Skinny will do
Word is that after the failed vote on a straight repeal of the Unaffordable Don’t-Care Act, which we all knew would not get through but was still useful in lots of ways including smoking out the fake Republican senators, that the next plan is to not scrap the “ACA” entirely but to do what is being somewhat mockingly called “skinny” repeal. As I understand it, this “skinny” repeal would leave a lot of the exoskeletal structure of the Unaffordable Don’t-Care Act in place for the time being at least, but at its core it would repeal the individual and employer mandates.
As much as I have been on record as a cheerleader for straight repeal status quo ante (Latin for “put it back the way it was” if you don’t know), I have to say, either there’s something here I’m not getting or this “skinny” bill isn’t so skinny at all. You kill the mandates, you will kill the system, period. This IS a silver bullet and DOES get rid of the abominations that prop this whole ponzi scheme up.
It’s real simple people. If you don’t make individuals buy this crappy insurance then even if insurance is still mandated to be crappy, people WILL have the choice to say go screw yourselves. They will have the freedom to enter into medical co-ops or pay-out-of-pocket arrangements with doctors and in doing so will starve the beast the rest of the way. Might even teach people that they can get along just fine without the insurance companies who wrote this piece of legislative dreck in the first place. And if you don’t make employers provide insurance the second they have more than X number of employees working Y number of hours per week then you unshackle small businesses once again and free up the ability to contract for what you want to provide in terms of benefits rather than having this as a very expensive baseline. It’s important and ultimately necessary to get rid of the Unaffordable Don’t-Care Act in its entirety but this one-two punch would bring it to its knees. It’s just a matter of cleanup from there.
Calling this latest effort “skinny” is like referring to the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima as “a small nuclear explosion.” No, it’s not everything it could be and it doesn’t live up to the potential it could, but it gets the job done and quite handily at that. If President Trump and the Republicans manage to get this through, skinny or not, it’s not time to bemoan the creation of “ACA Lite” or “Trumpcare,” it’s time to pop the champagne and pass the popcorn while we watch the system finish collapsing and the snowflakes lose their minds.
I can see the political benefit to minimizing the power of what this form of repeal will do, and if that’s the intent then that’s all well and good. But don’t flip out on your loyal GOP senators if they go for this. Remember the goal is to get to conference and hammer out the final bill from there, and the ultimate goal is to kill this monster, piece by piece if we have to.
Charlie Gard and single payer
I’m going to let the boys of Right Angle take this one. For once they all get it more or less right–and Bill Whittle is on fire. Sadly Scott Ott still manages to hem and haw and equivocate at the end even as he chokes back tears.
Charlie Gard had to die because he could not be allowed to show the flaws of socialized medicine. That’s it.
No, actually, it’s NOT dead
People are apparently losing their composure over the fact that the Senate floated a straight-repeal vote on the Unaffordable Don’t-Care Act that failed, losing 45-55. The seven turncoat GOP senators (all but one of whom voted YES on an identical bill when there was no chance it would clear the White House) were McCain (AZ), Portman (OH), Alexander (TN), Capito (WV), Murkowski (AK), Collins (ME), and Heller (NV).
I’ll give you one guess as to who is the consistent NO.
But contrary to the rage reaction, which I will acknowledge is justified, this does not mean that the repeal effort is dead by a longshot. Lots of us, myself included, wanted to at least TRY a clean repeal, status quo ante, end of sentence with no “and replace” baloney. We wanted at the very least what we ended up getting, and that is the names of the RINO senators who are jamming up the works. Senators like Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Ron Johnson who dug in their heels and weren’t sure about the replacement plans, the conservatives who are not willing to sign onto “ACA Lite” or some half-baked effort to “save” this dumpster fire, they voted YES today.
There will be amendments, there will be discussions, and there will be much more to come. Seven states now have their allegedly-Republican senators on record as saying “the hell with you” to their ACTUAL constituents. Lisa Murkowski has been caught saying “well I’m not up for re-election until 2022” in a pretty brazen “haha you suckers can’t fire me for six years and you’ll all have forgotten about this in six hours” that hopefully will live a little longer on the internet than Senator Murkowski was expecting. The fight is not over and the effort is not dead, and don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s NOT the whole GOP that turned on us here. 45 of our 52 Senators did their job today. These seven…there need to be words. Like “recall petition,” those are some good words.
President Trump, Kid Rock, and the rise of the un-politician
Recently someone did a poll in Michigan pitting right-leaning musician Kid Rock against useless Democrat incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow. If the 2018 election were held tomorrow between these two, Rock would walk away with it–even the poll had him winning pretty handily. Kid Rock took this poll to Twitter which of course further fueled the speculation that he is seriously contemplating throwing his fedora into the ring.
Of course this is hardly the first time a celebrity has done this. Former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was a governor before Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled it off in California. Unfunny liar and SNL alum Al Franken cheated his way into the Senate. Hell, Ronald Reagan himself was well known as an actor before he went into politics and became governor of California on his way to becoming President. And of course, President Trump has been a playboy showman for decades. I remember stories about him going back to my childhood, everyone knows about his catch line from “The Apprentice,” most people know of his frequent cameos in Hollywood movies and have seen clips of him having some fun in WWE matches (before he became better known for bodyslamming CNN).
I said a few months back that while the rise of President Trump through the power of celebrity does have the potential to cut both ways, I thought it could still be a good development in American politics and does not necessarily signal the start down the road to “Idiocracy.” Bill Whittle predicted the week after the 2012 election loss that the next president would come from the popular culture and he was right, while Greg Gutfeld noted that the reason Whatshisname won re-election (fraud notwithstanding) boiled down to people concluding “he’s cool and the other guy wasn’t.” And really, that’s all Whatshisname had going for him, and one big thing Dr. Pantsuit really did NOT have going for her. Ironically, the aging communist Bernie Sanders had more coolness and celebrity on his side before all was said and done than Dr. Pantsuit did. The point I’m trying to make here is, character and issues started taking a backseat to being cool and being at least a quasi-celebrity starting in 2008, and really much earlier–that’s part of how Billy Jeff won election twice. Like Whatshisname, Billy Jeff wasn’t a celebrity in his own right, but he carried himself like one and had lots of powerful, flashy friends. Billy Jeff’s two elections also got a boost from another quasi-celebrity, Ross Perot, siphoning what could well be described as the proto-Trump voters off of his Republican competition. And like Whatshisname, Billy Jeff’s chosen successor Al Gore just did not have the same “cool” factor.
Coming back to the present day, I still think that this rise of the un-politician that has reached its zenith in President Trump is a very good thing. I used to not be a fan of term limits because I knew of some old guard GOP who would be put out to pasture who I really didn’t want to lose, but those days are gone. Watching fossils like Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Susan Collins keep going back election after election has changed my mind on term limits even if they will one day cost us guys like Ted Cruz. That said, term limits are not a possibility at the moment, but combating name recognition with celebrity seems to me to be the next best thing. It’s tough convincing even party activists to vote against the incumbent in a primary, and it’s tough going from there to win an election without that powerful name backing you up. But just imagine if instead of Richard Mourdock primarying Dick Lugar in Indiana, it had been Larry Bird (I don’t know Larry’s political leanings but for this illustration they don’t matter). Or imagine if Mike Ditka had done more than just toy with running for Senate from Illinois in 2006, and had won the seat that Whatshisname held.
In a lot of ways I see this as the modern equivalent of what citizen representatives were envisioned as in the first place. Men like George Washington could take some time but not entire careers to leave their farms and businesses and go to serve in Congress or the Presidency because they were wealthy. The money wasn’t a strict pre-requisite but in reality, then as much as now, you had to have resources to be in government, and this was not a bad thing. You had to know how to manage a family, a household, a business, a plantation, or whatever, and to do it well enough to have a surplus and/or someone you could hand the day-to-day affairs off to while you were concerned with the nation’s business. Nowadays the people with resources like that are often celebrities, actors or sports figures. It may seem shallow and pathetic but the alternative is glamourizing career politicians the way the media tried to do (and largely succeeded) with Whatshisname.
When it comes right down to it the best reason that un-politicians are a good thing is that this system is not meant to have “outsiders.” We tell kids in civics class that “anyone can grow up to be President” and then put a big asterisk next to that that we don’t let them read until they’re at least in college, and it turns out that well, yeah, anyone can grow up to be President, if they’re from the right family and have the right connections and go to the right school and can get the right internships and get involved in politics on the local (but not TOO local) level and of course have the right look and ethnicity to get donors on board. Which boils down to not much of anyone at all can do it, until you get someone who earns and fights their way in from what has become “the outside.” Of course those on the “inside” will resist and try to thwart outsiders who short-circuit the established rules and process, some to protect the establishment, others because they have been trying to hopscotch along to the rules for a long time themselves. Once one outsider shows it can be done, once that breach in the wall happens, it’s only a matter of time before that barrier comes down low enough for other outsiders to walk in.
(And don’t try to be clever and compare this to illegal immigration–these “rules” are not laws and have no justification other than a self-appointed aristocracy. Moving on.)
There have been many rumblings about personalities from all over the spectrum considering making political runs. Mark Zuckerberg is supposedly planning a run for President. Joe Scarborough is doing the same. For a while it sounded like Tom Hanks was giving it some thought. Recently even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is rumored to be toying with the idea. Right now we are kind of at a crossroads, where we can either start to merge the outsiders and their celebrity status with ideas and policies, or we can dive headfirst down the slide of popularity-contest pure-star-power elections where a President Dwayne Elisondo Mountain Dew Camacho is just a few elections away, but one way or another, I think the days of the “establishment” are numbered.
Jeff Sessions and the Trump Train
As the wholly-concocted fairy tale about “Russian collusion” continues to dominate the dinosaur media, despite being more and more obviously nothing more than a fantasy, it’s surfaced that President Trump is displeased with former Senator, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his ab initio recusal from any matters involving Dr. Pantsuit and also from this whole bogus Russian flea circus. The President seemed to drop some broad hints that if Jeff Sessions can’t take the heat he ought to get out of the Department of Justice, to which Sessions dropped an equally broad reply that he loves his job and he’s not going anywhere.
I’d almost love to see the Democrats sprint to Jeff Sessions’ defense if the President were to fire him, like they did with Jim Comey. Moving along.
I have been very vocal in the past about my support and admiration for Jeff Sessions. Not only is he a border hawk and a rock-solid conservative, he was also an early Trump supporter and the left hates him with a white-hot fury. But I do agree (and did agree when it happened) that when he gave away the farm during his confirmation hearings, agreeing that he ought to recuse himself from half a dozen different matters without really even putting up a fight, that this was a terrible mistake. I don’t think that Sessions was invited to the Trump cabinet to just roll over and give up when the time came to stick up for the President and put a stop to this interminable nonsense, and I think that this recent round of head-butting is more or less standard procedure for Donald Trump, whether in the business world, on the campaign trail, or as President. Sessions was brought on board to get stuff done and fight, and instead he ran up a white flag of surrender that in every way that matters ceded control of a major executive branch department to the deep state embeds Whatshisname left behind, at least insofar as this endless fantasy pursuit is concerned. Trump is big on giving people chances but when they don’t deliver or show signs they don’t belong on the team, well, he is known for telling them “You’re Fired!”
I don’t think Jeff Sessions is irredeemable and I hope he sticks it out, because down deep I believe he’s not only the fighter Trump wanted all along, but I also chalk up his bowing-out of certain matters to his Southern gentleman’s code of honor combined with a healthy dose of not taking this nonsense seriously. But if he does go I don’t see that as a major sign of the “chaos” the dinosaur media is so desperate to imagine in the Trump administration. President Trump is an expert manager and as such he has no problem rearranging personnel until he gets the right people in the right roles. Much as I hope that remains Jeff Sessions, it’s not going to be the President’s fault if that ceases to be the case. It’ll be on Sessions.
Words that leftists should not use, chapter 4
Today’s word in the ever-expanding lexicon of words that leftist morons really ought to stop using because they can’t seem to get it right is “xenophobia.” The actual definition of this word is the irrational fear of anything alien or foreign. Like many “phobias,” the left likes to use this words in part because the connotation of the term does literally mean “irrational fear” as opposed to a justified fear or concern. Hence it is a semi-subtle means of trying to convey that their opponents are not only scared, but scared for no good reason.
And like most of the left’s favorite phobias, this does not mean remotely what they think it does. Xenophobia is first of all not synonymous with nationalism, nor is it an attitude that puts one’s own countrymen ahead of the rest of the world, nor is it a belief that a country’s borders and laws actually ought to mean something. It is also not any sort of rational fear or worry based in actual events, facts, and evidence. Being opposed to migrants and illegal aliens swarming into your country, not assimilating or going through the naturalization process, ignoring the law, going on the taxpayer-funded public dole, voting illegally, and engaging in terrorist acts is NOT xenophobia. Every one of those concerns is 100% grounded in observable reality–and that’s just for starters.
I’m not sure if xenophilia is a thing (i.e. loving things that are foreign for no good reason) but if it is the left is loaded with it.
Fire Bob Mueller
Special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by the deputy Attorney General to investigate the stupid fairy tale about “Russian collusion” in the 2016 election, is taking the blank check he has to investigate whatever and whenever he feels like it to probe into practically every business arrangement President Trump has ever had with anyone from Russia. He’s going back years before the Republican primaries even started and looking into people who just rented space in Trump Tower.
Add to that the fact that Mueller’s staff is loaded out with Pantsuit drones and Whatshisname’s sycophants. Some theorize that that was done to give legitimacy when Mueller inevitably concludes that nothing happened. I and many others say bullhonkey to that. What this basically is, is taxpayer-funded open-ended opposition research for the Democratic party to use in 2020–because you know everything they find is going to leak like a broken umbrella.
Known criminal and unrepentant terrorist supporter Eric Holder (still in contempt of Congress) has been blathering about how President Trump can’t fire Mueller. Oh yes, Eric, he can and he should. You disgusting people have wasted enough time and money on this ridiculous witch hunt and are at the point where you’re breathlessly trying to convince people that Donald Trump Junior meeting with someone who promised incriminating evidence about Dr. Pantsuit and happened to be Russian and didn’t end up panning out was in some way unusual, wrong, or even treasonous. News flash, children: it’s none of the above.
CIA director Mike Pompeo stated when asked if Russia had attempted to interfere in the last election replied “Yes, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that too.” Ted Kennedy asked the Soviets for help to defeat Ronald Reagan going into the 1984 election, for God’s sake. This is over and it’s well past time to just ignore it, and the first step in that process is to fire Bob Mueller. At the very least, give him a month to find whatever he’s going to find and as of September 1 he’s finished. But really, I’d like to see him shut down by close of business today. Just fire him and his deep-state lackeys and be done with it.
The new Doctor Who
I am not what you would call a “Whovian.” But I am a proud geek, and my wife and stepdaughter are full-blooded Doctor Who fans so I’ve had plenty of exposure and more than passing interest. Of course this week the geeksphere is abuzz with the news that the next incarnation of Doctor Who, the replacement for Peter Capaldi (whom many fans seem to regard as a less-compelling Doctor than many of his predecessors) will be a woman. Reactions to this have been mixed.
My wife correctly points out that the creator of Doctor Who, which has been around since the ’50s just like Star Trek, had batted around the concept of the Doctor regenerating into a woman way back then, and that every time the Doctor “regenerates” (i.e. the plot device wherein the Doctor sustains a fatal wound but instead of dying he transforms into a new body and acts kind of derpy for a few episodes, which is how the “Doctor” torch is passed from one actor to the next) the fans’ cycle is basically “we love the last one, best Doctor ever, we hate this guy, okay we’ll give him a chance, okay he’s all right, okay now we love him, best Doctor ever.” That’s all fine. And if I had the slightest reason to believe that the decision to cast the new Doctor as a woman was rooted in “hey, let’s do something cool” then I’d be fine with it. But it’s not, and it’s silly to even think that it might be. This decision was based solely in social justice glass-ceiling because-woman nonsense. You can hear it in the interview given by the new actress (Jodi Whittaker) who essentially said that she wasn’t that big a fan of the show and never once said (as all the recent guys who have inherited the keys to the TARDIS have said) how excited or honored she was to play The Doctor, but rather declared it some kind of victory for feminism.
Then of course you have bald-faced liar, known attacker of things she doesn’t understand, and all-around harpy Anita Sarkeesian blathering on about how “well this is okay but it’s not a reason to get excited until The Doctor is a transgendered person of color, because Doctor Who hasn’t represented those groups in the past.” Assuming this is even a valid point, which it’s not, it’s obvious Anita has not watched the damned show. The Doctor’s companion is almost always a woman (and even when she’s an utter dunce she upstages him on an almost constant basis), there have been at least two black companions just that I know of, at least two homosexual or bisexual companions, and pretty much every third person The Doctor runs into is gay. And that’s fine, who cares, but obviously it means something to Anita and idiots like her who think it isn’t happening. I mean for God’s sake, has she ever heard of Torchwood or Jack Harkness? Reality is hard for Ms. Sarkeesian.
Really, this situation reminds me of way back in the ’90s when Star Trek announced that their latest spin-off series Voyager was going to have a woman captain. Just like then, when Kate Mulgrew was cast as Captain Kathryn Janeway (a miserable sandpaper-voiced scold pretending to be some kind of badass and converted into the biggest Mary Sue this side of the Delta Quadrant) she gave an interview where she revealed she was not a fan of the show but hey, woman captain. The rest of the crew was also overwhelmingly “diverse” save for the holographic doctor and the designated screw-up white guy at the helm who actually managed to get rank-busted over the course of the series. And frankly, the series sucked. Hard. The characters were unlikable and unbelievable, the plot was retarded and full of holes (and constantly swerving into social justice nonsense), and by the time they ended the series with Voyager’s triumphant homecoming they had to have a hot blonde in a skintight bodysuit and conjure up a reason why Voyager could oneshot Borg cubes in order to keep people interested.
Contrast this with the rest of the Trek franchise. The Original Series’ first pilot featured a woman as second-in-command (before that role was given to Mr. Spock) and of course Star Trek made more than a few waves having Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura on the bridge, along with a Russian dude on one side of the helm and a Japanese guy in charge of firing the guns. That was revolutionary for its time. Decades later, when the first of the Next Generation spinoffs hit (Deep Space Nine), without a whole lot of silly fanfare or claims of victory, Star Trek gave us a series with a black captain (Avery Brooks’ Ben Sisko) and a woman second-in-command (Nana Visitor as Major Kira). Now this was when the internet was in its infancy so the chatter about this was limited to entertainment pages and TV Guides but I don’t remember anyone making a fuss over this. What they did was make good characters and told a good story, hard to believe as that is. Sure, they also took a few swerves into social justice territory, including a couple of completely nonsensical episodes where Sisko dreams he’s a comic book artist in the 1950s who gets beaten up by cops for…reasons, but on the whole the story held and the characters worked and grew and the series ended up being my personal all-time favorite. The crew just felt so much more developed and rugged and dare-I-say Captain-Kirk-like than Picard’s space U.N. Next Generation group had.
My wife has resolved to give the new Doctoress Who a chance and I have no problem with that. She may surprise everyone. But I wouldn’t bet money on it. I would bet money that within six months of her debut she will be hailed as “the best Doctor ever” for any number of non-sequitur reasons and the feminist twits will squee all over her as her BBC writers give her lots of faux-witty man-hating one liners. Doctor SJW is a presumption she’s going to have to rebut, and I doubt the snowflake brigade cares if they destroy a beloved decades-old franchise in the course of advancing their nonsensical agenda.
Tell me voter fraud isn’t real. I triple-dog-dare you.
I’m honestly way more shocked that this got reported, by the WaPo no less, than I am that it happened:
