Ho hum, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns that the Trump Administration may be preparing Executive Orders on health care which will almost certainly make insurance coverage "more expensive" and "less accessible." At which point Dear Leader will say, see? I told you Obamacare wasn't working! The best part is the part where they plan to let health insurance corporations charge older Americans 3.49 times what they charge younger ones even though the law says they can only charge older folks three times as much -- because 3.49 rounds down to three! Just like 46% rounds up to everyone.
The Trump Administration's one-in-two-out rule has stalled Department of Energy regulations that would protect whistleblowers. Ah, whistleblowers are all money-grubbing crooks, I can almost hear Mr. Trump say, and is it refreshing that he'd put it less politely than Mr. Obama would? No, not really. And of course whistleblowers usually wind up sacrificing their careers to do the right thing, whether they get paid or not.
So there was Ted Cruz on CNN the other night, telling Bernie Sanders that "Obamacare is discouraging people from going to medical school and training to be doctors" -- when statistical data tells us more folks enroll in med school every year. The Cruz camp says the real story is the shortfall in physicians (though not why he didn't just say that), but that's been happening for a while, and mainly because of higher demand for health care, a demand partly driven by, well, more and more of us living into older and older age. Still, arguing using facts is hard. Fake news is easier.
Glenn Greenwald sees the race for DNC Chair demonstrating "the systemic, fundamental sickness of the Democratic Party." The third-to-last paragraph summarizes all the problems Democrats have, which include, of course, "an inability to speak plainly, without desperately clinging to focus-group, talking-points scripts." All we have to do, as Americans, is focus on changing the Reps and Senators we've got -- and I've been hearing they're "rattled" by all our speaking out -- without getting personally invested in advancing Democratic fortunes.
Finally, in a related note, the personification of everything wrong with Democrats, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, tells us how Democrats can "win" in the "long haul." Of course it's all about "winning," "because if you win you then have the power to go do what has to get done" -- but when his party won, they made weak policy that led directly to their losing Congress (and most state offices!) in 2010. And he shouldn't boast that "I've never lost an election" when he's only ever run against token-if-any Republican opposition. Hate to pile on, but if any Democrat "masterminded" 2006, it was Howard Dean.
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