Mediaboss Marketing

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders address Brooklyn Colleges graduates during their commencement ceremony on May 30, 2017, in New York. Sanders urged graduates to stand together and not let demagogues divide the country. CREDIT: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Sunday blasted his Republican colleagues for secretly negotiating their Obamacare replacement bill behind closed doors and without public scrutiny, calling on Democrats to take a stand against the legislation.

This is completely unacceptable, Sanders told CBS Face the Nation host John Dickerson. Nobody can defend a process, which will impact tens of millions of Americans, and nobody even knows whats in the [legislation]...The reason they dont want to bring it public is because its a disastrous bill, I suspect similar to what passed in the House.

The outcome of the secret negotiations would impact about one sixth of the American economy, pointed out Sanders, who similarly slammed the House bill, which passed in May.

It was the worst piece of legislation, frankly, against working class people that I can remember in my political life in the Congress. Throwing 23 million people off of health insurance is beyond belief, said Sanders.

As ThinkProgress reporter Amanda Michelle Gomez reported earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is rushing to bring the Republican health care bill before the Senate for a vote by July 4, before Congress leaves for August recess.

To that end, McConnell fast-tracked the health bill by implementing Senate Rule 14, which allows the Senate to bypass the committee processand thus a full committee debateby placing it on the senate calendar for a vote.

Even many Republicans are being kept in the dark said Sanders, noting that this tactic underscores issues with the bill that Republicans would have difficulty defending, such as cutting Medicaid in favor of giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans.

So they want to keep it secret, they dont want the media involved, they dont want members of Congress involved, Sanders told Dickerson. And at the last minute they present it, they push it through and that is one sixth of the American economy and millions of people thrown off of health insurance. That is unacceptable.

The closed-door process has Republicans concerned as well.

Ive said from Day 1, and Ill say it again, Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, told the New York Times. The process is better if you do it in public, and that people get buy-in along the way and understand whats going on. Obviously, thats not the route that is being taken.

McConnell defended his approach, telling the New York Times there have been gazillions of hearings on this subject over the years.

For Sanders, the only solution is full transparency, and on Sunday he called on Democrats to do everything they can to oppose the Senate bill.

Read this article:
Bernie Sanders calls out Senate Republicans for secrecy surrounding health care negotiations - ThinkProgress

Sometimes the irony is so thick, you cant cut it with a laser.

House Republicans had long planned to hold a hearing on June 14 on a National Rifle Association bill that would make it far easier for gun owners to buy silencers. The so-called Hearing Protection Act (I kid you not) was all set for subcommittee scrutiny until news broke about the Field of Screams.

Having tallied the wounded this was the 195th mass shooting of the year Republicans speedily canceled the gun silencer hearing, deeming it inappropriate. Given the circumstances, and all that.

But then it occurred to me: If our latest angry white guy, newly dead James Hodginkson, had been free to fit a silencer on his easily obtained killing machine, wouldnt that have slowed the reaction time of the Republican ballplayers and the cops whod accompanied them? If hed sprayed his bullets with a silencer attached, wouldnt there have been an enhanced risk of far more casualties?

And if the next angry white guy, and the ones after that, are free to do the same, wont that ratchet up the death toll?

Its futile to even ask such questions, of course, because America is terminally locked and loaded.

Rest assured that after Republicans dry their tears about House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., and the other wounded souls, theyll get back to the NRAs business. The gun silencer hearing will be held.

Another NRA bill, which would allow people who live in states with lax gun laws to pack their concealed-carry heat in states with strict gun laws, is waiting in the wings.

And Republicans, with President Donald Trumps help, have already made it easier for some fugitives and mentally impaired people to buy guns.

Republicans did indeed shed tears Wednesday understandably so for their wounded allies and colleagues.

But in their grief, perhaps it would also have been appropriate to ask themselves: How come a guy with a history of violence had a gun license and an assault weapon?

Hodgkinson, by all accounts, was an unhinged lefty extremist who hated Republicans just a variation of the unhinged right-wing extremists who hate lefties and Democrats. What all these people have in common is a profound sense of alienation and a propensity for violence.

Their anger not ideology is their prime motivator. Hodginkson fit the profile perfectly.

In Hodgkinsons home state of Illinois (prior to his recent move to Alexandria, Va., where he spent weeks stalking the ballfield), he racked up a string of offenses damaging a motor vehicle, resisting police, criminally damaging property, driving under the influence, discharging a firearm (he was shooting at trees across a neighbors property while the neighbor was outside with his grandchildren), assaulting a neighboring girl (punching her with a closed fist), threatening a neighbor with a shotgun, and assaulting his foster daughter (which led to his arrest on a domestic violence charge).

In court, he screamed at the judge. But the judge dismissed the case after a witness mixed up the court date and failed to appear.

In virtually any other Western nation, Hodgkinson, with all his red flags, wouldve been denied a gun permit. But in America, he was good for it.

He also obtained an automatic weapon, the kind that civilians typically cant get in most western nations. But in America, he was good for it.

Because its considered important to protect the gun rights of people like him.

In America, the marketing of mass-destruction weaponry is simply good business.

Hodgkinsons weapon of choice was reportedly an M4, or similar to it. The manufacturers selling spiel for the M4 goes like this: The M4 can be comfortably carried, yet be instantly available to provide ... firepower, dependability and accuracy. Proven in military combat operations all over the world, it is in a class by itself as a first-rate combat weapon system.

But theres no way Republicans will connect these dots. Roughly 30 Americans die each day in gun homicides, but thats deemed acceptable collateral damage.

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., one of the congressmen who escaped the ballfield assault without injury, conceded that the Second Amendment has some adverse aspects, but said that gun rights are fundamental to our being the greatest nation in world history.

And as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., declared in a tweet last year, Why do we have a Second Amendment? Its not to shoot deer. Its to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!

Well, thats precisely what Hodgkinson thought he was doing. Its just a shame that NRA politicians make it so easy for people like him.

And when Scalise recovers from his wounds, rest assured that hell continue to toe the line. After all, his NRA rating is A-Plus.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at NewsWorks/WHYY in Philadelphia, a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons. Email him at [emailprotected] and follow him on Twitter: @DickPolman1. Click here for previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

Excerpt from:
Dick Polman: Are Republicans Brave Enough to Play Ball on Gun Control? - Noozhawk

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at an interview in Washington on May 24.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If Senate Republicans want to meet their goal of passing a health care bill by the Fourth of July recess, they have exactly two weeks to do it. Congress is scheduled to recess at the end of business on June 30, which means Republicans have to move at breakneck pace while keeping debate to a minimum. Whats the rush? For any Americans who are aware that the Senate is racing to pass a tightly guarded health care billand if the GOP strategy works, there wont be many of them!Republicans are hoping their outrage dissipates over the holiday weekend. And the world goes on.

Jim Newell is a Slate staff writer.

Passing this secretly developed, still-unfinished bill within two weeks would be a world historic achievement in underhanded policymaking. Put another way: This is the moment Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was born for. This, reader, is his jam.

Ask a different member of the Senate Republican leadership whether they are sticking to the June 30 deadline, and youll get a different answer. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican, has always been more of an end of July guy. South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Republican, treats it as more of a hope or an aspiration, a way of focusing the mind.

McConnell and his team, though, have not been deterred from the goal of a floor vote before the July4 recess, the Washington Post reports. [A]s McConnells team sees it, the options have all been vetted. Now, the difficult decisions about what to put in and leave out of the final bill are all that remain.

Much of the media has been operating under the assumption that the Congressional Budget Office would need two weeks to score the Senates legislation. Thats why senators were hoping to finalize the language by Monday night. Its now Friday, and the language still isnt finalized. But the CBO and Senate Republicans have been interfacing on legislative options for a while now, and leaders hope that the score could come quicker since CBO wouldnt be building an analysis from scratch. As Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso told Talking Points Memo, the issues theyre dealing with are dial-able so you can say, If you set this number, it does this and if you set that number, it does that. In other words, the CBO is just waiting for decisions on certain inputsgrowth rates for Medicaid spending, the length of the Medicaid expansion phase-out, expiration dates for certain taxes, lists of regulatory waivers that will be available to states, and so forth. Perhaps CBO could get a score done in, say, one week.

This is the moment Mitch McConnell was born for. This, reader, is his jam.

So whos going to make those tough decisions about which inputs to include? Its definitely not going to be all the Republican senators, and theres definitely not going to be anything like consensus reached. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, for example, are never going to agree about the proper growth rate for Medicaid. It will be up to McConnell and Cornyn to choose the proper balance that gets their conference closest to the 50 votes they need to pass the bill. Thats the phase they appear to be in right now. On the Hill Thursday afternoon, individual senators like Portman, Toomey, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins were ducking into McConnells office. The brainstorming sessions are finished, and now its about determining what each senator can live with.

Now, what about the Democrats? Lets be generous and say McConnell settles on a recipe by over the weekend, and the CBO begins scoring early next week. The score comes back early the following week, and McConnell posts the bill. Is there much Democrats can do to stop it?

One theory among progressive activists is that Democrats could leverage the vote-o-rama process. Under reconciliation rules, senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments during the 20-hour debate period; after the debate, each filed amendment would be considered with an up-or-down vote. That rapid-fire voting session is referred to as a vote-o-rama.

Ezra Levin, an executive director with Indivisible, suggested on Twitter this week that Democrats should extend the vote-o-rama well past a long nights work. He urged Democrats to threaten to filibuster by amendment, by filing tens of thousands of amendments to clog up chamber through the 2018 midterms.

But McConnell would have recourse. Though McConnell could let Democrats have their fun for a little whileat least to give off the veneer of a transparent, open processhe can eventually motion that the amendment process had become dilatory, the chair would rule in his favor, andbarring some appeals and other motions to draw the process outthe vote-o-rama would be finished. It might still be worthDemocrats while to push ahead this way,though,to see how long they candraw out the processbefore McConnell breaks, and to please their base.

Top Comment

No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or puttethitunder a bed; but settethiton a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. More...

It comes down to this: If McConnell and a majority of senators want to rush this secret bill to a vote before the Fourth of July recess, then they can. McConnell needs 50 votes for the bill, and he needs 50 votes to bust through whatever procedural roadblocks Democrats lay before him.

Some Republican senators have begun to speak out against the secrecy of the project, noting that it makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort, however, has not been palpable enough for them to exert real leverage over the way McConnell has conducted the process so far. Any three Republican senators could have told the majority leader in early May that they wouldnt vote for the bill unless it went through the normal open committee process. Maybe they didnt think it would get this bad. Or maybe they agree with him: Speed and secrecy is the only way to do this.

Read more here:
Can Republicans Actually Pass the AHCA in Two Weeks? - Slate Magazine

The latest outrage against the American people is that Mitch McConnells Republican Senate is drafting a vast health-care bill in complete secrecy and plans to rush it to a vote without hearings or scoring. There is outrage.

There is outrage about the likely contents of the bill, which will in one way or another throw millions of Americans off their insurance and give a big tax cut to the rich.

There is outrage about the process, which cloaks the contents from everyone who will be affected by it.

There is outrage about the flamboyant hypocrisy of it all, after President Trump promised to insure everybody and the GOP complained that Obamacare was written in the dark of night and rushed through Congress, even though the Obamacare process actually included endless hearings that were televised.

Well, you can skip the outrage over the hypocrisy part and save your breath. The GOP has already succeeded in neutralizing the very concept of hypocrisy. Republicans engage it in nonstop, because they have learned, or rather taught us, that it doesnt matter at all.

This is one thing that I have learned from the comments section of my blog. Unsympathetic writers engage in a continuous parade of criticism of progressives, using charges of behavior that in fact consist of exactly what Republicans do. Now to this endless game of I know you are, but what am I? one might be tempted to assign conservatives with the practice of projection, that is, attributing to others what you are guilty of yourself. But wait. A commenter the other day said it is members of the left that are guilty of this and are engaging in projection. I know you are, but what am I? continued, ad infinitum.

And so farther and farther into the house of mirrors, more extensive even than Trumps personal collection that he likes to regard himself in.

And the solution? Forget hypocrisy as a topic. It has been battered to senselessness in a case of American domestic abuse.

Save your energy for describing what Republicans actually are trying to do (take health coverage away from Americans), what the actual consequences of that are (increased wealth inequality and more dead Americans) and most important, stopping them (by voting).

Read the rest here:
Yes, the Republicans are wild and crazy hypocrites, and it doesn't matter - Washington Post

Republicans celebrate the passage of the House health-care bill in May. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Right-wing critics of Obamacare have been predicting for years that the law would enter an actuarial death spiral, in which healthy customers flee and insurers raise rates to unsustainably high levels as only the most sick and expensive patients remain. The alleged death spiral has played a crucial role in Republicans rhetoric, undergirding their claim that the law is collapsing of its own accord. When President Trump repeatedly insists Obamacare is collapsing, dead, or gone, he is popularizing in vulgar form an analysis that people like Paul Ryan have been spreading for years.

The most obvious sleight of hand in this argument is that, even if it were true that the Obamacare exchanges were entering a death spiral and collapsing, it would hardly justify the Republican health-care bill. The exchanges account for a bit less than half the coverage gains in Obamacare. The rest of the newly insured come from expanded childrens health insurance and, especially, Medicaid.

Remember, Medicaid expansion is how Obamacare provides insurance to the poorest Americans (those with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level). The allegedly collapsing exchanges only insure people with incomes above that level. And the spine of the GOP plan is hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Theres not even a patina of an argument that Medicaid is collapsing. The supposed death spiral in the exchanges is the Republican pretext for cutting a completely different program.

In any case, the death spiral is a fiction. An S&P analysis last spring found that insurers in most markets had found a stable and profitable price point. The conclusions received some attention, but the guts of the analysis deserve a bit more attention. What S&P found was that health costs of people buying insurance on the exchanges have converged with health costs of people who get insurance through their employer.

Look at the chart below from the report:

The dark blue line is the per-patient cost of people in the individual market. The light blue line is people in the employer market. Before Obamacare, individual insurance costs were much lower because insurers weeded out anybody who had a preexisting condition, and only sold insurance to people who were extremely healthy. Then, when Obamacare passed, the regulated exchanges enabled people with expensive medical needs to buy affordable individual insurance for the first time.

The costs of those patients ran well above the employer market in the first year or so it was available. That happened in part because many of the newly insured Americans had waited years for coverage and had a backlog of medical needs. Thats why the dark blue line shot up well ahead of the light blue line in 2014 and 2015. That trend is what a death spiral would look like the dark blue line would keep rising well ahead of the light blue line. But that hasnt happened. Since last year, the costs of patients in the individual market and patients in the employer market have converged.

So why are we reading all these stories about insurers pulling out of markets and premiums going way up? Oliver Wyman, an actuarial firm, examines the markets and concludes that at least two-thirds of the higher premiums next year are due to political uncertainty created by the Trump administration and Congress. The administration is threatening to withhold payments insurers are owed under the law, and also not to enforce the individual mandate. These deliberate efforts to subvert the exchanges are having their intended effect. But the underlying expected cost of insuring patients is low without a government engaged in deliberate sabotage, the firm estimates premiums would only rise 58 percent, a very modest level by the historic standards of health insurance costs.

Obamacare can be improved, especially in rural markets where hospitals and doctors are spread far apart and competition has always been difficult to produce. But the threat to the exchanges is the same as the threat to Medicaid: not any inherent flaw in the operation of the programs, but a governing party that ideologically opposes the transfer of resources that is needed to make health care available to the poor and sick.

Dont be complacent: High-rise building failures are never accidents, and contempt for the poor is global.

He left in place a policy protecting young undocumented immigrants while canceling protections for their parents. Its unclear whats next.

Jeronimo Yanez, who faced a second-degree-manslaughter charge, testified that he feared for his life.

Trump has made it impossible for Republicans to claim he is naive. Now, his behavior can only be explained by a guilty conscience or an unsound mind.

Look at this tweet, every time I do it makes me laugh.

The property was listed for rent on Thursday, and its already been snatched up.

The president is clamping down on travel to and trade with the communist country.

There are currently 8,400 U.S. troops in the country, along with 5,000 NATO soldiers.

That would leave Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand in charge. Heres what you need to know about her.

Michelle Carter sent her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, numerous texts urging him to kill himself.

Obamacares dead, says the man holding a gun to its head.

A Friday-morning tweet suggests Rod Rosensteins job is in danger and the special prosecutors is, too.

The investigation into the presidents son-in-law expands.

Asking him to subject himself to oversight comes as easily to him as it would to Putin or Duterte or Mugabe.

Because investigators are probably going to want to see it.

Its not clear what prompted Rod Rosensteins statement.

Lawmakers took to the field just a day after the shooting of House whip Steve Scalise.

Lynne Patton doesnt have any experience in housing policy, but she does have a lot of experience working for the Trump family.

The most expensive House race in history just got weirder and more heated.

The vice-president will be represented by Richard Cullen, a former Virginia attorney general.

More here:
Obamacare Is Not Collapsing Unless Republicans Kill It. Here's Proof. - New York Magazine