Health Care Plan Were Right All Along
Wednesday’s report from the Congressional Budget Office ought to erase any lingering doubt about how Republicans are trying to change American health care.
If they get their way, they will protect the strong at the expense of the weak ― rewarding the rich and the healthy in ways that punish the poor and the sick.
Republicans have tried mightily to deny this, and accused their critics of dishonesty. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) ― they and their allies have insisted over and over again that their proposals would improve access to health care and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions.
But it’s the Republicans who are lying about what their plan to repeal Obamacare would do.
They were lying back in March, when they introduced the initial version of the legislation ― a bill GOP leaders had to pull at the last minute because it didn’t have enough votes to pass. And they have been lying since early May, after they revised that proposal and rushed to vote on it before the CBO, Washington’s official scorekeeper, had time to evaluate it formally.
Now the budget office analysts have done their work. And if they are right, then the revised legislation would punish economically and medically vulnerable Americans more than the earlier version would have ― leaving many millions without insurance and unraveling the market for insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
To be clear, CBO’s overall assessment didn’t change much, since the basic framework of the bill hasn’t changed much either.
Older people would still face higher premiums, as insurers would gain more leeway to vary prices based on age. Lower-income people buying private insurance on their own would still lose financial assistance, as a new formula for tax credits would steer money away from them. And the very poor would still lose access to Medicaid, as states would lose funding they otherwise would have gotten from the federal government.
Some people would feel better off as a result of these changes ― young people in relatively good health would get access to cheaper coverage, for example, while more affluent people who get little or no financial assistance from the government today would start to get more. Wealthy people would get extra money in their pockets, since the GOP legislation would undo the taxes that finance the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion.
But the net effect would be 23 million fewer people with health insurance ― many of whom, as a result, would face financial or physical hardship because they could no longer afford medical care. That’s nearly identical to the 24 million that the CBO estimated would lose coverage from the bill’s previous version.
The one big change Congress made to that bill is a set of amendments that would allow states to waive some of the Affordable Care Act’s most important regulations, including rules that prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Republican leaders have insisted that these amendments, so essential to winning over holdout lawmakers in the House, wouldn’t actually make much difference to consumers.
Even in states that sought the waivers, GOP leaders promised, insurers could engage in “medical underwriting” ― that is, varying premiums based on health status ― only for people who allowed their coverage to lapse for more than two months. And that was bound to be a small number of people, Republicans said.
On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office indicated just how wrong that argument is.
For one thing, coverage lapses of more than two months would be pretty common under the GOP bill, because lower-income consumers who struggle to pay premiums would be getting less financial assistance than they do today. More important, the CBO pointed out, allowing insurance companies to vary premiums based on medical conditions even in some cases would inevitably create a bifurcated insurance market.
Insurers would end up setting up two sets of plans ― one with medical underwriting and one without. Healthy people would flock to the underwriting plans, since they’d be eligible for cheaper coverage there. The older plans would be left with a relatively sicker population, forcing them to raise premiums for everybody still enrolled in them and thereby encouraging more healthy people to leave ― until, eventually, those plans had shrunk to small groups of people with big medical problems.
Premiums in these plans would be much more expensive, and in many cases downright unaffordable, making access to them for people who had maintained continuous coverage essentially meaningless. As a result, the CBO concluded, “People who are less healthy ... would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive non-group health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”
The finding echoes an analysis that Matthew Fiedler, a former Obama administration economist who now works at The Brookings Institution, published shortly before the House bill passed. And on Wednesday, in an email to HuffPost, Fiedler noted that the people the GOP bill would marginalize are those that, in theory, an insurance system should prioritize. “Those markets would no longer fulfill one of their fundamental purposes, which is ensuring that people can get health care when they need it,” he said.
Of course, insurance markets under the Republican scheme would serve other purposes ― like limiting the size and scope of government, offering cheap coverage to younger and healthier people, and allowing wealthier Americans to keep some money they now pay to the federal government in the form of taxes.
Republicans may think those goals are more important than making health care available to the people who need it most. Such thinking would be consistent with the way Republicans have tried to govern more generally, with their constant efforts to strip down programs for the poor and middle class while showering the wealthy with tax cuts.
But when talking about health care over the past few years and especially in the past few months, Republicans have pretended they have different priorities ― a deception the CBO exposed quite clearly on Wednesday.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
If they get their way, they will protect the strong at the expense of the weak ― rewarding the rich and the healthy in ways that punish the poor and the sick.
Republicans have tried mightily to deny this, and accused their critics of dishonesty. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) ― they and their allies have insisted over and over again that their proposals would improve access to health care and protect people with pre-existing medical conditions.
But it’s the Republicans who are lying about what their plan to repeal Obamacare would do.
They were lying back in March, when they introduced the initial version of the legislation ― a bill GOP leaders had to pull at the last minute because it didn’t have enough votes to pass. And they have been lying since early May, after they revised that proposal and rushed to vote on it before the CBO, Washington’s official scorekeeper, had time to evaluate it formally.
Now the budget office analysts have done their work. And if they are right, then the revised legislation would punish economically and medically vulnerable Americans more than the earlier version would have ― leaving many millions without insurance and unraveling the market for insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
To be clear, CBO’s overall assessment didn’t change much, since the basic framework of the bill hasn’t changed much either.
Older people would still face higher premiums, as insurers would gain more leeway to vary prices based on age. Lower-income people buying private insurance on their own would still lose financial assistance, as a new formula for tax credits would steer money away from them. And the very poor would still lose access to Medicaid, as states would lose funding they otherwise would have gotten from the federal government.
Some people would feel better off as a result of these changes ― young people in relatively good health would get access to cheaper coverage, for example, while more affluent people who get little or no financial assistance from the government today would start to get more. Wealthy people would get extra money in their pockets, since the GOP legislation would undo the taxes that finance the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion.
But the net effect would be 23 million fewer people with health insurance ― many of whom, as a result, would face financial or physical hardship because they could no longer afford medical care. That’s nearly identical to the 24 million that the CBO estimated would lose coverage from the bill’s previous version.
The one big change Congress made to that bill is a set of amendments that would allow states to waive some of the Affordable Care Act’s most important regulations, including rules that prohibit insurance companies from charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Republican leaders have insisted that these amendments, so essential to winning over holdout lawmakers in the House, wouldn’t actually make much difference to consumers.
Even in states that sought the waivers, GOP leaders promised, insurers could engage in “medical underwriting” ― that is, varying premiums based on health status ― only for people who allowed their coverage to lapse for more than two months. And that was bound to be a small number of people, Republicans said.
On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office indicated just how wrong that argument is.
For one thing, coverage lapses of more than two months would be pretty common under the GOP bill, because lower-income consumers who struggle to pay premiums would be getting less financial assistance than they do today. More important, the CBO pointed out, allowing insurance companies to vary premiums based on medical conditions even in some cases would inevitably create a bifurcated insurance market.
Insurers would end up setting up two sets of plans ― one with medical underwriting and one without. Healthy people would flock to the underwriting plans, since they’d be eligible for cheaper coverage there. The older plans would be left with a relatively sicker population, forcing them to raise premiums for everybody still enrolled in them and thereby encouraging more healthy people to leave ― until, eventually, those plans had shrunk to small groups of people with big medical problems.
Premiums in these plans would be much more expensive, and in many cases downright unaffordable, making access to them for people who had maintained continuous coverage essentially meaningless. As a result, the CBO concluded, “People who are less healthy ... would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive non-group health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”
The finding echoes an analysis that Matthew Fiedler, a former Obama administration economist who now works at The Brookings Institution, published shortly before the House bill passed. And on Wednesday, in an email to HuffPost, Fiedler noted that the people the GOP bill would marginalize are those that, in theory, an insurance system should prioritize. “Those markets would no longer fulfill one of their fundamental purposes, which is ensuring that people can get health care when they need it,” he said.
Of course, insurance markets under the Republican scheme would serve other purposes ― like limiting the size and scope of government, offering cheap coverage to younger and healthier people, and allowing wealthier Americans to keep some money they now pay to the federal government in the form of taxes.
Republicans may think those goals are more important than making health care available to the people who need it most. Such thinking would be consistent with the way Republicans have tried to govern more generally, with their constant efforts to strip down programs for the poor and middle class while showering the wealthy with tax cuts.
But when talking about health care over the past few years and especially in the past few months, Republicans have pretended they have different priorities ― a deception the CBO exposed quite clearly on Wednesday.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 12 hours ago.
↧
↧
Globalization Isn't Dead, It's Just Shed Its Slick Cover Story
Ariadna Estévez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
*The penultimate installment in our two-week Globalisation Under Pressure series questions the concept of globalization, suggesting that the so-called backlash against it is merely neoliberalism unmasked.*
With the recent rise in nationalism, surge in protectionism, and Donald Trump’s “America first” vision, it’s become common to declare that the golden age of globalization has come to an end. That the three-decade-old “global village” is closing its doors.
But was globalization ever really about internationalism and shared development? The fact is, globalization has always been more political discourse than reality.
Even the term “global governance” is itself merely a strategic turn of phrase. Defined as “systems of rule at all levels of human activity, from the family to the international organization, in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions”, the term obfuscates the real objectives of globalization.
Over the past 30 years, this Western-led system, which is essentially a managerial approach to complex human and natural phenomena, has actually reproduced – intentionally – the problems it was theoretically intended to tackle through global collaboration: crime, environmental devastation, human trafficking, insecurity, terrorism, gender-based violence and political repression.
Globalization, which is also referred to as neoliberalism, has mostly served to generate profit and reify white supremacy. And in that sense, it is alive and well today.*Local Neoliberalism*
Scholars who draw from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism argue that neoliberal states have actually ceased to be states that administer justice.
Today, we have managerial states that use policy (defined as government decision-making intended to modify or orientate social action in the form of a set of legal, political and technical elements based on social knowledge) to regulate the health and growth of the population.
They do so not via direct intervention in the style of welfare states, such as Norway or Ecuador, where governments actively seek to protect and promote the economic and social well-being of citizens.
Rather, neoliberal countries, such as the United States, reduce social policy to a bare minimum, providing the least for the poorest sector of society while encouraging the wealthy to leverage the corporate sector to fund health and education (“incentivising the market”, say its defenders).
On the domestic front, the neoliberal government achieves its desired balance of maximum productivity and minimum social responsibility by convincing people that they are responsible for their own wealth and well-being – the old “bootstraps” narrative. Those who cannot afford what they need are mostly left to their fates.
The American free-market health insurance fiasco, which leaves out 33 million non-citizens, poor people, and young, healthy people, is the finest possible example of this (govern)mentality.
Globalization... has mostly served to generate profit and reify white supremacy. And in that sense, it is alive and well today.
*Negative Externalities*
For modern capitalism to reproduce itself, people across the world must produce and consume, consume and produce. Global governance is how we manage the international costs this nonstop globalized market incurs.
From migration and the environment to terrorism and drugs, the powers behind globalization have manipulated global forces to control populations both at home and abroad. A system originally “pitched as a strategy that would raise all boats in poor and rich countries alike”, as a 2015 assessment of globalization in Forbes magazine put it, has in practice ensured the survival and reproduction of white and Western peoples.
If you’re dubious on this point, read this April 2016 Harper’s interview in which a former Nixon White House aide admits that the war on drugs was designed to criminalize “the blacks.”
Laws have been designed to profoundly marginalize the poorest and the darkest-skinned people of the world (and, in predominantly white societies, gay men and women), often to the point of death.
Nor are violence and environmental degradation unfortunate outcomes of unchecked free-market capitalism. They’re negative externalities that must be administered. Hence, we see homicide and pollution mostly produced in the developing world.
Central America is one such production center. There, the environment is being rapidly destroyed as transnational corporations haul out timber, zinc, water, and other resources.When locals defend themselves and their land from exploitation, they are killed and criminalized. Latin America is now the world’s most dangerous place to be an environmental activist.
If rich countries must bear such problems, they are effectively relegated by policies both explicit and implicit to their poorest neighborhoods. In the US, it’s Native Americans at Standing Rock who take the hit when oil companies come out swinging and black and Latino drug users who go to jail rather than their equally numerous white peers.
*Migration and Murder*
Sometimes, people in the developing world grow sick of the struggle and seek to leave their poisoned or dangerous homelands. There’s a system for that, too: international and domestic migration policies.
The kind of immigration rhetoric favored by Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and many others holds that border enforcement is a national security necessity: it protects natives against terror, violence, and criminality.
Securitization discourse, as this is called, generally depicts migrants in three ways, none of them good.
First, migrants are surreptitious transnational actors who pose strategic threats to host states. In the UK, right-wing politicians have made a debatable link between immigration and recent terrorist attacks, offering a xenophobic explanation for closing English borders.
Secondly, migrants pose a threat to national identity and to a country’s cultural and ethnic balance. This notion leads to racism and racial identity politics like the various attempts to limit the use of Muslim veils and headscarves in France, Germany, Belgium and the UK, among other European countries.Finally, migrants are economic competitors who profit from the Western welfare state’s social benefits. In this category are Trump’s promises to restore working class Americans’ jobs by deporting “illegal” Mexicans and the labor-market rationale behind Brexit.
*Nothing New Under the Global Sun*
The unsettled state of politics today may seem scary and unknown, but substantively, very little has changed.
The current right-wing resurgence is merely the confirmation that neoliberalism, now entering its fourth decade, is so well entrenched that it no longer needs subtle political discourses about “global governance” and “international cooperation” to thrive.
Over the past year, racism, nationalism, and chauvinism were democratically elected and approved at referendum, from the UK and the US to Hungary and Argentina. They are legitimate movements now, not subcultures or aberrations but bare-faced political preference.
This is fascism, getting uncomfortably close to the mainstream.
Ariadna Estévez, Professor, Center for Research on North America, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
*This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
*The penultimate installment in our two-week Globalisation Under Pressure series questions the concept of globalization, suggesting that the so-called backlash against it is merely neoliberalism unmasked.*
With the recent rise in nationalism, surge in protectionism, and Donald Trump’s “America first” vision, it’s become common to declare that the golden age of globalization has come to an end. That the three-decade-old “global village” is closing its doors.
But was globalization ever really about internationalism and shared development? The fact is, globalization has always been more political discourse than reality.
Even the term “global governance” is itself merely a strategic turn of phrase. Defined as “systems of rule at all levels of human activity, from the family to the international organization, in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions”, the term obfuscates the real objectives of globalization.
Over the past 30 years, this Western-led system, which is essentially a managerial approach to complex human and natural phenomena, has actually reproduced – intentionally – the problems it was theoretically intended to tackle through global collaboration: crime, environmental devastation, human trafficking, insecurity, terrorism, gender-based violence and political repression.
Globalization, which is also referred to as neoliberalism, has mostly served to generate profit and reify white supremacy. And in that sense, it is alive and well today.*Local Neoliberalism*
Scholars who draw from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s critique of neoliberalism argue that neoliberal states have actually ceased to be states that administer justice.
Today, we have managerial states that use policy (defined as government decision-making intended to modify or orientate social action in the form of a set of legal, political and technical elements based on social knowledge) to regulate the health and growth of the population.
They do so not via direct intervention in the style of welfare states, such as Norway or Ecuador, where governments actively seek to protect and promote the economic and social well-being of citizens.
Rather, neoliberal countries, such as the United States, reduce social policy to a bare minimum, providing the least for the poorest sector of society while encouraging the wealthy to leverage the corporate sector to fund health and education (“incentivising the market”, say its defenders).
On the domestic front, the neoliberal government achieves its desired balance of maximum productivity and minimum social responsibility by convincing people that they are responsible for their own wealth and well-being – the old “bootstraps” narrative. Those who cannot afford what they need are mostly left to their fates.
The American free-market health insurance fiasco, which leaves out 33 million non-citizens, poor people, and young, healthy people, is the finest possible example of this (govern)mentality.
Globalization... has mostly served to generate profit and reify white supremacy. And in that sense, it is alive and well today.
*Negative Externalities*
For modern capitalism to reproduce itself, people across the world must produce and consume, consume and produce. Global governance is how we manage the international costs this nonstop globalized market incurs.
From migration and the environment to terrorism and drugs, the powers behind globalization have manipulated global forces to control populations both at home and abroad. A system originally “pitched as a strategy that would raise all boats in poor and rich countries alike”, as a 2015 assessment of globalization in Forbes magazine put it, has in practice ensured the survival and reproduction of white and Western peoples.
If you’re dubious on this point, read this April 2016 Harper’s interview in which a former Nixon White House aide admits that the war on drugs was designed to criminalize “the blacks.”
Laws have been designed to profoundly marginalize the poorest and the darkest-skinned people of the world (and, in predominantly white societies, gay men and women), often to the point of death.
Nor are violence and environmental degradation unfortunate outcomes of unchecked free-market capitalism. They’re negative externalities that must be administered. Hence, we see homicide and pollution mostly produced in the developing world.
Central America is one such production center. There, the environment is being rapidly destroyed as transnational corporations haul out timber, zinc, water, and other resources.When locals defend themselves and their land from exploitation, they are killed and criminalized. Latin America is now the world’s most dangerous place to be an environmental activist.
If rich countries must bear such problems, they are effectively relegated by policies both explicit and implicit to their poorest neighborhoods. In the US, it’s Native Americans at Standing Rock who take the hit when oil companies come out swinging and black and Latino drug users who go to jail rather than their equally numerous white peers.
*Migration and Murder*
Sometimes, people in the developing world grow sick of the struggle and seek to leave their poisoned or dangerous homelands. There’s a system for that, too: international and domestic migration policies.
The kind of immigration rhetoric favored by Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and many others holds that border enforcement is a national security necessity: it protects natives against terror, violence, and criminality.
Securitization discourse, as this is called, generally depicts migrants in three ways, none of them good.
First, migrants are surreptitious transnational actors who pose strategic threats to host states. In the UK, right-wing politicians have made a debatable link between immigration and recent terrorist attacks, offering a xenophobic explanation for closing English borders.
Secondly, migrants pose a threat to national identity and to a country’s cultural and ethnic balance. This notion leads to racism and racial identity politics like the various attempts to limit the use of Muslim veils and headscarves in France, Germany, Belgium and the UK, among other European countries.Finally, migrants are economic competitors who profit from the Western welfare state’s social benefits. In this category are Trump’s promises to restore working class Americans’ jobs by deporting “illegal” Mexicans and the labor-market rationale behind Brexit.
*Nothing New Under the Global Sun*
The unsettled state of politics today may seem scary and unknown, but substantively, very little has changed.
The current right-wing resurgence is merely the confirmation that neoliberalism, now entering its fourth decade, is so well entrenched that it no longer needs subtle political discourses about “global governance” and “international cooperation” to thrive.
Over the past year, racism, nationalism, and chauvinism were democratically elected and approved at referendum, from the UK and the US to Hungary and Argentina. They are legitimate movements now, not subcultures or aberrations but bare-faced political preference.
This is fascism, getting uncomfortably close to the mainstream.
Ariadna Estévez, Professor, Center for Research on North America, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
*This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.*
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 7 hours ago.
↧
The 7 most terrifying wishes on Trump's 'wish list' budget bill.
*The Trump administration just released its proposed fiscal year 2018 budget, and well... *
The document outlines billions of dollars in cuts to dozens of popular social programs that previously have enjoyed bipartisan support while simultaneously pumping an equal and opposite number of billions into defense.
Some analysts argue we shouldn't be too concerned. After all, they say, the budget isn't and probably won't be policy. It's just a "wish list."
Just a reminder: Every president's budget is just a wish list. Congress writes the budget, and the spending bills.
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) May 22, 2017
Even some Republican legislators say the document is "dead on arrival."
*But if it is indeed a "wish list," what are its architects wishing for?*
Having read the proposed budget, I can only imagine their requests went something like this:
*1. "Fairy godmother, please slow down cancer research and make it so more Americans get heart disease."*
Image by William West/AFP/Getty Images and iStock.
The authors of the proposed budget wish to cut funding to the National Cancer Institute by a whopping $1 billion and funding to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute by $575 million.
That's a really weird wish! Moreover, it directly conflicts with the wishes of the millions of Americans with cancer and cardiopulmonary conditions and their relatives who wish not to die — or watch their family members die — from those diseases. And they probably wish their government could help them out a little bit in that regard.
*2. "Genie, I wish that fewer poor people were able to see a doctor..."*
The budget proposal includes a wish to slash over $800 billion from Medicaid, which covers over 75 million families.
Those 75 million families have wishes too. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 42% of Trump voters say Medicaid is "somewhat" or "very" important to them. Their wishes probably include not having their kidney disease, hepatitis, or multiple sclerosis treated in an emergency room simply because they can't afford private health insurance.
Those wishes won't be granted if Medicaid goes away.
*3. "...and while you're at it, make it harder for them to attend college, too!"*
Image via iStock.
If this budget is enacted, many low-income students will see their subsidized loans eliminated.
It turns out, thousands of Americans who don't have rich parents wish to be able to attend college without years, or even decades, of being buried under crippling personal debt. If they lose that ability, it won't matter how much they pull themselves up by their bootstraps since eliminating those loans is like tying their bootstraps to a refrigerator taped to an anvil double-bolted to a neutron star.
*4. "Oh, all-seeing stone, won't you put our diplomats overseas at considerable personal risk?"*
If the Trump administration gets its wish, the State Department would lose 31% of its budget.
That's something Sen. Lindsay Graham believes could lead to American foreign service officers dying on the job — or, "a lot of Benghazis in the making," as the senator told The Washington Post.
That's something Graham — and those American foreign service members and their families — definitely wishes won't happen.
*5. "Kindly wizard, let's cut back on providing health care to sick kids." *
Image via iStock.
Oh, also, the budget reduces funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — which makes it easier for 5.6 million working-class kids to see a doctor — by 20%.
Like rich kids, non-rich kids wish to be able to go out and play and scrape their knee without being charged hundreds of dollars for antibiotics. The ability to just be a kid would be imperiled for millions of them if the Trump administration gets its budget wish.
*6. "Bridge troll, we have answered your riddles three. Now we wish to take food away from families struggling to make ends meet!"*
Families who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, wish to continue feeding their families — a wish that could be denied by the proposed budget cuts that would take nearly $200 billion from the program.
An analysis by The Washington Post found that families with more than four children could fare even worse because the budget would cap benefits at the maximum amount currently allotted to a family of six.
*7. "And last but not least, we wish we may we wish we might turn a blind eye to climate change tonight! Glow, magic monkey's paw, glow!"*
Image via iStock.
For the polar bears who wish not to have their habitats eliminated, the coral that wishes not to be bleached, and the residents of coastal cities who wish not to have their homes slide into the sea forever, the budget merrily would ax EPA funding by 31%.
That's not going to help anyone if — and, as is becoming more inevitable, when — the flood waters rise.
*The only way to stop these bizarre budget wishes from coming true is if ordinary people don't let them. *
The good news: Regular folks have gotten pretty good at resisting in the last few months — hitting up protests, town halls, and their elected representatives' phone lines with the gusto usually reserved for a Madonna reunion tour or a Patriots Super Bowl loss.
Freeing up money for tax cuts, most of which will likely go to rich people, may be the wish of some in government. But that's not a wish shared by most Americans. And Americans now have a lot of practice having their say.
*If this budget is truly dead on arrival, that's cool! But we can't just wish it is. *Call your congressman or senator to make sure what's dead stays dead.
Bibbity-bobbity-freakin-boo. Reported by Upworthy 9 hours ago.
The document outlines billions of dollars in cuts to dozens of popular social programs that previously have enjoyed bipartisan support while simultaneously pumping an equal and opposite number of billions into defense.
Some analysts argue we shouldn't be too concerned. After all, they say, the budget isn't and probably won't be policy. It's just a "wish list."
Just a reminder: Every president's budget is just a wish list. Congress writes the budget, and the spending bills.
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) May 22, 2017
Even some Republican legislators say the document is "dead on arrival."
*But if it is indeed a "wish list," what are its architects wishing for?*
Having read the proposed budget, I can only imagine their requests went something like this:
*1. "Fairy godmother, please slow down cancer research and make it so more Americans get heart disease."*
Image by William West/AFP/Getty Images and iStock.
The authors of the proposed budget wish to cut funding to the National Cancer Institute by a whopping $1 billion and funding to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute by $575 million.
That's a really weird wish! Moreover, it directly conflicts with the wishes of the millions of Americans with cancer and cardiopulmonary conditions and their relatives who wish not to die — or watch their family members die — from those diseases. And they probably wish their government could help them out a little bit in that regard.
*2. "Genie, I wish that fewer poor people were able to see a doctor..."*
The budget proposal includes a wish to slash over $800 billion from Medicaid, which covers over 75 million families.
Those 75 million families have wishes too. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 42% of Trump voters say Medicaid is "somewhat" or "very" important to them. Their wishes probably include not having their kidney disease, hepatitis, or multiple sclerosis treated in an emergency room simply because they can't afford private health insurance.
Those wishes won't be granted if Medicaid goes away.
*3. "...and while you're at it, make it harder for them to attend college, too!"*
Image via iStock.
If this budget is enacted, many low-income students will see their subsidized loans eliminated.
It turns out, thousands of Americans who don't have rich parents wish to be able to attend college without years, or even decades, of being buried under crippling personal debt. If they lose that ability, it won't matter how much they pull themselves up by their bootstraps since eliminating those loans is like tying their bootstraps to a refrigerator taped to an anvil double-bolted to a neutron star.
*4. "Oh, all-seeing stone, won't you put our diplomats overseas at considerable personal risk?"*
If the Trump administration gets its wish, the State Department would lose 31% of its budget.
That's something Sen. Lindsay Graham believes could lead to American foreign service officers dying on the job — or, "a lot of Benghazis in the making," as the senator told The Washington Post.
That's something Graham — and those American foreign service members and their families — definitely wishes won't happen.
*5. "Kindly wizard, let's cut back on providing health care to sick kids." *
Image via iStock.
Oh, also, the budget reduces funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — which makes it easier for 5.6 million working-class kids to see a doctor — by 20%.
Like rich kids, non-rich kids wish to be able to go out and play and scrape their knee without being charged hundreds of dollars for antibiotics. The ability to just be a kid would be imperiled for millions of them if the Trump administration gets its budget wish.
*6. "Bridge troll, we have answered your riddles three. Now we wish to take food away from families struggling to make ends meet!"*
Families who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, wish to continue feeding their families — a wish that could be denied by the proposed budget cuts that would take nearly $200 billion from the program.
An analysis by The Washington Post found that families with more than four children could fare even worse because the budget would cap benefits at the maximum amount currently allotted to a family of six.
*7. "And last but not least, we wish we may we wish we might turn a blind eye to climate change tonight! Glow, magic monkey's paw, glow!"*
Image via iStock.
For the polar bears who wish not to have their habitats eliminated, the coral that wishes not to be bleached, and the residents of coastal cities who wish not to have their homes slide into the sea forever, the budget merrily would ax EPA funding by 31%.
That's not going to help anyone if — and, as is becoming more inevitable, when — the flood waters rise.
*The only way to stop these bizarre budget wishes from coming true is if ordinary people don't let them. *
The good news: Regular folks have gotten pretty good at resisting in the last few months — hitting up protests, town halls, and their elected representatives' phone lines with the gusto usually reserved for a Madonna reunion tour or a Patriots Super Bowl loss.
Freeing up money for tax cuts, most of which will likely go to rich people, may be the wish of some in government. But that's not a wish shared by most Americans. And Americans now have a lot of practice having their say.
*If this budget is truly dead on arrival, that's cool! But we can't just wish it is. *Call your congressman or senator to make sure what's dead stays dead.
Bibbity-bobbity-freakin-boo. Reported by Upworthy 9 hours ago.
↧
Has The Dismantling Of The American Health Care System Begun?
Graph: CBO
We now know that the revised Republican repeal of Obamacare is really intended to dismantle and perhaps destroy any federally-funded health care program, which would return health care to either cash-starved states or private industry; to the high cost, broken healthcare system it was before Obamacare. And all this to give the wealthiest among us a tax break they don’t need?
We know this because the CBO and JCT estimate just out says that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under H.R. 1628 than under current law. The increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number projected under current law would reach 19 million in 2020 and 23 million in 2026.
We also know this because no public hearings were held on the House plan and none are planned for the still-secret Senate plan, something that Senator Diane Feinstein said has never happened before for major legislation in her 40 years in Congress.
And it is a very major bill. *For instance, in 2026, an estimated 51 million people under age 65 would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law, *according to the CBO*.* Under the legislation, a few million of those people would use tax credits to purchase policies that would not cover major medical risks, but their costs would rise because no longer protected by the ACA prohibition against raising costs for those with pre-existing conditions, for example.
It in fact dismantles the possibility of affordable health care that covers pre-existing conditions for most Americans. It gives businesses and the wealthiest a juicy $664 billion reduction in taxes, which are the tax revenues needed to pay for the Obamacare state subsidies—mainly to reimburse states that cover their poorest Medicaid citizens. So, it’s to be paid for with a total of $1.111B in spending cuts for Medicaid and social security disability coverage.
This is what the white racist agenda of Tea Party Republicans and President Trump is leading us towards. This is what they mean by making American great again. Let us hope there are enough intelligent Senators to block what is being done in secrecy, in the hopes that most Americans won’t notice there is nothing great about leaving a total of 53 million in 10 years—mostly the elderly and poor—without any healthcare options except the most expensive, and a budget that wants to continue to redistribute our tax dollars to the wealthiest one percent where it will do the least good.
And Senate Republicans, while they debate their version of repeal, now face increasing pressure to rescue health insurance markets and protect coverage for millions of Americans amid growing fears that the Trump administration is going to let the markets collapse, said the LA Times.
This is because President Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal aid that helps millions of low-income Americans afford their deductibles and co-pays. The aid, which reimburses insurers for lowering out-of-pocket costs for low-income consumers, was paid by the Obama administration. But it is now the subject of a lawsuit by congressional Republicans, who argue Congress must approve the payments.
In recent days, leading hospitals, physician groups, health insurers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pleaded with the Senate to step in, effectively going around the White House.
“Congress must take action now,” the groups warned in a letter to Republican and Democratic Senate leaders. “At this point, only congressional action can help consumers.”
Can it be any clearer that health care coverage for many, if not most Americans, is in danger of collapse?
*Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: *https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 8 hours ago.
We now know that the revised Republican repeal of Obamacare is really intended to dismantle and perhaps destroy any federally-funded health care program, which would return health care to either cash-starved states or private industry; to the high cost, broken healthcare system it was before Obamacare. And all this to give the wealthiest among us a tax break they don’t need?
We know this because the CBO and JCT estimate just out says that, in 2018, 14 million more people would be uninsured under H.R. 1628 than under current law. The increase in the number of uninsured people relative to the number projected under current law would reach 19 million in 2020 and 23 million in 2026.
We also know this because no public hearings were held on the House plan and none are planned for the still-secret Senate plan, something that Senator Diane Feinstein said has never happened before for major legislation in her 40 years in Congress.
And it is a very major bill. *For instance, in 2026, an estimated 51 million people under age 65 would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law, *according to the CBO*.* Under the legislation, a few million of those people would use tax credits to purchase policies that would not cover major medical risks, but their costs would rise because no longer protected by the ACA prohibition against raising costs for those with pre-existing conditions, for example.
It in fact dismantles the possibility of affordable health care that covers pre-existing conditions for most Americans. It gives businesses and the wealthiest a juicy $664 billion reduction in taxes, which are the tax revenues needed to pay for the Obamacare state subsidies—mainly to reimburse states that cover their poorest Medicaid citizens. So, it’s to be paid for with a total of $1.111B in spending cuts for Medicaid and social security disability coverage.
This is what the white racist agenda of Tea Party Republicans and President Trump is leading us towards. This is what they mean by making American great again. Let us hope there are enough intelligent Senators to block what is being done in secrecy, in the hopes that most Americans won’t notice there is nothing great about leaving a total of 53 million in 10 years—mostly the elderly and poor—without any healthcare options except the most expensive, and a budget that wants to continue to redistribute our tax dollars to the wealthiest one percent where it will do the least good.
And Senate Republicans, while they debate their version of repeal, now face increasing pressure to rescue health insurance markets and protect coverage for millions of Americans amid growing fears that the Trump administration is going to let the markets collapse, said the LA Times.
This is because President Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal aid that helps millions of low-income Americans afford their deductibles and co-pays. The aid, which reimburses insurers for lowering out-of-pocket costs for low-income consumers, was paid by the Obama administration. But it is now the subject of a lawsuit by congressional Republicans, who argue Congress must approve the payments.
In recent days, leading hospitals, physician groups, health insurers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pleaded with the Senate to step in, effectively going around the White House.
“Congress must take action now,” the groups warned in a letter to Republican and Democratic Senate leaders. “At this point, only congressional action can help consumers.”
Can it be any clearer that health care coverage for many, if not most Americans, is in danger of collapse?
*Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: *https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 8 hours ago.
↧
A.M. Best Affirms Credit Ratings of Health Services Welfare Society Limited
SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A.M. Best has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating of B (Fair) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of “bb+” of Health Services Welfare Society Limited (New Zealand), trading as Accuro Health Insurance (Accuro). The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) is positive. The ratings reflect Accuro’s adequate risk-adjusted capitalization and improved operating performance over the past five years. The company has a good business profile in New Zealand’s retail medi
Reported by Business Wire 8 hours ago.
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↧
Why Skipping Health Insurance is Still a Bad Idea
If you think dropping your health insurance policy will save you money, you're missing the big picture.
Reported by Motley Fool 7 hours ago.
↧
Paul Ryan gets grilled about latest unflattering CBO report on GOP healthcare bill
House Speaker Paul Ryan was bombarded with questions Thursday about the Congressional Budget Office's latest report on the GOP's healthcare bill.Ryan pointed to the good news about the American Health Care Act in the report — it showed premiums would decrease for healthy people and the federal budget deficit would decline if the bill were to become law.
"I'm actually comforted by the CBO report because it shows, yeah, we're going to lower premiums," Ryan said.
But the CBO's analysis also contained some alarming projections.
It showed that 23 million more people would be without health insurance in 2026 compared to the current baseline. It also found that people with preexisting conditions could face much higher premiums because of waivers states could use to get around of some Obamacare regulations, and that some of the changes that helped get the bill through the House could make some individual insurance markets "unstable."
The CBO report also said the premium declines would come in part due to people with preexisting conditions dropping out of the market, as insurance would become too expensive. That would drive down costs for healthy people, but throw sicker people's insurance status into further question.
On May 2, Ryan's official website argued that the amendment that introduced waivers "protects people with preexisting conditions," which the CBO said was not the case.
Ryan defended the idea, citing the fact that in order for a state to be granted a waiver, it must have a high-risk pool in place.
"A state has to have a risk system in place" to get a waiver "and that risk system is specifically designed to make sure that people with a catastrophic illness, who has a preexisting condition also gets access to affordable healthcare," Ryan said. "What we have learned is if we target resources at the state level and the federal level to make sure we subsidize catastrophic illnesses, what you end up doing is you end up lowering premiums for everybody else. We think that's so much smarter."
The Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy think tank, has found that the high-risk pools Ryan cited that existed prior the passage of Obamacare were woefully underfunded, had few people enrolled, and left out many sick Americans.
Additionally, health policy experts have said the current version of the AHCA does not have enough funding in the new high-risk pools to solve the problems. The CBO echoed a similar sentiment in its report Wednesday.
Ryan argued that the CBO score did not take into account the state-level funding for the high-risk pools, saying "the states will do some of the lifting."
However, projections from GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy also showed that many states will have to shoulder a much larger burden of Medicaid costs due to the AHCA's changes to funding for that program.
The AHCA is now in the hands of the Senate, which has already said it will write its own version of the bill separate from the House plan.
*SEE ALSO: CBO says GOP healthcare bill would leave 23 million more uninsured, undermine protections for people with preexisting conditions*
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: This animated map shows how religion spread across the world Reported by Business Insider 7 hours ago.
↧
Trump’s Budget Slashes Opportunity For Everyday Americans
A few hundred billion cut here, a few hundred billion slashed there, and the Trump budget proposal released this week adds up to real crushed opportunity.
The spending plan slices a pound of flesh from everyone, well, everyone who isn’t a millionaire or billionaire. For the rich, it promises massive tax breaks.
There are cuts to worker safety programs, veterans’ programs, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, vocational training, public education, environmental protection, health research and more. So much more. The list is shockingly long.
Each incision is painful. But what’s worse is the collective result: the annihilation of opportunity. The rich can buy opportunity. The rest cannot. What was always special about America was its guarantee of opportunity to everyone. All who worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps could earn their own picket-fenced home. This budget terminates the goal of opportunity for all. It declares that the people of the United States no longer will help provide boots to those who lost jobs because of NAFTA, the residents of economically depressed regions, the children of single mothers, the sufferers of chronic diseases, the victims of natural disasters. No bootstraps for them. Just for the rich who hire servants to pull the straps on their fancy $1,500 Gucci footwear.
The minimum-wage servant class doesn’t have a prayer under this budget. Trump condemns them to a perpetual prison of poverty. His budget denies them, and even their children, the chance to rise. It treats no better the precarious middle class and workers whose jobs are threatened by imports. It even screws veterans.
Achieving the American Dream depends on a good education, and the Trump budget would extinguish that possibility...
Achieving the American Dream depends on a good education, and the Trump budget would extinguish that possibility for tens of millions. The breadth and depth of the cuts to public education are gobsmacking. They’ll enable billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to use the money instead to subsidize private school tuition for the Gucci class.
While DeVos helps the already-rich attend pricey private schools, she and Trump would cut $345.9 billion from public education, training, employment and social services. That includes $71.5 billion from public elementary, secondary and vocational education. They’d take $11.4 billion from education for disadvantaged children and $13.9 billion from special-needs children.
They’d withdraw $183.3 billion from higher education including $33 billion from financial assistance. They say to kids who failed to be born to wealthy parents, “too bad for you, no low-interest student loans for brilliant poor students and far fewer grants for the talented who could cure cancer if only they could afford college tuition.”
Many of these aspiring students can’t turn to their parents for help because they’ve lost jobs as manufacturers like Rexnord and Carrier closed American factories and shipped jobs to Mexico or China. Trump and DeVos would also decimate help for the parents to get back on their feet, eliminating $25.2 billion for training and employment.
If the parents’ unemployment insurance runs out as they search for new jobs and their cars are repossessed, mass transit may not be an option for commuting to new positions. Trump would cut it by $41.6 billion.
If a furloughed worker in North Dakota or Minnesota or Pennsylvania can’t afford to pay the heating bill, Trump’s government would no longer help. He would eliminate entirely the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, ending aid that can mean the difference between life and freezing to death for 6 million vulnerable Americans.
If laid-off workers ultimately also lose their homes to foreclosure, Trump is unsympathetic. He’d cut $77.2 billion from housing assistance. His advice: take your bootless feet and live in the street.
And don’t expect any government cheese once there. Trump would carve $193.6 billion out of food stamps. He doesn’t even spare infants, with an $11.1 billion smack to the program that feeds pregnant women and their babies. School kids can’t expect food either. Trump and DeVos say too bad for them if they can’t hear their teachers over their growling stomachs. Trump takes nearly 21 percent away from the Agriculture Department, which subsidizes school lunches for low-income kids.
[T]he Trump budget... [rips] $154.1 billion from veterans’ services, including $94.4 billion from hospital and medical care...
Trump also stiffs families that lose their health insurance because they can’t afford COBRA premiums after a job loss or can’t find new employment before their COBRA eligibility expires. Trump slashes $627 billion from Medicaid, and that’s on top of draconian cuts in his so-called health plan that would cost 14 million Americans their insurance coverage next year and 23 million over 10 years. Trump says no health care for the down and out.
For the residents of West Virginia glens with closed coal mines, and the citizens of shuttered mill towns in Western Pennsylvania and the in habitants of Michigan municipalities struck down by offshored auto manufacturing jobs, Trump would purge $41.3 billion from the community development program that provides both jobs and otherwise unaffordable crucial municipal improvements.
The unemployed or under-employed who hoped for jobs in Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure program receive no reprieve in this proposed spending plan. It removes $97.2 billion from airports, $123.4 billion from ground transportation and $16.3 billion from water transportation projects.
Trump is mulling sending thousands of new troops to Afghanistan, and for some young people with few options, that service is attractive because it comes with good medical and education benefits. But the Trump budget diminishes that chance at success as well, ripping $154.1 billion from veterans’ services including $94.4 billion from hospital and medical care and $511 million from veterans’ education and training.
For young people who thought the AmeriCorps program might be an employment substitute for the military, no luck. Trump’s spending plan abolishes that service program.
Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget redefines America. No longer the land of opportunity, it would be a place of welfare for the rich in the form of million-dollar tax breaks and subsidies for exclusive private schools. For the rest, hope would be extinguished. For them, Trump’s budget would convert America the beautiful into America the hellish hole.type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=59244342e4b0b28a33f62f8b,5924693be4b03b485cb59638,592456a6e4b0b28a33f62faa,58cad7e5e4b07112b6472ba0
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 4 hours ago.
The spending plan slices a pound of flesh from everyone, well, everyone who isn’t a millionaire or billionaire. For the rich, it promises massive tax breaks.
There are cuts to worker safety programs, veterans’ programs, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, vocational training, public education, environmental protection, health research and more. So much more. The list is shockingly long.
Each incision is painful. But what’s worse is the collective result: the annihilation of opportunity. The rich can buy opportunity. The rest cannot. What was always special about America was its guarantee of opportunity to everyone. All who worked hard and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps could earn their own picket-fenced home. This budget terminates the goal of opportunity for all. It declares that the people of the United States no longer will help provide boots to those who lost jobs because of NAFTA, the residents of economically depressed regions, the children of single mothers, the sufferers of chronic diseases, the victims of natural disasters. No bootstraps for them. Just for the rich who hire servants to pull the straps on their fancy $1,500 Gucci footwear.
The minimum-wage servant class doesn’t have a prayer under this budget. Trump condemns them to a perpetual prison of poverty. His budget denies them, and even their children, the chance to rise. It treats no better the precarious middle class and workers whose jobs are threatened by imports. It even screws veterans.
Achieving the American Dream depends on a good education, and the Trump budget would extinguish that possibility...
Achieving the American Dream depends on a good education, and the Trump budget would extinguish that possibility for tens of millions. The breadth and depth of the cuts to public education are gobsmacking. They’ll enable billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to use the money instead to subsidize private school tuition for the Gucci class.
While DeVos helps the already-rich attend pricey private schools, she and Trump would cut $345.9 billion from public education, training, employment and social services. That includes $71.5 billion from public elementary, secondary and vocational education. They’d take $11.4 billion from education for disadvantaged children and $13.9 billion from special-needs children.
They’d withdraw $183.3 billion from higher education including $33 billion from financial assistance. They say to kids who failed to be born to wealthy parents, “too bad for you, no low-interest student loans for brilliant poor students and far fewer grants for the talented who could cure cancer if only they could afford college tuition.”
Many of these aspiring students can’t turn to their parents for help because they’ve lost jobs as manufacturers like Rexnord and Carrier closed American factories and shipped jobs to Mexico or China. Trump and DeVos would also decimate help for the parents to get back on their feet, eliminating $25.2 billion for training and employment.
If the parents’ unemployment insurance runs out as they search for new jobs and their cars are repossessed, mass transit may not be an option for commuting to new positions. Trump would cut it by $41.6 billion.
If a furloughed worker in North Dakota or Minnesota or Pennsylvania can’t afford to pay the heating bill, Trump’s government would no longer help. He would eliminate entirely the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, ending aid that can mean the difference between life and freezing to death for 6 million vulnerable Americans.
If laid-off workers ultimately also lose their homes to foreclosure, Trump is unsympathetic. He’d cut $77.2 billion from housing assistance. His advice: take your bootless feet and live in the street.
And don’t expect any government cheese once there. Trump would carve $193.6 billion out of food stamps. He doesn’t even spare infants, with an $11.1 billion smack to the program that feeds pregnant women and their babies. School kids can’t expect food either. Trump and DeVos say too bad for them if they can’t hear their teachers over their growling stomachs. Trump takes nearly 21 percent away from the Agriculture Department, which subsidizes school lunches for low-income kids.
[T]he Trump budget... [rips] $154.1 billion from veterans’ services, including $94.4 billion from hospital and medical care...
Trump also stiffs families that lose their health insurance because they can’t afford COBRA premiums after a job loss or can’t find new employment before their COBRA eligibility expires. Trump slashes $627 billion from Medicaid, and that’s on top of draconian cuts in his so-called health plan that would cost 14 million Americans their insurance coverage next year and 23 million over 10 years. Trump says no health care for the down and out.
For the residents of West Virginia glens with closed coal mines, and the citizens of shuttered mill towns in Western Pennsylvania and the in habitants of Michigan municipalities struck down by offshored auto manufacturing jobs, Trump would purge $41.3 billion from the community development program that provides both jobs and otherwise unaffordable crucial municipal improvements.
The unemployed or under-employed who hoped for jobs in Trump’s promised $1 trillion infrastructure program receive no reprieve in this proposed spending plan. It removes $97.2 billion from airports, $123.4 billion from ground transportation and $16.3 billion from water transportation projects.
Trump is mulling sending thousands of new troops to Afghanistan, and for some young people with few options, that service is attractive because it comes with good medical and education benefits. But the Trump budget diminishes that chance at success as well, ripping $154.1 billion from veterans’ services including $94.4 billion from hospital and medical care and $511 million from veterans’ education and training.
For young people who thought the AmeriCorps program might be an employment substitute for the military, no luck. Trump’s spending plan abolishes that service program.
Trump’s $4.1 trillion budget redefines America. No longer the land of opportunity, it would be a place of welfare for the rich in the form of million-dollar tax breaks and subsidies for exclusive private schools. For the rest, hope would be extinguished. For them, Trump’s budget would convert America the beautiful into America the hellish hole.type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=59244342e4b0b28a33f62f8b,5924693be4b03b485cb59638,592456a6e4b0b28a33f62faa,58cad7e5e4b07112b6472ba0
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 4 hours ago.
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Handout Nation: Combined Enrollment In America's 4 Largest Safety Net Programs Hits A Record High
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,Margaret Thatcher once said that the *problem with socialism “is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. * As you will see below, the combined enrollment in America’s four largest safety net programs has* reached a staggering 236 million.* Of course that doesn’t mean that 236 million people are getting benefits from the government each month because *there is overlap between the various programs. * For example, many Americans that are on Medicaid are also on food stamps, and many Americans that are on Medicare are also on Social Security. But even accounting for that, most experts estimate that the number of Americans that are dependent on the federal government month after month is well over 100 million. * And now that so many people are addicted to government handouts, can we ever return to a culture of independence and self-sufficiency?*
On Wednesday, CNN ran an editorial by Bernie *Sanders** in which he called President Trump’s proposed budget “immoral” because it would cut funding for government aid programs.*
*But is it moral to steal more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay for these programs?*
Of course the answer to that question is quite obvious.
*There will always be some Americans that are unable to take care of themselves, and we should want to help them.*
But as millions upon millions of Americans continue to jump on to the safety net, eventually we are going to get to the point where it is going to break.
As I mentioned above, *the combined enrollment in the four largest safety net programs has reached a new all-time record high…*
–More than 74 million Americans are on Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program).
–More than 58 million Americans are on Medicare.
–More than 60 million Americans are on Social Security.
–Approximately 44 million Americans are on food stamps. And even though we are supposedly in an “economic recovery”, this number is still dramatically higher than the 26 million Americans that were on food stamps prior to the last financial crisis.
When you add the figures for those four programs together, you get a grand total of *236 million*, and that doesn’t even count any of the other federal programs which are helping people.
Once again, there is overlap in enrollment between these various programs, but even accounting for that most experts believe that well over a third of the country is currently receiving benefits from the government each month.
*How far down this road do we have to go before people start calling it “socialism”?*
As I was writing this, I was reminded of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous quotes…
*“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”*
In our country today, many politicians have discovered that one of the best ways to win elections is to promise the voters as much free stuff as possible. *This is one of the primary reasons why Bernie Sanders did so well. *Young people loved his socialist policies, and he received more votes from Millennials in the primaries and caucuses than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined.
*As older generations of Americans continue to die off, the Millennials will just become even more powerful politically. * And considering the fact that they are far more liberal than other generations, that is a very alarming prospect…
In the minds of 80 percent of baby boomers and 91 percent of elderly Americans, communism was a major problem in years past and remains a significant concern today. But millennials, aged 16 to 20 years, see it differently. Only 55 percent of the younger generation take issue with communism, 45 percent say they would vote for a socialist and 21 percent say they’d vote for a communist.
And millennials made all that clear during the Democratic presidential primary, when many of them cast their vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist. In fact, the report credits the New England lawmaker with a “bounce” that led to less than half of millennials — 42 percent — having a favorable view of capitalism.
At this point, the Republic that our founders established is barely recognizable, and if it is going to be saved we need a conservative revolution as soon as possible.
A good place to begin would be to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government, and there are some promising signs in the budget that President Trump has proposed. He wants to completely eliminate 66 federal programs, and liberals are screaming bloody murder over this.
*Of course Trump’s budget is “dead on arrival” in Congress because many among his own party do not support him. * Most Republicans campaign as conservatives but govern like Democrats, and it is high time that we held them accountable for that. In 2018 we are going get Trump a whole bunch of friends in Congress, and a lot of those establishment Republicans that have been betraying conservatives for years are going to have to find a new line of work.
*We simply cannot afford to keep sending the same cast of characters back to Washington time after time. * Just look at the debacle that the effort to repeal Obamacare has become. According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, getting any sort of bill through the Senate is going to be extremely challenging…
Referring to behind-the-scenes work among Senate Republicans on a healthcare bill, McConnell said, “I don’t know how we get to 50 (votes) at the moment. But that’s the goal.”
Under a scenario of gathering the votes needed for passage in the 100-seat chamber, Republican Vice President Mike Pence would be called upon to cast any potential tie-breaking Senate vote.
McConnell opened the interview by saying, “There’s not a whole lot of news to be made on healthcare.” He declined to provide any timetable for producing even a draft bill to show to rank-and-file Republican senators and gauge their support.
And yet somehow when Obama was in office the Republicans in the House and the Senate were able to easily pass a bill to repeal Obamacare and get it to Obama’s desk.
Why can’t they get that exact same bill to Trump’s desk?
We definitely need to “drain the swamp” in D.C., and we can start with Congress.
*But the alliance between big money and big government is going to be hard to defeat, and so if we want our country back we are going to have to fight harder than we have ever fought before.* Reported by Zero Hedge 6 hours ago.
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Speaker Ryan: ‘No Plans Left in Iowa Because Obamacare Collapsed’ – New Health Care Act is a ‘Rescue Mission’
*(CNSNews.com)* -- Following the release of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the American Health Care Act, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said in a press conference on Thursday he was encouraged that the bill is meeting its budget targets and will lower health insurance premiums for Americans.
-- Reported by CNSNews.com 6 hours ago.
-- Reported by CNSNews.com 6 hours ago.
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New Analysis of Health Care Law Affirms Increases in Hunger, Poverty
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--#AHCA--Bread for the World is alarmed that 23 million people, including 14 million on Medicaid, would lose their health insurance coverage under the American Health Care Act.
Reported by Business Wire 6 hours ago.
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There's finally a federal bill to help workers in the gig economy
We know about the problems with the gig economy: workers who drive for Uber, deliver food for Postmates, and run errands on TaskRabbit don't have health insurance or any other guarantees or benefits from their employers — and their ranks are only growing.
While the growth of gig jobs has gotten lots of attention from major companies, research firms, and startups, national legislators haven't done much about it. (They've had other stuff going on, I guess.)
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Suzan DelBene, of Virginia and Washington respectively, are looking to change that. On Thursday they introduced the first federal bill addressing the gig economy. Read more...
More about Uber, Lyft, Senate, Postmates, and Legislation Reported by Mashable 4 hours ago.
While the growth of gig jobs has gotten lots of attention from major companies, research firms, and startups, national legislators haven't done much about it. (They've had other stuff going on, I guess.)
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Suzan DelBene, of Virginia and Washington respectively, are looking to change that. On Thursday they introduced the first federal bill addressing the gig economy. Read more...
More about Uber, Lyft, Senate, Postmates, and Legislation Reported by Mashable 4 hours ago.
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Here are all the ways Trump's budget screws young people
President Trump released his budget this week and — aside from seeming to be for an imaginary country without our very real problems — it totally screws young people.We're going to talk about how.
The way this White House writes it, we're back in the depths of a financial crisis. This time, though, we haven't a penny to spare on stimulating the economy and job growth — in this imaginary recession, we can only cut benefits for the sick, the poor, and the young people that will drive the future of our country.
As this Budget returns us to economic prosperity, it will also allow us to fund additional priorities, including infrastructure, student loan reform, and initiatives to help working families such as paid parental leave. We will champion the hardworking taxpayers who have been ignored for too long. Once we end our economic stagnation and return to robust growth, so many of our aspirations will be within reach.
But our economy isn't stagnant. It hasn't been in years. We're coming off one of the biggest recoveries in American history. The problem is that recovery has been uneven, and many of Trump's supporters have been left behind.
Instead of lifting them up with this budget, though, the Trump administration is going to drag the rest of the country down with them. This goes especially for young people, and with the help of our friends at Young Invincibles (YI), a millennial advocacy group, let me count the ways.
"This budget is grossly out of step with the needs of young people and the priorities of most members of Congress. It fails to invest in young people and the future of our country, by slashing opportunities for young adults to gain skills through education, sustain themselves and their families, and contribute to our workforce," said Reid Setzer, the director of government affairs at Young Invincibles.
I'll say it again, Donald Trump doesn't care about young people.
*SEE ALSO: Everyone should hear what the journalist who interviewed Trump for The Economist said afterward*
*SEE ALSO: The White House just made one thing abundantly clear to millennials*
-This budget leaves more young people without healthcare.-
On top of the American Healthcare Act, which cuts $800 million off Medicaid, this budget cuts another $616 billion from *Medicaid and CHIP (Children's Health Insurance Program)*.
4 million young people gained access to healthcare with Obamacare. Now their coverage is at risk.
And lest we forget, Medicare helps schools pay to care for students with special needs and disabilities.-This budget screws young people looking to get technical training.-
If you're a young person looking to learn a technical skill under an apprenticeship type program, there's going to be less to go around for you.
Trump's budget cuts funding for the *Perkins Career and Technical Education Act* in half.
"CTE is vital for both students and employers because it teaches young people valuable, in-demand skills that employers need and provides hands-on training. However, this budget only allocates $186 million to implement its reauthorization, while the previous Administration asked for double that amount for its reauthorization proposal," says YI.-This budget screws over poor kids and vets (in/or) trying to get to college.-
The Trump budget cuts $193 million from TRIO and GEAR UP.
*TRIO* helps underprivileged kids and vets who are struggling in school through tutoring and counseling.
*GEAR UP* helps underprivileged kids get the college prep they need.
It also cuts the Youth Activities from the Department of Labor budget by $394 million. That program helps underprivileged kids get summer or year-round jobs that help them prep for college and develop skills.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider Reported by Business Insider 5 hours ago.
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City Council moves to mandate fertility coverage for employees
The City of Philadelphia used to cover in vitro fertilization under the health insurance plan used by 6,000 employees. In January, it cut the service to keep premiums level. City Councilwoman Helen Gym on Thursday introduced legislation that would require the city provide IVF and other infertility services.
Reported by philly.com 5 hours ago.
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House Republicans Don't Regret Passing Their Health Care Bill
WASHINGTON ― House Republicans have finally seen an updated Congressional Budget Office score for the American Health Care Act, and while the legislation reportedly would be disastrous ― 23 million fewer people with insurance over 10 years, plus higher costs for people with pre-existing conditions and women seeking maternity care ― Republicans showed little remorse for passing the bill.
“I said for weeks I had zero confidence in the CBO,” Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told HuffPost on Thursday. “You would never hire them to manage your retirement plan, so it came out exactly what I expected it to be.”
Marshall dismissed concerns that the CBO indicates it would become more difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to purchase insurance in states that waive certain Obamacare regulations and that those people would see their premiums “increase rapidly.”
“The CBO’s crazy,” Marshall said, adding that sick people would be “even better protected with our legislation than they would before.”
The report issued Wednesday said the GOP bill would save $119 billion over 10 years, but that savings would come from slashing $834 billion from Medicaid and cutting taxes that were used to fund Obamacare by about $600 billion. The CBO also said low-income seniors, sick people and women seeking maternity care could all face significantly steeper prices, while healthy people in states that waive protections for the vulnerable could see their premiums fall by as much as 30 percent.
But many Republicans have cast doubt on the CBO, citing the federal agency’s 2010 score for the Affordable Care Act as proof that the scorekeepers can be wrong. Of the more than 20 Republicans HuffPost asked for a reaction, almost all of them shrugged off the CBO report and remained supportive of the bill.
“The CBO is very good at crunching budget numbers,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said. “It has demonstrated it doesn’t have the first clue about how [health care] markets work.”
McClintock went on to cite missed Obamacare projections on small premium increases and the number of people who would enroll in the exchanges. (The CBO said there would be around 24 million people electing insurance through the exchanges, while the number ended up being closer to 10 million. And the CBO was off on the number of people who would be helped through Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion: The projection said around 10 million when the number was closer to 14 million.)
“So their policy discussions are helpful,” McClintock said. “They are often wildly inaccurate.”Health policy experts have acknowledged some of the missed projections for Obamacare. But the Commonwealth Fund also said “the CBO’s projections were closer to realized experience than were those of many other prominent forecasters.” And a fact check of how close the CBO projection was for Obamacare concluded that the analysts were not “way, way off.”
Still, Republicans have a point that the CBO was overly optimistic about the effects of Obamacare. Premiums have gone up, and fewer people have enrolled in the exchanges as a result. And that false optimism in 2010 has led Republicans to conclude that the CBO is overly pessimistic now.
“CBO has been wrong on so many fronts it ain’t even funny,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said.
“There have been so many false assumptions by CBO,” Johnson added. “But what they did verify is that our health care plan ― the American Health Care Plan ― reduces the deficits and lowers premiums.”
When HuffPost raised the point that the CBO score said the GOP health care bill would not lower premiums for sick people in states that waived protections for people with pre-existing conditions, Johnson said, “Sure it does. I don’t believe them.”
The CBO also said older people with low incomes would face substantially higher premiums. For example, a 64-year-old making $26,500 a year is expected to pay more than $16,000 a year in premiums for health insurance, even after a tax credit is applied. That same person would pay $1,700 a year in premiums under Obamacare.But Republicans said they simply don’t trust the CBO score and generally seemed unconcerned that 23 million people may lose their health insurance.
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), who was on the fence about the bill until the day before the May 4 vote, said 23 million people electing not to buy health insurance as a result of the GOP bill was “basically a picture of when people are not forced to buy broccoli, they don’t eat it.”
Only Republicans who voted against the health care bill seemed to take the CBO report seriously.
Vulnerable Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) said she continued to have “a lot of other concerns about the bill.” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group, seemed concerned that other Republicans haven’t addressed how many people are projected to lose insurance as a result of this bill.
“Too many people are going to be without coverage as a result of legislation that was haphazardly constructed and hastily considered,” Dent said. “And it’s part of the reason why we have an issue here.
Too many people are going to be without coverage as a result of legislation that was haphazardly constructed and hastily considered.
Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)
The one Republican who seemed generally upset by some of the CBO’s projections was the man who was instrumental in reviving the bill: Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who chairs the conservative Freedom Caucus.
Meadows continued to defend the bill after the CBO score was released, pointing to the high-risk pools that states would need to create to waive certain protections for people with preexisting conditions. But after reading a couple of paragraphs about less healthy people facing higher premiums, he began tearing up and talking about what the health care bill meant to him.
“I lost my sister to breast cancer,” Meadows said Wednesday. “I lost my dad to lung cancer. If anybody is sensitive to pre-existing conditions, it’s me. And I’m not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father, because I wouldn’t do it to myself. And so I tell you that in the most earnest of ways that we’re going to get this right, not just because of my sister and my dad, we’re going to get it right for the American people because that’s the right thing to do.”
Meadows also suggested that he would be willing to keep more of the Obamacare taxes to help keep more people on Medicaid and to offset the cost of health insurance for sick people.
“In the end,” Meadows said, “what we’ve got to do is make sure there’s enough funds there to handle pre-existing conditions and drive down premiums. And if we can’t do those [two] things, then we will have failed.”
Still, Meadows remained supportive of the bill, and his less-than-enthusiastic reaction was the exception, not the norm.
When HuffPost asked Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) for her take on the CBO score ― which, again, says 23 million fewer people will have insurance, that sick people could face significantly steeper costs, and that women could have to pay around $1,000 a month more for insurance that covers maternity care ― Foxx said, “I think it’s great.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) expressed relief over the score. Republicans had held onto the bill for two weeks and not sent it to the Senate because they feared it would not save the requisite $2 billion it needed to keep its reconciliation status.
“I’m actually comforted by the CBO report because it shows, yeah, we’re going to lower premiums,” Ryan said.
Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 3 hours ago.
“I said for weeks I had zero confidence in the CBO,” Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told HuffPost on Thursday. “You would never hire them to manage your retirement plan, so it came out exactly what I expected it to be.”
Marshall dismissed concerns that the CBO indicates it would become more difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to purchase insurance in states that waive certain Obamacare regulations and that those people would see their premiums “increase rapidly.”
“The CBO’s crazy,” Marshall said, adding that sick people would be “even better protected with our legislation than they would before.”
The report issued Wednesday said the GOP bill would save $119 billion over 10 years, but that savings would come from slashing $834 billion from Medicaid and cutting taxes that were used to fund Obamacare by about $600 billion. The CBO also said low-income seniors, sick people and women seeking maternity care could all face significantly steeper prices, while healthy people in states that waive protections for the vulnerable could see their premiums fall by as much as 30 percent.
But many Republicans have cast doubt on the CBO, citing the federal agency’s 2010 score for the Affordable Care Act as proof that the scorekeepers can be wrong. Of the more than 20 Republicans HuffPost asked for a reaction, almost all of them shrugged off the CBO report and remained supportive of the bill.
“The CBO is very good at crunching budget numbers,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said. “It has demonstrated it doesn’t have the first clue about how [health care] markets work.”
McClintock went on to cite missed Obamacare projections on small premium increases and the number of people who would enroll in the exchanges. (The CBO said there would be around 24 million people electing insurance through the exchanges, while the number ended up being closer to 10 million. And the CBO was off on the number of people who would be helped through Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion: The projection said around 10 million when the number was closer to 14 million.)
“So their policy discussions are helpful,” McClintock said. “They are often wildly inaccurate.”Health policy experts have acknowledged some of the missed projections for Obamacare. But the Commonwealth Fund also said “the CBO’s projections were closer to realized experience than were those of many other prominent forecasters.” And a fact check of how close the CBO projection was for Obamacare concluded that the analysts were not “way, way off.”
Still, Republicans have a point that the CBO was overly optimistic about the effects of Obamacare. Premiums have gone up, and fewer people have enrolled in the exchanges as a result. And that false optimism in 2010 has led Republicans to conclude that the CBO is overly pessimistic now.
“CBO has been wrong on so many fronts it ain’t even funny,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said.
“There have been so many false assumptions by CBO,” Johnson added. “But what they did verify is that our health care plan ― the American Health Care Plan ― reduces the deficits and lowers premiums.”
When HuffPost raised the point that the CBO score said the GOP health care bill would not lower premiums for sick people in states that waived protections for people with pre-existing conditions, Johnson said, “Sure it does. I don’t believe them.”
The CBO also said older people with low incomes would face substantially higher premiums. For example, a 64-year-old making $26,500 a year is expected to pay more than $16,000 a year in premiums for health insurance, even after a tax credit is applied. That same person would pay $1,700 a year in premiums under Obamacare.But Republicans said they simply don’t trust the CBO score and generally seemed unconcerned that 23 million people may lose their health insurance.
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), who was on the fence about the bill until the day before the May 4 vote, said 23 million people electing not to buy health insurance as a result of the GOP bill was “basically a picture of when people are not forced to buy broccoli, they don’t eat it.”
Only Republicans who voted against the health care bill seemed to take the CBO report seriously.
Vulnerable Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) said she continued to have “a lot of other concerns about the bill.” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), chairman of the moderate Tuesday Group, seemed concerned that other Republicans haven’t addressed how many people are projected to lose insurance as a result of this bill.
“Too many people are going to be without coverage as a result of legislation that was haphazardly constructed and hastily considered,” Dent said. “And it’s part of the reason why we have an issue here.
Too many people are going to be without coverage as a result of legislation that was haphazardly constructed and hastily considered.
Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.)
The one Republican who seemed generally upset by some of the CBO’s projections was the man who was instrumental in reviving the bill: Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who chairs the conservative Freedom Caucus.
Meadows continued to defend the bill after the CBO score was released, pointing to the high-risk pools that states would need to create to waive certain protections for people with preexisting conditions. But after reading a couple of paragraphs about less healthy people facing higher premiums, he began tearing up and talking about what the health care bill meant to him.
“I lost my sister to breast cancer,” Meadows said Wednesday. “I lost my dad to lung cancer. If anybody is sensitive to pre-existing conditions, it’s me. And I’m not going to make a political decision today that affects somebody’s sister or father, because I wouldn’t do it to myself. And so I tell you that in the most earnest of ways that we’re going to get this right, not just because of my sister and my dad, we’re going to get it right for the American people because that’s the right thing to do.”
Meadows also suggested that he would be willing to keep more of the Obamacare taxes to help keep more people on Medicaid and to offset the cost of health insurance for sick people.
“In the end,” Meadows said, “what we’ve got to do is make sure there’s enough funds there to handle pre-existing conditions and drive down premiums. And if we can’t do those [two] things, then we will have failed.”
Still, Meadows remained supportive of the bill, and his less-than-enthusiastic reaction was the exception, not the norm.
When HuffPost asked Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) for her take on the CBO score ― which, again, says 23 million fewer people will have insurance, that sick people could face significantly steeper costs, and that women could have to pay around $1,000 a month more for insurance that covers maternity care ― Foxx said, “I think it’s great.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) expressed relief over the score. Republicans had held onto the bill for two weeks and not sent it to the Senate because they feared it would not save the requisite $2 billion it needed to keep its reconciliation status.
“I’m actually comforted by the CBO report because it shows, yeah, we’re going to lower premiums,” Ryan said.
Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 3 hours ago.
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The Body Slam Politic
*Like what you read below? **Sign up for HUFFPOST HILL** and get a cheeky dose of political news every evening! *
Good luck ever getting a Hill reporter to write a puff piece about your dog if you’re the congressman who body slammed a journalist (well, actually, there’s always Matt Boyle). Though we really don’t like the idea of politicians body slamming us or our colleagues, we cheered ourselves up with the idea that someone last night got really deep into a Medium essay on how terrible it was that Greg Gianforte body-shamed Ben Jacobs. And President Trump celebrated a Rasmussen poll showing him with a 48% approval rating and dear, sweet Lord, we hope a framed version of this gets hung up in the West Wing alongside that “electoral landslide” map. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, May 25th, 2017:
*VOTERS GO TO THE POLLS IN MONTANA, NO MORE BODY-SLAMMING INCIDENTS TO REPORT - *Alexander C. Kaufman and Daniel Marans: “Democrat Rob Quist, a populist progressive cowboy poet known for his career as a bluegrass singer, supports single-payer health care, legalizing marijuana and funding more arts programs in schools. Republican Greg Gianforte, a tech entrepreneur who moved to the state in 1995, is a hard-line social conservative who backs the deeply unpopular GOP bill to replace Obamacare and wants to turn over control of public lands to the state. Gianforte, who narrowly lost a bid for governor last year, is favored to win the seat that Zinke handily won re-election to in November. *But Gianforte’s own strategists describe him as ‘basically an unpopular incumbent trying to get re-elected.’ *... The election took an unexpected turn on Wednesday evening, when Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs accused Gianforte of ‘body-slamming’ him…. It’s unclear how the election-eve violence may influence Thursday’s vote. *The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wasted no time trying to capitalize on it, demanding that Gianforte ‘immediately withdraw’ from the race*.” [HuffPost]
*Naturally, congressional Republicans have identified the real villains here: *“Apparently, you can body-slam a reporter for asking a question and still have a place in the Republican Party…. ‘The actual act of what he did, there’s just no way to justify that,’ said Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), *who then shifted blame onto liberals*. ‘I understand the frustrations that people feel because we can’t hardly go to a town hall without it just being a total denial of free speech. The left has created enormous polarization in this country.’ … HuffPost asked nearly a dozen lawmakers about the CBO score on Thursday. No one threw any punches. And yet, when asked why Gianforte couldn’t show any such constraint, *many of these lawmakers expressed disappointment with the reporters themselves*. ‘What’s your question, do I think body slamming reporters is a good thing?’ Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said, laughing at reporters. ‘Ya’ll really are into this.’” [HuffPost’s Laura Barrón-López]
Check out this photo gallery of politicians not body-slamming reporters.
*HOUSE GOP STILL HAPPY WITH THAT BILL STRIPPING 23 MILLION PEOPLE OF THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE* *-* Ahhhh, yes, who can forget that chapter from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” on the merits of covering one’s eyes and yelling at the top of one’s lungs, “YOU CAN’T SEE ME IF I CAN’T SEE YOU!!!” Matt Fuller: “*Republicans showed little remorse for passing the bill. ‘I said for weeks I had zero confidence in the CBO,’ Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told HuffPost on Thursday. ‘*You would never hire them to manage your retirement plan, so it came out exactly what I expected it to be.’ Marshall dismissed concerns that the CBO indicates it would become more difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to purchase insurance in states that waive certain Obamacare regulations and that those people would see their premiums ‘increase rapidly.’ ‘The CBO’s crazy,’ Marshall said, adding that sick people would be ‘even better protected with our legislation than they would before.’” [HuffPost]
*Yeah, the GOP sales pitch for that bill is bull. “*Wednesday’s report from the Congressional Budget Office ought to erase any lingering doubt about how Republicans are trying to change American health care. If they get their way, they will protect the strong at the expense of the weak ― rewarding the rich and the healthy in ways that punish the poor and the sick.” [HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn]
*Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s book*, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government
Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
*TRAVEL BAN ONCE AGAIN SLAPPED DOWN IN APPEALS COURT - *Can we say it was schlonged? That it was schlonged in appeals court? Cristian Farias: “In yet another setback for the Trump administration, *a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, on Thursday refused to lift a nationwide injunction that halted a key provision of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on six predominantly Muslim nations. *The ruling is the most bruising the White House has suffered in its attempts to defend the ban, as it was rendered by 13 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit — which deemed the case important enough to skip the usual three-judge process that the vast majority of cases go through. U.S. Chief Circuit Judge Roger Gregory wrote that the text of Trump’s executive order, which was challenged in courts across the country for targeting members of a particular faith, ‘speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.’” [HuffPost]
*HOUSE REPUBLICANS TRYING TO KEEP DUMPSTER FIRE FROM GETTING TOO OUT OF HAND - *Rachael Bade and John Bresnahan: “House Republican leaders, facing a serious time crunch this fall, are already plotting ways to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September — a real possibility given partisan divisions over spending priorities. Speaker Paul Ryan in a closed-door GOP conference meeting Thursday morning laid out the legislative calendar, showing lawmakers they’re approximately four months behind schedule in the appropriations process for 2018, in part because President Donald Trump’s budget landed later than usual…. *House Republicans can’t agree on their own budget blueprint for next year, clashing internally over cuts to entitlement programs and safety net initiatives such as food stamps and housing aid*, all while trying to create space for tax reform and a big defense spending increase. In addition, they still have to find money for Trump’s priorities, including the hugely controversial border wall between the United States and Mexico.” [Politico]
*NOMENTUM - *We wish him nothing but success in his future endeavors, namely falling asleep during the roll call at Third Way board meetings. Rebecca Ballhaus: “*Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, once a leading contender for FBI director, on Thursday withdrew himself from consideration for the post in a letter to President Donald Trump, citing the appearance of a conflict of interest.* The former Connecticut senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate works at the same law firm as Marc Kasowitz, whom Mr. Trump retained earlier this week to serve on a team of private attorneys representing him in the broad special-counsel probe of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election. ‘I do believe it would be best to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, given my role as senior counsel in the law firm of which Marc is the senior partner,’ Mr. Lieberman wrote in the letter dated Wednesday, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. He thanked Mr. Trump for inviting him to discuss ‘the possibility of being nominated’ as FBI director.” [WSJ]
*MULLER RUSSIA PROB BIGFOOTING ALL THE OTHER RUSSIA PROBES - *We like to imagine that Mueller’s probe strides into the crime scene and tells the scrappy local congressional probes that they’re taking over and that it’s going to be by the books from here on out, see. Ryan J. Reilly: “Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government will hold up congressional probes that were looking into whether Trump affiliates colluded with foreign entities to interfere with the 2016 election, a letter from the FBI indicated on Thursday. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had requested a copy of memos that former FBI Director James Comey reportedly made to memorialize conversations with President Donald Trump…. But Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last week named Mueller, a former FBI director, as special counsel to lead the investigation, and the FBI *told Chaffetz on Thursday that it couldn’t immediately provide a copy of Comey’s memos*.” [HuffPost]
*TRUMP, WHAT ELSE, ATTACKS LEAKERS - * MIchael D. Shear and Steven Erlanger: “President Trump condemned ‘leaks of sensitive information,’ responding on Thursday to a complaint by Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, over disclosures of details from the investigation into Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack since 2005. ‘The alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling,’ Mr. Trump said in a statement. ‘These leaks have been going on for a long time, and my administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security.’ … [T]wo dimensions of the latest controversy are new: The disclosures in this case are about a terrorism investigation led by a foreign ally, and the British government has brought its complaints to a receptive audience.” [NYT]
*TRUMP BASHES NATO ON ITS BIG DAY - *The wake for Tony Soprano’s mother comes to mind. S.V. Date: “*President Donald Trump on Thursday publicly scolded European allies for taking advantage of U.S. taxpayers by failing to spend enough on defense ― while in private reportedly breaking with them over how to treat Russia*, the country that worked to help get him elected. ‘NATO members must fully contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,’ he said at a ceremony intended to mark the alliance’s solidarity in responding to the 9/11 attacks on America. ‘Twenty-three of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they’re supposed to be paying for their defense,’ Trump said. ‘This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. And many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years.’” [HuffPost]
*BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR -* Here’s a child who just wants to chill.
*A GRATEFUL NATION THANKS WHOEVER HACKED HARVARD’S NEWSPAPER -* Just read this. You’ll be glad you did. Bryan Menegus: “Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to the venerable Ivy League institution he famously dropped out of, revisiting his old dorm room and giving a commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017. *To commemorate the social networking titan’s return to his alma mater, the website of Harvard’s 144-year-old newspaper (or whomever gained control of it) ran as its frontpage story: ‘MARK ZOINKERBURG AT IT AGAIN.’*” [Gizmodo]
*COMFORT FOOD*
- Share this man’s joy as he sets a Plinko record on “The Price is Right.”
- It’s really not hard to entertain dogs.
- Looking back at Nestlé’s 150-year history.
If Gianforte gets elected no reporter should ask him about anything other than his thoughts on the CBO score for the remainder of his term
— l33t bharara (@FanSince09) May 25, 2017
Someone on Cleveland Park listserv floats idea of organizing a protest against Wegman’s. Are there no other injustices left to rail against?
— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) May 25, 2017
C
Body slam all reporters
O
— Kriston Capps (@kristoncapps) May 25, 2017
Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffpost.com)
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 3 hours ago.
Good luck ever getting a Hill reporter to write a puff piece about your dog if you’re the congressman who body slammed a journalist (well, actually, there’s always Matt Boyle). Though we really don’t like the idea of politicians body slamming us or our colleagues, we cheered ourselves up with the idea that someone last night got really deep into a Medium essay on how terrible it was that Greg Gianforte body-shamed Ben Jacobs. And President Trump celebrated a Rasmussen poll showing him with a 48% approval rating and dear, sweet Lord, we hope a framed version of this gets hung up in the West Wing alongside that “electoral landslide” map. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, May 25th, 2017:
*VOTERS GO TO THE POLLS IN MONTANA, NO MORE BODY-SLAMMING INCIDENTS TO REPORT - *Alexander C. Kaufman and Daniel Marans: “Democrat Rob Quist, a populist progressive cowboy poet known for his career as a bluegrass singer, supports single-payer health care, legalizing marijuana and funding more arts programs in schools. Republican Greg Gianforte, a tech entrepreneur who moved to the state in 1995, is a hard-line social conservative who backs the deeply unpopular GOP bill to replace Obamacare and wants to turn over control of public lands to the state. Gianforte, who narrowly lost a bid for governor last year, is favored to win the seat that Zinke handily won re-election to in November. *But Gianforte’s own strategists describe him as ‘basically an unpopular incumbent trying to get re-elected.’ *... The election took an unexpected turn on Wednesday evening, when Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs accused Gianforte of ‘body-slamming’ him…. It’s unclear how the election-eve violence may influence Thursday’s vote. *The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee wasted no time trying to capitalize on it, demanding that Gianforte ‘immediately withdraw’ from the race*.” [HuffPost]
*Naturally, congressional Republicans have identified the real villains here: *“Apparently, you can body-slam a reporter for asking a question and still have a place in the Republican Party…. ‘The actual act of what he did, there’s just no way to justify that,’ said Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), *who then shifted blame onto liberals*. ‘I understand the frustrations that people feel because we can’t hardly go to a town hall without it just being a total denial of free speech. The left has created enormous polarization in this country.’ … HuffPost asked nearly a dozen lawmakers about the CBO score on Thursday. No one threw any punches. And yet, when asked why Gianforte couldn’t show any such constraint, *many of these lawmakers expressed disappointment with the reporters themselves*. ‘What’s your question, do I think body slamming reporters is a good thing?’ Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said, laughing at reporters. ‘Ya’ll really are into this.’” [HuffPost’s Laura Barrón-López]
Check out this photo gallery of politicians not body-slamming reporters.
*HOUSE GOP STILL HAPPY WITH THAT BILL STRIPPING 23 MILLION PEOPLE OF THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE* *-* Ahhhh, yes, who can forget that chapter from Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” on the merits of covering one’s eyes and yelling at the top of one’s lungs, “YOU CAN’T SEE ME IF I CAN’T SEE YOU!!!” Matt Fuller: “*Republicans showed little remorse for passing the bill. ‘I said for weeks I had zero confidence in the CBO,’ Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told HuffPost on Thursday. ‘*You would never hire them to manage your retirement plan, so it came out exactly what I expected it to be.’ Marshall dismissed concerns that the CBO indicates it would become more difficult for people with pre-existing conditions to purchase insurance in states that waive certain Obamacare regulations and that those people would see their premiums ‘increase rapidly.’ ‘The CBO’s crazy,’ Marshall said, adding that sick people would be ‘even better protected with our legislation than they would before.’” [HuffPost]
*Yeah, the GOP sales pitch for that bill is bull. “*Wednesday’s report from the Congressional Budget Office ought to erase any lingering doubt about how Republicans are trying to change American health care. If they get their way, they will protect the strong at the expense of the weak ― rewarding the rich and the healthy in ways that punish the poor and the sick.” [HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn]
*Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s book*, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government
Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here. Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffpost.com. Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill
*TRAVEL BAN ONCE AGAIN SLAPPED DOWN IN APPEALS COURT - *Can we say it was schlonged? That it was schlonged in appeals court? Cristian Farias: “In yet another setback for the Trump administration, *a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, on Thursday refused to lift a nationwide injunction that halted a key provision of President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on six predominantly Muslim nations. *The ruling is the most bruising the White House has suffered in its attempts to defend the ban, as it was rendered by 13 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit — which deemed the case important enough to skip the usual three-judge process that the vast majority of cases go through. U.S. Chief Circuit Judge Roger Gregory wrote that the text of Trump’s executive order, which was challenged in courts across the country for targeting members of a particular faith, ‘speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.’” [HuffPost]
*HOUSE REPUBLICANS TRYING TO KEEP DUMPSTER FIRE FROM GETTING TOO OUT OF HAND - *Rachael Bade and John Bresnahan: “House Republican leaders, facing a serious time crunch this fall, are already plotting ways to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September — a real possibility given partisan divisions over spending priorities. Speaker Paul Ryan in a closed-door GOP conference meeting Thursday morning laid out the legislative calendar, showing lawmakers they’re approximately four months behind schedule in the appropriations process for 2018, in part because President Donald Trump’s budget landed later than usual…. *House Republicans can’t agree on their own budget blueprint for next year, clashing internally over cuts to entitlement programs and safety net initiatives such as food stamps and housing aid*, all while trying to create space for tax reform and a big defense spending increase. In addition, they still have to find money for Trump’s priorities, including the hugely controversial border wall between the United States and Mexico.” [Politico]
*NOMENTUM - *We wish him nothing but success in his future endeavors, namely falling asleep during the roll call at Third Way board meetings. Rebecca Ballhaus: “*Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, once a leading contender for FBI director, on Thursday withdrew himself from consideration for the post in a letter to President Donald Trump, citing the appearance of a conflict of interest.* The former Connecticut senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate works at the same law firm as Marc Kasowitz, whom Mr. Trump retained earlier this week to serve on a team of private attorneys representing him in the broad special-counsel probe of Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election. ‘I do believe it would be best to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, given my role as senior counsel in the law firm of which Marc is the senior partner,’ Mr. Lieberman wrote in the letter dated Wednesday, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. He thanked Mr. Trump for inviting him to discuss ‘the possibility of being nominated’ as FBI director.” [WSJ]
*MULLER RUSSIA PROB BIGFOOTING ALL THE OTHER RUSSIA PROBES - *We like to imagine that Mueller’s probe strides into the crime scene and tells the scrappy local congressional probes that they’re taking over and that it’s going to be by the books from here on out, see. Ryan J. Reilly: “Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of potential ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government will hold up congressional probes that were looking into whether Trump affiliates colluded with foreign entities to interfere with the 2016 election, a letter from the FBI indicated on Thursday. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had requested a copy of memos that former FBI Director James Comey reportedly made to memorialize conversations with President Donald Trump…. But Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last week named Mueller, a former FBI director, as special counsel to lead the investigation, and the FBI *told Chaffetz on Thursday that it couldn’t immediately provide a copy of Comey’s memos*.” [HuffPost]
*TRUMP, WHAT ELSE, ATTACKS LEAKERS - * MIchael D. Shear and Steven Erlanger: “President Trump condemned ‘leaks of sensitive information,’ responding on Thursday to a complaint by Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, over disclosures of details from the investigation into Britain’s deadliest terrorist attack since 2005. ‘The alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling,’ Mr. Trump said in a statement. ‘These leaks have been going on for a long time, and my administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security.’ … [T]wo dimensions of the latest controversy are new: The disclosures in this case are about a terrorism investigation led by a foreign ally, and the British government has brought its complaints to a receptive audience.” [NYT]
*TRUMP BASHES NATO ON ITS BIG DAY - *The wake for Tony Soprano’s mother comes to mind. S.V. Date: “*President Donald Trump on Thursday publicly scolded European allies for taking advantage of U.S. taxpayers by failing to spend enough on defense ― while in private reportedly breaking with them over how to treat Russia*, the country that worked to help get him elected. ‘NATO members must fully contribute their fair share and meet their financial obligations,’ he said at a ceremony intended to mark the alliance’s solidarity in responding to the 9/11 attacks on America. ‘Twenty-three of the 28 member nations are still not paying what they should be paying and what they’re supposed to be paying for their defense,’ Trump said. ‘This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. And many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years.’” [HuffPost]
*BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR -* Here’s a child who just wants to chill.
*A GRATEFUL NATION THANKS WHOEVER HACKED HARVARD’S NEWSPAPER -* Just read this. You’ll be glad you did. Bryan Menegus: “Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to the venerable Ivy League institution he famously dropped out of, revisiting his old dorm room and giving a commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017. *To commemorate the social networking titan’s return to his alma mater, the website of Harvard’s 144-year-old newspaper (or whomever gained control of it) ran as its frontpage story: ‘MARK ZOINKERBURG AT IT AGAIN.’*” [Gizmodo]
*COMFORT FOOD*
- Share this man’s joy as he sets a Plinko record on “The Price is Right.”
- It’s really not hard to entertain dogs.
- Looking back at Nestlé’s 150-year history.
If Gianforte gets elected no reporter should ask him about anything other than his thoughts on the CBO score for the remainder of his term
— l33t bharara (@FanSince09) May 25, 2017
Someone on Cleveland Park listserv floats idea of organizing a protest against Wegman’s. Are there no other injustices left to rail against?
— Amanda Terkel (@aterkel) May 25, 2017
C
Body slam all reporters
O
— Kriston Capps (@kristoncapps) May 25, 2017
Got something to add? Send tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffpost.com)
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 3 hours ago.
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