“Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted,” the bill states.”
– Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Mo Brooks / Scribed.
The beauty of the thing is that it is simple, effective, and out in the open (unlike Ryan’s Whack-a-Bill failure). Thus, the beauty guarantees the GOP will never pass it.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds accurately details the incomprehensible Republican failure and stupidity last week in D.C.
The plan to replace Obamacare with a new bill crafted by House Speaker Paul Ryan has failed, and embarrassingly so. And that failure is part and parcel of a larger failure of the Republican-led Congress to push an agenda in the new administration.
Talking to a friend at lunch not long ago, he expressed his amazement that the House and Senate leadership didn’t have bills “lined up like airplanes on a runway” ready to take off in the new year. I was surprised, too.
It’s not like the need to do something about Obamacare was a surprise. Republicans have been promising to repeal it for most of a decade. And it’s not like Obamacare was popular or successful. Premiums are rising, providers are dropping out, and costs are going up. It’s true that the Obamacare bill, pushed through on a procedural technicality that avoided a filibuster but left it impossible to fix at the time, was a mess. It’s also true that the legislation was drafted, and the regulations implementing it were designed, in part to make it hard to undo.
Nonetheless, the Republican inability to deliver a bill that could get a majority in the GOP-led House is a colossal failure, and pretty much undercuts its entire reason for being. For years the congressional GOP leadership failed to deliver on promises to constituents, and offered the excuse that it couldn’t do anything without control of the White House. Well, they’ve got that, so what’s their excuse now? And where are the bills on infrastructure, on tax reform, on free speech?
The congressional GOP’s failure to deliver on its promises is one of the things that led to the election of President Trump. Now they’re still failing. What comes next?
If history has taught us anything about Republicans, then “what comes next” is more failure. The Atlanta Falcons of politics.
Last night I caught a few minutes of Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox – I could not turn away as she utterly skewered Paul Ryan:
Paul Ryan needs to step down as Speaker of the House.
The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill. The one trumpeted to repeal and replace ObamaCare. The one that he had seven years to work on. The one he hid under lock and key in the basement of Congress. The one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass.
But this bill didn’t just fail — it failed when Republicans had the House, the Senate, the White House.
And the timing? It failed within the first 70 days of President Donald Trump’s administration. A president who made replacement of ObamaCare the hallmark of his campaign. And then used valuable political capital to accomplish it.
Americans elected the one man they believed could do it. A complete outsider. Someone beholden to no one — but them.
And Speaker Ryan, you come in, with all your swagger and experience, and you sell him a bill of goods which ends up a complete and total failure. And you allow our president, in his first one hundred days, to come out of the box like that? Based on what? Your legislative expertise? Your knowledge of the arcane ins and outs of the bill writing process? Your relationships? What? Your drinks at the Hay-Adams with your pals?
Folks, I want to be clear: this is NOT on President Trump. No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process. How would he know which individuals upon whom he would be able to rely? Many of them, friends and establishment colleagues of Speaker Ryan.
You, on the other hand, Speaker Ryan, know very well who the 15 hard liners, the 10 moderates, and all the other ones.
Amen. No, this one is not on Trump. This one and this one alone. No more passes in the future. He’s a smart enough man to learn how the jellyfish sting. Whether he’s willing to use what he learns and whether that is enough remains to be seen.
The whole 61st (61st!!) failure to repeal ObamaCare boiled down to not getting conservative Republicans on board. Hell, as Pirro says, they were physically locked out of the process. How could anyone have expected their support? The Bill could have been passed with their help and without a single Democrat vote in favor. This is strictly a GOP problem.
Their “solution” is strict GOP stupidity. The conservatives in the “conservative” party were not consulted, then. Now, instead on trying to get them on board, the GOP and Trump are opening to the idea of bringing Democrats into the fold. I wonder what their suggestions might entail?
And the GOP is splintering. Blaming those fellow conservatives who were never invited to participate, Rep. Ted Poe is abandoning the House Freedom Caucus.
Ted Poe / Twitter.
Despite decades of jading, I had high hopes for Trump’s Presidency. I still do though that old shade of green is creeping back into my views. If he cannot marshal this band of derelicts and losers into a solid party, then there isn’t much faith in his (their?) agenda. If that happens, one can expect similar failures on: the debt ceiling (a given no matter what); tax cuts; immigration; etc.
The whole thing starts to look like the Contract with America. Remember that stellar GOP success? Neither do I.
The Republicans are the Atlanta Falcons of politics. Losers from Loserville. Early last month the real Falcons showed the sporting world how to blow a 25-point lead, insurmountable by practical standards, and lose a Super Bowl in spectacular, if typical, Atlanta fashion. Yesterday, not to be out-done, the GOP squandered control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, losing their bid to reform ObamaCare for something like the 60th time.
It’s worse really, and not just because millions actually depend on the outcome. Atlanta lost to the greatest team, coach, and quarterback in history – all striding through the second half like no team has before (or likely will after). Trump, Ryan, and Co. “lost” to a Democrat party with no clear leadership, no agenda, and no motives. Failure to internally think, plan, and communicate led the Speaker to pull the AHCA Bill just prior to a vote.
Republicans abruptly pulled their health care bill from the House floor on Friday, just minutes ahead of a planned vote, dealing a devastating blow to efforts by President Donald Trump and the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare.
“This is a disappointing day for us,” Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters shortly after the bill was yanked. “Doing big things is hard. All of us, myself included, will need time to reflect how we got to this moment, what we could have done to do it better.”
Ryan said he told Trump around noon the White House that they didn’t have the Republican votes needed to pass the bill. “I told him that the best thing I think to do is to pull this bill and he agreed with that decision,” Ryan said.
Speaking via phone later at 3:00 p.m. EST, Trump said Democrats in the House — all of whom had planned to vote against the bill — shoulder the blame for the defeat. “Obamacare is exploding,” the president said in the Oval Office. “With no Democrat support, we couldn’t quite get there. We were just a very small number of votes short in terms of getting our bill passed.”
“I’m disappointed,” Trump said, adding, “I’m a little surprised to be honest with you.”
Welcome to Washington, Mr. Trump. The irresistible force has met the immovable object. Even the Donald’s charismatic juggernaut has limits.
A friend and I debated whether the circus clown might be a better symbol for the GOP than the noble elephant. I think I’ve found a better. The elephant is large, powerful, dangerous even. And it is a smart animal, as animals go. No relation to the GOP in the 21st Century. No, a better mascot would be the jellyfish: a brainless, spineless creature dedicating to drifting the currents and soaking up nutrients. As seemingly harmless as it is useless, it can still deliver a nasty sting to those foolish enough to associate with it. Trump feels the burning sting this weekend.
Carlos Slim’s Blog.
In fairness, the Repubs have been working on repealing, repealing and replacing, or amending ObamaCare for seven years. Only seven. It took the Democrats over 15 years to craft the law – from Bill and Hillary’s hints in 1992-3 to Obama’s collusion with Big Insurance and the Devil in 2010. But the Dems really are stubborn like donkeys. They bide their time and plan strategically. The predictable failure of ObamaCare even fits their long-term plans for socialism.
The “conservatives” have no plans and no idea how to handle authority. Monday, they’ll be on to a similar debacle with tax cuts. However, then (or now), they will find the debt ceiling looming once again on the D.C. horizon. The debt will rise; it always does. This year promises, perhaps, some extra suspense and entertainment.
Well, as much of those things as a jellyfish can generate.
The woes of monitoring the Mohammedan invasion of Europe- poor MI5:
Because of his age, Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood does not fit the profile of a suicide attacker. Fifty-two is about double the norm.
But being a local-born extremist, and radicalised in prison, is typical.
The attackers of 7/7, Madrid, Paris, Nice, Charlie Hebdo and Lee Rigby were almost all local volunteers striking at soft targets – in common with the pattern seen for atrocities in the Islamic world.
There are relatively few exceptions to this, although they include the 9/11 hijackers and the Berlin truck attacker Anis Amri, a radical from Tunisia (via prison in Italy).
Masood shows the scale of the challenge MI5 faces. The security services are monitoring more than 3,000 Islamist extremists in the UK.
Masood (not his birth name) wasn’t among those “top” 3,000 threats, although he was long ago investigated, with little evidence to suggest the convert was more than a “peripheral” figure.
While Isis has claimed him as its “soldier”, there is no evidence the group knew in advance of the attack, or had any contact with him. Try stopping that.
Theresa May struck a dignified tone as she led tributes to PC Keith Palmer. The former Home Secretary left any talk of extra powers for MI5 for another day.
3,000!? If that was even close to the real number of problem persons, they would be lucky. I offer a better metric: anyone who does not fit the general British demographic of, say, 1900 (or 1800, or 1500) should be considered an invader and a threat. Better yet, just look for scenes like this:
inews (UK).
That’s a sure sign there’s trouble in the neighborhood.
Bob Woodward seems to think someone from the Obama administration is (or should be) going to jail for various illegal activities related to the wiretapping of Trump Tower.
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump’s transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities “unmasked” after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials.
It’s too soon to tell if this might include Barry himself. If it does, then perhaps he can share a cell with John McCain.
Nunes obviously saw something, some confirmation of Trump’s wiretapping allegations. We’ll likely see it soon.
Republican congressional investigators expect a potential “smoking gun” establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week, a source told Fox News.
Classified intelligence showing incidental collection of Trump team communications, purportedly seen by committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and described by him in vague terms at a bombshell Wednesday afternoon news conference, came from multiple sources, Capitol Hill sources told Fox News. The intelligence corroborated information about surveillance of the Trump team that was known to Nunes, sources said, even before President Trump accused his predecessor of having wiretappedhim in a series of now-infamous tweets posted on March 4.
The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump, according to sources.
The key to that conclusion is the unmasking of selected U.S. persons whose names appeared in the intelligence, the sources said, adding that the paper trail leaves no other plausible purpose for the unmasking other than to damage the incoming Trump administration.
This will (should) have extreme implications. Here again, unless the evidence is a video showing BHO, in coveralls with a wrench, physically hacking away in a Trump Tower utility room, then it won’t matter to some people. Then, there’s the fact that stuff like this happens to most Americans on a daily basis; most seem unconcerned. Worse, I just remembered that it’s March Madness, prime time for tall, jumping ball. Nearly no one will even notice anything at all…
This is a sh!t-ton more important than what happens with “your” government! All Rookie.
With all the fuss about TrumpCare and ObamaCare it is important to remember that the government has been iinterfering with medical care for over 100 years. Each law and every step increases costs and hassles while decreasing freedom and choices.
Since 1910, when Republican William Taft gave in to the American Medical Association’s lobbying efforts, most administrations have passed new healthcare regulations. With each new law or set of new regulations, restrictions on the healthcare market went further, until, at some point in the 1980s, people began to notice the cost of healthcare had skyrocketed.
This is not an accident. It’s by design.
As regulators allowed special interests to help design policy, everything from medical education to drugs became dominated by virtual monopolies that wouldn’t have otherwise existed if not for government’s notion that intervening in people’s lives is part of their job.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
But how did costs go up, and why didn’t this happen overnight?
It wasn’t until 1972 that President Richard Nixon restricted the supply of hospitals by requiring institutions to provide a certificate-of-need.
Just a couple years later, in 1974, the president also strengthened unions for hospital workers by boosting pension protections, which raise the cost for both those who run hospitals and taxpayers in cases of institutions that rely on government subsidies. This move also helped force doctors who once owned and ran their own hospitals to merge into provider monopolies. These, in turn, are often only able to keep their doors open with the help of government subsidies.
This artificial restriction on healthcare access had yet another harsh consequence: overworked doctors.
The caduceus.Quora.
And on and on and on… Maybe, just maybe, it might be time to return to the free system that worked so well for so long (so cheaply). Just a thought.
* The Caduceus was the staff carried by Hermes while he conducted departed souls to the Underworld. A strangely fitting symbol.
There’s always surveillance in a police state. Against everyone. Even a President-elect. It’s starting to come out:
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.
The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.
…
“I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored,” the California Republican told reporters. “It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.” He said the information he had seen was not related to the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Nunes said intelligence reports discussed “high-level people in the Trump transition.” He also said he was not in possession of the new evidence, but that he hoped the intelligence agencies would provide it to his panel through official means and that other committee members would be able to review it.
…
More will keep coming out. And the deniers will keep denying. (They’re in denial).
In a way the Russia-obsessed nuts will kind of be vindicated here. Trump tweeted that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. The loonies will hold him to the semantics. And I really doubt there’s any footage of BHO manually tapping in with a toolbox or something (too much like a real job, that).
So, no, Obama did not wiretap Trump. He just instructed his agents to use existing open-air intercepts and other investigations to gather raw data on Trump, data possibly processed in the UK and sent back to D.C.for illegal dissemination.
Donald Trump / Twitter.
Nothing at all to see here. Speaking of “UK” – squeaky ball is on!
PizzaGate returns to the news in most bizarre fashion. One really can’t make this stuff up. Were one to write a novel about an international child sex ring, political machinations, and American apathy, the script couldn’t get much better than what we’ve seen in the news the past 6 months. Now this: someone, a likely Democrat, is making hay out of Alex Acosta’s lenient treatment of Jeffery “Sex Criminal” Epstein:
“That wasn’t an appropriate resolution of this matter,” Reiter said, arguing that the charges leveled against Epstein were “very minor,” compared with what the facts called for. In a letter to parents of Epstein’s victims, Reiter said justice had not been served.
Prosecutors in Acosta’s Miami office who had joined the FBI in the investigation concluded, according to documents produced by the U.S. attorney’s office, that Epstein, working through several female assistants, “would recruit underage females to travel to his home in Palm Beach to engage in lewd conduct in exchange for money. . . . Some went there as much as 100 times or more. Some of the women’s conduct was limited to performing a topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself. For other women, the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse.”
Epstein has a near-legendary reputation in New York financial circles as a money manager who made many millions for his clients. Although he never graduated from college, he taught advanced math at the Dalton School, one of the city’s top private schools, and went on to be a successful trader at Bear Stearns before starting his own firm, J. Epstein & Co., which managed the finances of clients who had a minimum of $1 billion in assets.
Federal prosecutors detailed their findings in an 82-page prosecution memo and a 53-page indictment, but Epstein was never indicted. In 2007, Acosta signed a non-prosecution deal in which he agreed not to pursue federal charges against Epstein or four women who the government said procured girls for him. In exchange, Epstein agreed to plead guilty to a solicitation charge in state court, accept a 13-month sentence, register as a sex offender and pay restitution to the victims identified in the federal investigation.
“This agreement will not be made part of any public record,” the deal between Epstein and Acosta says. The document was unsealed by a federal judge in a civil lawsuit in 2015.
Reiter said in the 2009 deposition that federal prosecutors in Miami told him “that typically these kinds of cases with one victim would end up in a ten-year sentence.” Reiter said he was surprised not only by the decision to pull back from prosecuting the case, but also by the light sentence and liberal privileges granted to Epstein during his jail term.
Money and power buy “justice” in Amerika. Epstein had (has) both. The following is a short list of people he jetted to and from his private “Lolita” island: Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, Tony Blair, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, and Jimmy Buffett. That’s a very short list. It seems none wish to be associated with him now and with good reason. Epstein’s case touched on an international racket which has seen hundreds if not thousands arrested in the past decade (and that is probably the tip of the iceberg).
Wikileaks attempted to shed light on this and related matters late last year. America’s supposed affections for children aside, no one seemed to care.
They likely won’t care now, with squeaky shoe ball in full swing and all.
More interestingly, given the far-reaching implications of this case and all “pizza” related business in D.C., NYC, the Seaboard, and allied Europe, who in their right minds would bring up this as a charge against Acosta?! We’re taking about the Wa-Po and Congress, but still… One would think they would leave this as quiet as possible.
How’s that hearing going to go?
Senator X: “Mr. Acosta, why didn’t you fully prosecute Epstein and protect our vulnerable children?”
Acosta: “Well, Senator, we had constraints. We didn’t go after a lot of leads in that case. You, for instance…”
Senator “red-face” X: “Um. Uh… Russian hackers?”
All this to the Wa-Po, Carlos Slim’s blog, etc. was just “fake news” a few months ago. Now, with the ability to derail Team Trump, it suddenly matters. Huh?
An aside: anyone seen or heard from John Podesta lately???
Renegade Broadcasting.
There’s no doubt justice was not served in Florida. The fact Epstein is still alive testifies to that. He’s still free and so are 10,000 other perverts. I have no idea how this will affect Acosta’s nomination. I honestly don’t care. Maybe, just maybe, this pitiful political theater will shed a little more light on a few of those other cockroaches. Play fool games with fire, get burned.
I’m considering putting “ObamaCare” to rest as a central reference. Now, it’s TrumpCare, the AHCA, instead of the lingering ACA. The GOP owns it now. And, now, they need to decide how to handle the matter. Rand Paul has some ideas:
Paul, one of the leading senators out of more than a dozen Republicans in the upper chamber criticizing the bill there, told Breitbart News in this exclusive interview he believes there are at least 35 House Republicans ready to vote against the bill in its current form. And he predicted that, unless some major changes come to the legislation between now and the scheduled vote on Thursday, Ryan will need to withdraw the bill and Republicans will have to start from scratch with a new bill and a new strategy on Obamacare.
Paul said in the in-person interview at his U.S. Senate office in the Russell Senate Office Building:
I think there’s easily 35 no votes right now so unless something happens in the next 24 hours, I would predict they pull the bill and start over. I think if conservatives stick together, they will have earned a seat at the table where real negotiation to make this bill an acceptable bill will happen. But it’s interesting what conservatives are doing to change the debate. We went from keeping the Obamacare taxes for a year—hundreds of billions of dollars—but they’re coming towards us because we’re standing firm. So we have to stick together, and if we do stick together there will be a real negotiation on this. The main goal I have is not to pass something that does not fix the situation. If a year from now, insurance rates and premiums are still going through the roof and it’s now a Republican plan it will be a disservice to the president and all of us if we pass something that doesn’t work.
There are choices: the ACA as is (failing); the AHCA (ACA-lite?); the previous repeal bill (vetoed by Obama, perhaps not by Trump?); complete socialized medicine (not popular but perhaps cheaper than the cobbled-together rat’s nest we have now), or; free market medicine (no longer in American vogue). Pick one, GOP.
Sergio Go / Twitter / Breitbart.
Trump was on the Hill this morning in an attempt to strong-arm support for the AHCA. Paul makes clear that may not have worked, at least not in the Senate. Still, pick one or the other. Ball’s in your court. It’s going to be the second or third choices or a hybrid, so get cracking.
PERRIN LOVETT 
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