The Thing With Feathers -- Not Just a Shuttlecock

• Redneck Revolt --  worth keeping an eye on.
• Jacob Sugarman (AlterNet) on Paul Krugman on the "'Better' Care Reconciliation Act." Or, y'know, "Trumpcare."

  It's really very simple. If the GOP manages to pass its health care bill, millions of Americans will be deprived of insurance, while those who manage to keep theirs will pay considerably more for less. As Krugman sees it, this is what Republicans have wanted all along.
  
  "Conservative ideology always denied the proposition that people are entitled to health care; the Republican elite considered and still considers people on Medicaid, in particular, 'takers' who are effectively stealing from the deserving rich," he concludes. "So what we’re seeing here is supposed to be the last act in a long con, the moment when the fraudsters cash in, and their victims discover how completely they’ve been fooled."

Specialist Pound Cake

• I'm thawing/softening a stick of butter which may take forever.  
• I begin to suspect that God did, in fact, create perfect people to populate the planet, and then got Bored.
• Looking at Tom Price, who doesn't understand why the insurance companies don't want to return to pre-Obamacare practices:

  "But if you look at the Republican plan to modify it and replace it, more than 10 medical groups are against it. Thirty-two cancer organizations oppose it. And on Thursday, in a rare joint statement by the biggest insurance companies in the country, called the Cruz Amendment unworkable in any form and warned it would lead to, quote, 'widespread terminations of coverage.'
  
  "So, Dr. Price, why this wall of opposition?"

  (Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)
  
• Looking at Rand Paul:

  So you're talking about fighting insurance companies in fifty different states -- often in states where those companies are based. Good luck with that!
  
  You're also talking about underwriting and administering all these smaller groups -- groups that won't save that much money because their risk pools aren't large enough.

  (Also Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)
  
• The Rude Pundit:

  Republicans are saying, in word and action, that they hold their constituents in contempt. The voters are disposable. In fact, they are saying, let's help them along, whether by starving them or taking away their health care. And then let's make them thank us because, we can say, we kept our promises.

• Cornered?  (William Rivers Pitt, Truthout,  via Alternet)
• Sounding an alarm for conservatives:

  One of the reasons why the radical right was able to overcome conservatives back in the 1930s was that the conservatives did not understand the threat. Nazis in Germany, like fascists in Italy and Romania, did have popular support, but they would not have been able to change regimes without the connivance or the passivity of conservatives.

  (Timothy Snyder, The Guardian, via AlterNet)Also, some parts of them were in unspoken agreement with the fascists.
• Yastreblyansky tweets about the meeting with the Russians.  The comments are of interest, too.
• More efforts to reduce the number of registered voters (via twistedchick on dreamwidth).  In the name of Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud" "prevention," of course.

Bright Makeup-Melting Klieg Lights

Keeping them trained on Senator McConnell as he doctors the next version of the "health care" bill.  (Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet)

Fallout

• From Bluedot Daily:  Pastor John Pavlovitz addresses "embarrassed for the past 8 years" of some voters.

  Were you embarrassed by his eloquence, his quick wit, his easy humor, his seeming comfort meeting with both world leaders and street cleaners; by his bright smile or his sense of empathy or his steadiness—perhaps by his lack of personal scandals or verbal gaffes or impulsive tirades?
  
  No. Of course you weren’t.
  
  Honestly, I don’t believe you were ever embarrassed. That word implies an association that brings ridicule, one that makes you ashamed by association, and if that’s something you claim to have experienced over the past eight years by having Barack Obama representing you in the world—I’m going to suggest you rethink your word choice.
  
  You weren’t “embarrassed” by Barack Obama.
  
  [...]
  
  But I don’t believe it had anything to do with his resume or his experience or his character or his conduct in office—because you seem fully proud right now to be associated with a three-time married, serial adulterer and confessed predator; a man whose election and business dealings and relationships are riddled with controversy and malfeasance. You’re perfectly fine being represented by a bullying, obnoxious, genitalia-grabbing, Tweet-ranting, Prime Minister-shoving charlatan who’s managed to offended all our allies in a few short months. And you’re okay with him putting on religious faith like a rented, dusty, ill-fitting tuxedo and immediately tossing it in the garbage when he’s finished with it.

  The whole thing is pretty pointed; the original is on the pastor's website.  With 1,000 + comments.  (Apparently I accidentally closed the originating tab.  Sorry.)
• So.  Some folks at Faux News are "concerned" that the Obamas are vacationing.

  If you thought that becoming a private citizen meant that former President Barack Obama could take a vacation without being scolded by Fox News, think again.
  
  Fox’s excuse this time is that it’s “just reporting” on left-wing criticism. Recently, on FoxNews.com, reporter Christopher Wallace (who does not appear to be the Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace) wrote an article titled, “Obamas under fire from the left for never ending, sizzling ultra-luxury vacations.”

  (News Hound Ellen, Crooks and Liars)
• Meanwhile:  Golf vacation infomercials??
• In Department of You Didn't Really Want the Answers, So You Shouldn't Have Asked the Question:  Indiana Republicans asked for "Obamacare Horror Stories."

  The Hill quoted one commenter who said that the “only horror story is that Republicans might take it away.”
  
  “I love OBAMACARE! It has helped our family. Shame on the REPUBLICANS wanting to get rid of it… BLOOD will be our your hands!!!” said another commenter.

  (AlterNet, reprinting RawStory). From Shakesville:

  My favorite coverage of this debacle is, naturally, the Indy Star's, where Ryan Martin writes with perfect Hoosier kindness that "The responses were unexpected" and "Many seemed to relish that the post didn't receive more horror stories." Ha.

  Remember to continue to contact your Senator.
  
• 44 states are refusing to hand over voter data to the Kobach "voter fraud" commission.  (Yes, it is Little Green Footballs.  Deal.  Zandar pulls together some of the state objections.

  The Trump regime's plan to assemble a national database of voters under the guise of "voter integrity" has run into not one but two buzzsaws: blue states understand full well that the information will be used for targeted voter suppression purposes, but red states know that voter registration systems have been completely compromised by the Russians. Neither group trust the incompetent Trump regime and now 44 states have rejected participation in the scheme.

And Incidentally...

• Via Zandar Versus the Stupid:
• Caitlin Owens, Axios, notes that Ted Cruz has proposed health insurance deregulation such that:

  The bottom line: That would give Republicans a better idea of the impact of his proposal, which would let insurers sell health plans that don't meet Affordable Care Act standards — including, potentially, waiving the pre-existing condition rules — as long as they also sell plans that comply with all of the ACA insurance regulations.

• Jack Moore at GQ's take:

  Anyway, Cruz, in his typical pompous ass way, believes he has solved the Senate's health care bill. His proposal is designed to allow moderate Republicans who are still on the fence to claim they saved the Obamacare protections that are popular with voters while simultaneously allowing insurers to offer plans that don't include such protections, thus costing the government less and pleasing hard-line right-wingers like Cruz. If you're thinking to yourself, how the hell would that work? The short answer is that it wouldn't.

• Robert Reich minces no words.
• Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky Secretary of State, bluntly dismissed "voter fraud" commission.

  Lundergan Grimes was well prepared to discuss Trump's phony voter fraud commission at length and replied, "If Donald Trump asked for not only your address but date of birth, political affiliation and entire voting history along with last four digits of your social security number, would you give it to him?"
  
  She continued, "The answer from Kentucky and states around the United States is a resounding no. There is no state fully complying with what has been a request from a sham commission that the president set up to try to create and find evidence to back up a lie that has simply been disputed..."

  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
• Ilana Novak at AlterNet summarizes Paul Krugman's Monday New York Times column, which suggests that Trump is trying to start a trade war.  Not good.
• Real headline at the SF Gate.com:  Trump accuses Clinton of colluding with Democrats to defeat 'Crazy Bernie Sanders'
• Zandar, citing New York magazine, says Justice Anthony Kennedy may be retiring next year, and why that is bad.
• More Zandar:  Lowered rates of unemployment and disparate electoral results.
• Jesse Curtis:  "On Taking Action For Black Lives"  Read this or stop pretending to be an activist.
• Annoying Anti-Feminists.  (Alas, A Blog)

It's the Bermuda Dodecahedron

I've been hunting wabbits accumulating links for a week.  Those things are indigestible.

• wendelah at dreamwidth has some links for the disastrous Senate version of a "healthcare" bill.
• Feministing supports saving the ACA before it gets destroyed.
• Echidne of the Snakes comments on the "free market religion" of conservatives and how that really doesn't help with healthcare.
• How "conservatives" are robbing you of health care and how "corporate media" have been "aiding and abetting."  (Adam Johnson, AlterNet)
• An actual shortfall problem which the Senate bill does not address.
• "Civic illiteracy" and how we got there. (Henry A. Giroux, Salon)

  I am not referring here to only the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such as Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky and Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.
  
  This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.

• Senator Franken talks about the Senate "health care" bill (the header is a little misleading).  (Alexandra Rosenmann, AlterNet) on Morning Joe.
• Speaking of Morning Joe, he noticed the President has called the "health care" bill "mean."  (Travis Gettys, Raw Story at AlterNet)  "Jedi Mind Trick," indeed.
• Paul Ryan may be vulnerable (politically). (Capper, Crooks and Liars)
• Authoritarianism creeps in on little cat feet.  Time for the squirt bottle.  (MJ Stephan and T Snyder, The Guardian)
• In Memoriam:
• Glenne Headly, actress
• Bill Dana, comic
• Gabe Pressman, TV journalist
• Pete Flynn, Mets groundskeeper

Mmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Via Shakesville, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post:

House Republicans are now angry at this, Politico reports, because they stuck out their necks making the case for a bill that would leave many millions without coverage and gut protections for people with preexisting conditions. They “explained to their constituents” that the last-minute changes to the bill (adding all of $8 billion) would make it less destructive to that latter group. But Trump has now upended all of this, putting them at greater political risk.

But their anger over this is particularly galling, because Republicans themselves do not want their constituents to actually know what is in the bill they are set to pass. And they are taking active, extensive and possibly unprecedented steps to make sure they don’t. Trump merely made this harder for them to get away with.

[...]

Now Senate Republicans are urgently working to soften the bill, because a number of moderates can’t be seen embracing something that cruel. But, if anything, they are going further than their House counterparts to forestall any kind of serious public awareness of what they are doing. Two GOP aides recently told Axios that there are no plans to publicly release the Senate version well in advance of the vote, because, as one of them put it, “we aren’t stupid.” There have been no public hearings. Even some Senate Republicans have expressed befuddlement about what’s in the bill that they will be voting on.

Emphases added.

Sample scripts for calling Senators.

*cough* *cough* Termites in the Load-Bearing Timbers *cough*

• Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars, this morning.

  Investigators found evidence that hackers tried to delete or alter voter data in Illinois. They also accessed software designed to be used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state, accessed a campaign finance database.

• Brad Reed, Raw Story, at AlterNet, this morning.

  A new report reveals that Russian hackers breached voting systems in 39 different states, which means that Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election appears far more widespread than what has been previously disclosed.

Full report at Bloomberg (which does not like ad blockers).

Also, Driftglass comes down on both-siderism with both pies.

Call your Senators and tell them to vote NO on repealing and replacing Obamacare (ACA) with their Frankenstein's monster of a bill, and while you're at it, insist that they hold hearings, because they're trying to sneak this through without hearings or the report from the CBO with the actual cost.  Everyone knows or is related to someone this will affect personally.  Everyone.

ETA:

There is exactly one reason for Senate Republicans to do this [forbid filming interviews with Senators in hallways]: They're afraid to own the legislation that strips 24 million Americans of their healthcare. After witnessing the nightmare House Republicans endured at their town halls, the Senate GOP has clearly decided that secrecy and speed are necessary to force the immensely unpopular ACA repeal through. Do I even need to mention the almost unlimited hypocrisy of hiding what they're doing after Republicans spent years screaming the lie that Obamacare was crafted behind closed doors (they had over 100 public hearings)?

Justin Rosario, The Daily Banter. Further:

As of this writing, the official statement from the Senate Republicans says that no one authorized the ban but clearly someone put out the word.

Further corroboration at sfgate.com.

THE MASKS ARE OFF!  The Republican Senators refuse to release a draft of their bill.  They don't want anyone to know precisely what's in it.  Because, y'know, there might be OBJECTIONS!  (via twistedchick)

STEALTH AND SPEED ARE THE ANTITHESIS OF, DARE I SAY IT, THE AMERICAN WAY!

Yes, I am shouting.

So Now They're Trying Stealth Speed, Redux

twistedchick pointed me to this tweet from Sahil Kapur:

It begins: McConnell initiates the "Rule 14" process of putting the House-passed AHCA on the Senate calendar for fast-track consideration.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 7, 2017

[Embedded tweet.]

Gee, one would think that there must be something extremely smoky, smelly, and suspicious about the haste to get that bill passed.  The Congressional Budget Office's report was not favorable to the "American Health Care Act."  (See Shakesville.)  It's time to call Senators and ask them to vote No, or at least schedule hearings and read the thing.  Especially the 23 million that will be (re-)deprived of  health insurance.

Also, the House wants to water down the financial regulations put in place after the 2007 crisis, because they have learned nothing.

Kansas is ending its "experiment" with deep tax cuts (video).  It didn't work.

The Rude Pundit on Comey's conversations, and the video of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing at C-SPAN (Flash needed; runtime 2:40.)  Zandar, citing Vox.com and the Washington Post:

The Trump Regime is in trouble, and badly so. Comey will help see to that. He flat-out said that he believed he was fired over the Russia investigation and Mike Flynn, period. What Congress chooses to do with that information, and what voters choose to do as a result, we shall see.

More on everything at Avedon's Sideshow.

Memorial Day is Coming; Here Are a Few Things to Remember

• Lance Mannion on the haters:

  They hate the poor, that's obvious. They hate and despise and fear the poor, especially if they're brown. But they hate the sick too. And the old, at least everyone irresponsible enough to get old without having put together a $500,000 portfolio. They hate children. Other people's children, of course. They dote on and spoil their own. But other people's children are coddled and raised to think life owes them so those kids need to be taught a lesson. They hate mothers. They hate women! They hate veterans. They hate anybody---anybody who isn't rich---who has ever looked to the government for help. They hate everybody who isn't rich because we should be rich. That's what life is for. To make money. Lots of it. And if you didn't do that you've wasted your life. If you didn't do it it's a sign you didn't try, you didn't work or work hard enough. It's a sign of your bad character and moral failure. And that's what we all are in their eyes, moral failures who expect them to bail us out when our bad character gets us in trouble. Even if we aren't constantly coming to them with our hand out in one way, we're doing it in another, demanding we be paid more than we're worth, demanding benefits we haven't earned or deserved.
  
  [...]
  
  And out in Montana, Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate for Congress, who last night auditioned for the WWE using a reporter for his sparring partner, wants to end Social Security because he’s against the whole idea that people should ever retire. Noah was still working when he was 600, you know. Noah lived to be 950, going 300 years without, as far as I know, building another ark, but never mind. The bible doesn’t specifically mention retirement, so Gianforte thinks God’s against it. The bible doesn’t mention the United States, the state of Montana, or millionaire ignoramuses with anger management issues getting elected to Congress either, so I hope that means God is against at least the last one, but it’s not looking that way, according to the polls.

• ThinkProgress:

  Fox News journalists were key witnesses to the violent incident that occurred on Wednesday in Montana involving Greg Gianforte, Republican House candidate in Thursday’s special election, and Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. But you wouldn’t know it from watching Fox and Friends.
  
  Jacobs accused Gianforte of assaulting him after the reporter asked him for the candidate’s reaction to the Congressional Budget Office’s score for the American Health Care Act. Audio of the incident supports Jacobs’ account, but Gianforte’s campaign released a statement telling a very different story — one that actually painted Jacobs as the aggressor.
  
  [...]
  
  Gianforte’s story was demolished by eyewitness accounts from Fox News reporter Alicia Acuna, field producer Faith Mangan, and photographer Keith Railey. They actually make the incident sound even more violent than what Jacobs initially described. Acuna authored a story on Fox News’ website that details how Gianforte, without any physical provocation, “grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.”

  Have I mentioned that the masks are off? The masks are off.
  
• See also Welcome Back to Gotham City, who quotes Mark Twain about Congress being the criminal class.  ETA:  More on the story.  The Guardian on Gianforte's apology and win.
• Indomitable:

  Because [name redacted] is a white man, certain questions will not be asked. Who radicalized him? What types of news media did he watch, read and listen to? Is there a moral leadership crisis in White America? What is going on in the homes and communities of the white people who join right-wing hate groups or who find themselves attracted to the white supremacist and white nationalist “alt-right” movement?

  A terrorist by any other name ... still stinks.
  
• The Rude Pundit:

  And, again, it can't be said enough, this was a ceremony dedicated to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the way that nations came together under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the T in NATO, to help the U.S. after 9/11, nations that lost soldiers in the war they joined under Article 5.

  Read at home, or wait until the boss and/or the office tattletale is out for lunch. The Rude One has a very low opinion of Buttercup.
• "Did Comey Knowingly Act On A Bogus Piece Of Russian Intelligence?"  Apparently, yes.  (Crooks and Liars and Shakesville, respectively)
  
• Driftglass:

  No, Mr. Gerson. No and no and no.
  
  Donald Trump is not destroying your conservative movement. He is just throwing a very inconvenient, million-candle-power spotlight on the rotting, squirmy, midden pile of racists, con men, imbeciles and demagogues that your conservative movement has always been.
  
  Donald Trump is not "changing the party’s most basic moral and political orientations". He is simply putting your party's longstanding-but-carefully-camouflaged obscene "moral and political orientations" front-and-center in a way that is visible from the orbit of Jupiter.
  
  And "eventual exile"? Oh please, Michael, we've been through all of this before. Remember Operation Endless Clusterfuck? Ring any bells? It was big news for awhile. In fact, as I recall, it was men like you who put so many clever words into Dubya's mouth explaining how imperative Bush's Iraqi Debacle was, and how quick and ouchless it would all be, and how swimmingly it was all going...
  
  ...right up until it all went tits-up.
  
  Then do you remember what happened? Because we here on the Left sure as shit do.

  Read the whole thing; it is a righteous jeremiad. A J'Accuse. An indictment of liars and grifters in high office.
  
• From AlterNet:
  • Jacob Sugarman summarizes Paul Krugman.
  • Robert Reich on the Scylla and Charybdis that is Trumpcare.

Sustained/Overruled

• Congressional Budget Office examines the "American Health Care Act" and finds it wanting.  As it were.  (Los Angeles Times document copy of report.  Via Karoli Kuns at Crooks and Liars, with Bernie Sanders video.  See also David Leonhardt's column at the New York Times:

  Distraction is a tactic of the politicians who are trying to take away health insurance from people. These politicians can’t sell their proposals on the merits. That’s why both the House and, thus far, the Senate have refused to hold any hearings. They know that virtually every expert across the ideological spectrum — including groups representing doctors, nurses, hospitals, patients and senior citizens — opposes the bill.
  
  Unable to win a debate on its merits, Republican leaders need to change the subject. They can’t let their proposals be judged on whether they improve the American health care system, because they don’t. They need to create a lower standard by which the plan will be judged.

  [Emphasis added by me.]
• John Lewis opposes proposed federal budget and cuts. Report by Alexandra Rosenmann at AlterNet, with video.
• The masks are off, people.

Bumpty-Bumpty-Bump

Not channelling Trashcan Man...

(Aside:  I managed somehow not to have heard that song until the late '90s, which meant I lost the aural background of a fair piece of The Stand).

• To begin:  Lesley Stahl interviews the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg (Nürnberg in German) trials.

  The Nuremberg trials after World War II were historic -- the first international war crimes tribunals ever held. Hitler's top lieutenants were prosecuted first. Then a series of subsequent trials were mounted against other Nazi leaders, including 22 SS officers responsible for killing more than a million people -- not in concentration camps -- but in towns and villages across Eastern Europe. They would never have been brought to justice were it not for Ben Ferencz.
  
  [...]
  
  But Ferencz knew they were guilty and could prove it. Without calling a single witness, he entered into evidence the defendants' own reports of what they'd done. Exhibit 111: "In the last 10 weeks, we have liquidated around 55,000 Jews." Exhibit 179, from Kiev in 1941: "The city's Jews were ordered to present themselves… about 34,000 reported, including women and children. After they had been made to give up their clothing and valuables, all of them were killed, which took several days." Exhibit 84, from Einsatzgruppen D in March of 1942: Total number executed so far: 91,678. Einsatzgruppen D was the unit of Ferencz's lead defendant Otto Ohlendorf. He didn't deny the killings -- he had the gall to claim they were done in self-defense.

• Via skippy: Paid protestors. When "conservatives" claim that protesters are paid by various shadowy leftist financiers (there are leftist financiers? Where?), it's because that's how they roll, and they are so unimaginative that they can't believe anyone would take sufficient exception to acts unless money was involved.  (Tommy Christopher, Shareblue.  Which may be biased.)
• Following the money...  Because it's indicative of the man's character.  (The Rectification of Names)
• Stealth oppression of poor people.  Because their lives are still insufficiently Dickensian.  (Kai Wright, The Nation, and I've hit my limit of 6 articles.)
• Why Republicans hate sick and/or poor people.  A streak of libertarianism holds that a person attracts those pre-existing conditions on purpose.  (Another reason to distrust libertarianism.)

  In reality, people exist in a society where their life trajectories are largely determined by impersonal social and political systems. Nevertheless, the just world hypothesis can be compelling. It allows the privileged, the powerful and the rich to rationalize their opportunities: “I earned it! Those people are lazy!” “Good things happen to good people! Those people are immoral and made bad choices unlike me!” “Their problems aren’t my responsibility!”

  (Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable)
• An illustration
• Joy Reid's staff could not get one Republican to come on and defend health care vote.  (Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars)  Yes, I know I've mentioned it before.
• A fuller explanation

  It's unlikely that the Republican House bill ends up used as the real blueprint, but if that happens the most likely outcome would be that many individuals with pre-existing conditions would be priced out of the insurance markets altogether, and a certain number of them would die earlier than would have been the case under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Those early deaths are a bizarre way of saving money, and so is a plan aiming at insuring only the healthy against the expenses of illness.

  (Echidne of the Snakes)
• Lance Mannion on the health-care bill fight:

  I mean the Republicans civic religion, their belief that all government spending is bad for the economy and bad for the character of the nation. The road to serfdom is paved with liberals' good intentions and paid for by conservatives who---another article of faith---are the only people in America who work and pay taxes. How can we call ourselves a free people if most of us are imprisoned by our dependency on the government for food, shelter, and health care while the hardworking rest of us are held captive by our obligation to foot the bill for the lazy, entitled, irresponsible mobs demanding and collecting free stuff?

• Eschaton: the "It's better than nothing, but" defense of Obamacare.
• Three from driftglass:
  • Conservatives co-opting liberal positions and erasing liberals at MSNBC
  • About "centrism" (with bonus Star Trek clip)
  • Bankruptcy of both-siderism (with bonus dance clip from Dragnet [movie])
• Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Michael Flynn is still a problem.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)  UPDATE!  Sally Yates testifies.
• Southern Beale:

  This is part of a larger flaw in white Southern evangelical Christianity. There’s this belief that material success is the outward manifestation of spiritual worthiness. It’s proof that one has been “chosen” by God. It has to be that, right? To concede that it might more accurately be the result of privilege and decades of the cards being stacked in your favor at the expense of others would be to concede complicity in an unjust system. Few have the moral courage to admit that. Better to believe that the system is fair and success a sign of righteousness.

And that closes all the tabs. But there are probably outrages I've missed.  Oh, and Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen.  (Video)  Whew!

So Now They're Trying Stealth Speed

Because affordable health care (and the Affordable Care Act by extension) is Bad, from that point of view.  (Washington Post, by way of Shakesville.  I think*.)

The fresh pressure from the White House to pass a revision was met with skepticism by some Capitol Hill Republicans and their aides, who were recently humiliated when their bill failed to reach the House floor for a vote and who worry now that little has changed to suggest a new revision would fare any better.

The effort reflects Trump’s sense of urgency to score a victory on Obamacare replacement and move on to other legislative objectives, notably tax restructuring.

*(Memory not as bad as I thought.)

We Really Are All In This Together

Lance Mannion "apologizes" for hiking your health insurance premiums, except not really.

And that’s what I’m getting at, the moral failure in the thinking behind “Why should healthy people pay the medical bills for sick people?” which should be read as “Why should I pay for your medical care?”

Basically, this is a reiteration of the Republican creed: I got mine. You get yours.

The health care debate isn’t a debate over money, except that money is the be-all and end-all for many Republicans. Nor is it a debate over what is the purpose of the federal government, which, according to Republicans is to protect wealth and property and see to it the wealthy and the propertied get to have things their own way, particularly when it comes to increasing their own wealth and acquiring more property, so it does come back down to money, at least for them.

It’s a debate about what people are for. Why are we here? Why are any of us here?

Always a good time to quote Dr Vonnegut, the novelist’s son. “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

"Standing at the Crossroads, Believe I'm Sinking Down"

• Missed Opening Day this year.  Oh well.  But at least they're breaking even.  So far...
• Via skippy:  Device weirdness.  (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic)

  Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends. And so, with increasing frequency, technology will exist not to serve human goals, but to facilitate its own expansion.
  
  This might seem like a crazy thing to say. What other purpose do toilets serve than to speed away human waste? No matter its ostensible function, precarious technology separates human actors from the accomplishment of their actions. They acclimate people to the idea that devices are not really there for them, but as means to accomplish those devices own, secret goals.
  
  This truth has been obvious for some time. Facebook and Google, so the saying goes, make their users into their products—the real customer is the advertiser or data speculator preying on the information generated by the companies’ free services. But things are bound to get even weirder than that.

• What Bernie Sanders and others get "wrong" (Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable):

  Chasing the largely mythical “white working-class voters whose loyalties went from “Obama to Trump” will not win future elections. The white working-class voters they covet are solidly Republican.
  
  Alienating people of color and women by embracing Trump’s base of human deplorables will not strengthen the Democratic Party. It will only drive away those voters who are the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters.
  
  Sanders has unintentionally exemplified the way that both white liberals and white conservatives are heavily influenced by the white racial frame. As such, both sides of the ideological divide are desperate to see the best in their fellow white Americans, despite the latter’s racist behavior.

• Echidne of the Snakes:  Patriarchy makes its move.

  Well, Bernie Sanders is still in politics. Donald Trump ran for president three times. Newt Gingrich is still mouthing on television. And so on. But there is something very different about presumed female ambition. As an aside, there is no evidence at all that Hillary Clinton would consider running again. She has simply given a few speeches, but that is too ghastly for words.

• Body Impolitic:  Police/Jail Violence

  This series [Undisclosed podcast], now five episodes in, is very painful to listen to. When I want to turn it off, I remind myself that Freddie Gray didn’t get to turn it off, and neither did his family, friends, and neighbors. Nor do they still. Besides, if you can hear anything through the pain, it is also fascinating.

• On the Republican dislike of poor people (The Hunting of the Snark):

  When you don't, all your complaints about the new system don't mean anything. You wanted the system broken. You demanded its failure. You fought tooth-and-nail to kill it. You don't get to just walk away from that and shrug your shoulders and go back to your well-paid career rat-fucking the poor. You are responsible for your actions.
  
  And make no mistake: [Megan] McArdle doesn't care about the people who need insurance. She doesn't want the Republicans' greed and incompetence to ruin Republican political success.
  
  [...]
  
  McArdle gives the reasons why she is against the Republicans' plans, which are mixed in with her usual lies and deceit about Obamacare and too tedious to discuss. Then she tells us that she simply can't understand why Republicans decided to pull down Obamacare without having a replacement.
  
  [...]
  
  She should have thought of that when she was predicting that Obamacare would destroy health care and must be stopped immediately. She watched Republicans do nothing viable to replace Obamacare with a functioning market yet for seven years yet she yelped constantly to kill it. Now she shakes her head and fumes that her political party will be hurt by their and her actions.
  
  [...]
  
  After eight (or more?) years of Republicans rat-fucking Obamacare, McArdle became convinced that it was damaged enough to die on its own and she is not best pleased that her ego or career might be dinged by a loss of Republican power. The sick, dead and suffering are beside the point.

• ETA: Lance Mannion: They want people to die.

  They want people to die. I’ve preached this sermon before, and I know I’m preaching to the choir. But it’s the unholy truth. They want people to die. That’s the explanation for this. The AHCA was---is still---wildly unpopular and one of the reasons is it would take away guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. But that’s the part the Freedom Caucus wants to bring back. They want people with cancer to die of it. Poor people, first, but not just poor people. Anybody who isn’t rich enough to pay top dollar for tests, treatment, operations, and medicine. They---we---should all die if we aren’t smart enough, strong enough, virtuous enough to not ever get sick.
  
  Their religion requires human sacrifice. They pray by offering other people’s suffering to their wicked demon of a god. It’s how they feel virtuous. By being tough. Cruel. Impulses to kindness, charity, common decency are signs of weakness, failures to be tough enough to carry out God’s will.

• Yastreblyansky:

  You start the unmasking procedure not because of the identity of the person, which you don't know, but because of their behavior, which makes you want to know it. Flynn, Stone, Manafort, and Page were just Male X when whoever it was got interested in them, their identities hidden by the NSA rules; they were unmasked because somebody at some agency, NSC or elsewhere, needed to find out who it was that was doing the stuff they were doing.
  
  I should add that what the story as it's unfolding really shows, in addition to the willed psychopathic incoherence of rightwing storytelling, is further evidence that the techies of NSA who collect the material do indeed follow the rules of minimizing and masking the identities of US persons with excruciating rigor. Whatever bad eggs at FBI and CIA may end up doing with them.

• Colorblind Christians:

  It will be a bleak future for American democracy if the poles of political debate range from racist/incompetent populism to technocratic liberalism to leftism. There must be a place for thoughtful conservatism. Do you believe in the value of reasoned debate and the vigorous airing of dissenting opinions? Then support conservatives of integrity.

  Yes, I did observe the date.
• Still trying to destroy health care. (Zandar Versus The Stupid)  Keep up the vigilance!

Side Dish

• Remember that joke about how the Republican health plan was "Die quickly"?  Ever suspect it wasn't really a joke?  Southern Beale provides some evidence:

  But after the laughs died down I remembered my November panic attacks about being old and fat and weak and I realized,
  

  Oh my god. Alexandra Petri is right. They are culling the herd.

  And it’s not just Trump, it’s the entire Republican Party. It’s the entire ethos of conservatism: if you’re poor or weak or sick, get outta the way. You’re dragging the country down. You are dead weight on American greatness.

  (Link to Alexandra Petri's Washington Post article transferred to this quote.)  Did someone just mutter "Social Darwinism" out there?
  
• Why wait until college?  Shouldn't something that important be taught starting in first grade?  (What's that you say?  We have to preserve children's innocence?  They shouldn't have to learn that everyone lies to them that early? What about Santa Claus?  What about [*gasp*] advertising?)
• (Well, what about Santa Claus?  Most children figure that out before they turn 10.  It's adults who need to believe that their kids believe in Santa Claus.  As for advertising, finding that sort of hyperbole credible is the mark of a fool, or someone who would take politicians at their word.  Really, one can be open to new experiences and beauty and still distrust out-and-out untruths.  But maybe Americans really can't handle the truth¹.)
• (This also feeds into the demand, usually by con artists and swindlers and, generally, Persons Who Mean You Harm, that they be trusted.  Not merely believed, but trusted.  People don't like to hear this, but the correct answer to a wheedling "Don't you trust me?" is "NO."  Preferably loudly enough to be heard a mile away.)

¹ In your dreams, Charlie. Return to text.

All Right, This is Absolutely It for the Day

• In Memoriam:  Mike Connors, actor.
• Dr. Monkey Hussein Monkerstein of Monkey Muck on one possible replacement for Obamacare.  (I don't have to explain satire, do I?  This is an adults-preferred zone.)

What Is to Be Remembered

• An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, and opportunities lost.

  Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
  [...]
  He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.

• AlterNet's Ilana Novick summarizes Robert Reich's suspicions of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
• Via Body Impolitic:  Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black."  Warning:  It is long and thorough.  A taste:

  Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

  Read it. That is all.
• Zandar on the Kentucky Noseless.

  They're finding out now that the bulk of people on Obamacare were always poor white folk from the hills anyway, and that they're going to be the first people with their heads on the block when the axe comes thundering down. But guess what? I have little sympathy for people who thought they were gladly condemning others to lose their health care in order to benefit themselves. They voted for Trump because he was going to "fire" those people and make white America great again. Trump sold them the dream and they bought the coming nightmare hook line and sinker.
  
  "Trump will take Obamacare from those people who don't deserve it, but never from me and my family."
  
  That'll be on the gravestone of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
  
  It should be on the gravestones of a lot of Kentuckians over the next four years too.

  Yes, they've spited their faces,and now they all look like Voldemort. /sarcasm mine.
• Why was I humming "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the way back from the clinic?

"Traveling Eternity Road, What Will You Find There?"

First let me say that tracking the game yesterday at the MLB site is weird.  I'm not watching on Fux and I'm not a subscriber to MLB.tv, so I followed along on their graphic representation of the game, which was ...

(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio.  There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like.  Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)

... silent.

On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to fill the silences and gaps between action impart the lore of this storied game.  In the graphic representation, none of that happens.  Totally mit out sound.  There's an image of a batter in the batter's box (right or left, with the uniforms facing the correct way) against a backdrop of stadium.  The strike zone is indicated by a rectangle divided into 9 parts approximating the width of home plate and the length between knees and midchest.  Trajectory of incoming balls (there must be a device recording this stuff behind home plate) is shown graphically.

And that's it.  There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics.  But silent.

I have to check that out again this evening.

Oh, and Cleveland won the first game.  6-0.

---

And now for sewer-side:

• Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs.  Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
• Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare.  (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)

  Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]

• Two-fer:
  
  • Yastreblyansky:

    That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.

  • Driftglass:

    Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
    
    [...]
    
    What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
    
    What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
    
    [...]
    
    For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]

    (See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
    
  • ETA:  Now three-fer:  Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):

    The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
    
    Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.

    (Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows."  A conservative value.)
• The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
• Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.

  It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.

• Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer:  Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star.  More details from Oliver Willis.

• And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

  Driftglass. Because...
  

Water Is Wet

• Have health care?  Need health care?  You might want to consider the ramifications of electing Trump.  

  Republican candidate Trump would repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with a new tax deduction, insurance market changes, and a Medicaid overhaul. Democrat Clinton would increase financial assistance for people with private insurance and expand government coverage as well.
  
  The two approaches would have starkly different results, according to the Commonwealth Fund study released Friday.
  
  The analysis was carried out by the RAND Corporation, a global research organization that uses computer simulation to test the potential effects of health care proposals. Although the New York-based Commonwealth Fund is nonpartisan, it generally supports the goals of increased coverage and access to health care.

  Well, I didn't think I would need health care, either, but one's body proves everyone wrong sooner or later.  As usual, the Republican health plan is "Don't get sick."  (Yes, I stole that years ago.)
• Two essays from Jesse Curtis that probably need to be read together:
  
  1. On how "evangelical" does not mean "Trump supporter," and why. 

     Many Americans know evangelicalism primarily as a political movement. So it may surprise some people to learn that evangelicals are spending far more time and money working on things like poverty, racism, health care, and education than they are in trying to elect Republicans. World Vision, for example, is an evangelical aid organization with a budget that by itself dwarfs all the activities of the "Christian" Right in the United States.
     
     [...]
     
     This is the culminating act of political self-destruction in a 40 year campaign of harmful politics. When I think of the "Christian" Right, I'm inclined to repurpose a line from Frederick Douglass' first autobiography: "between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference..." Indeed. Despite all the good done by evangelicals in local communities, the dominant political expression of American evangelicalism is hateful and selfish, and unworthy to be called Christian.

  2. On racism and denial.

     White Americans desperately want to be innocent of any racial wrongdoing. You notice this pretty quickly when you begin to talk about race. Once you look for it, you'll see how often White people are approaching the whole conversation with one goal: establishing their innocence. "My family didn't own slaves. My grandparents immigrated here in the twentieth century. I worked hard for everything I have. Black people have had the same opportunities." Etc.
     
     These kinds of statements tend to be beside the point, and often plainly false. But truth in a literal sense is not the goal of this kind of rhetoric. We use it to claim that we are good, and that we bear no responsibility for racial injustice. We use it to avoid negative feelings. We want to claim innocence not by doing something, but by creating our own reality with our words.

  They're related.
• Noam Chomsky, taking the long view (excerpt, via AlterNet):

  "We want quick victories," Chomsky pointed out, but went on to explain that even the Civil Rights movement was rooted in a movement that had spread to America nearly 200 years prior.

  (There are interesting typos, such as "writers" for "Riders.")
• ETA:  Department of Oh, And By the Way:

  Bob Schieffer, a CBS news veteran and former presidential debate moderator had a very different idea of what the job of a debate moderator is.
  
  CBS' Face The Nation host John Dickerson asked, "There's been a big question about fact-checking and what the moderator's role should be in that. How do you see that question?"
  
  The only reason there are questions about fact checking is because Trump is against it.
  
  Schieffer replied, "Well -- and I've said and I've thought about this over the years, after doing these things -- the first fact-checkers have to be the candidates themselves. If one candidate makes a mistake, you want to give the other person a chance to call him out on that."
  
  This is very smart from Schieffer, but he didn't stop there.
  
  Schieffer said, "If he or she doesn't, then the moderator steps in and sets the record straight. But if you don't give the candidates themselves that opportunity, you're being unfair to both of them."

  Got that? (John Amato, Crooks and Liars.)  EFTA:  Because the Debate Commission Chief begs to differ:

  Janet Brown, executive director of the commission, which organizes the debates every four years, said [...] "I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica."
  
  Once the fact-checking door is open, "I'm not sure, what is the big fact, and what is a little fact?" [...]
  
  Trump campaign aides have staked out a similar position. Some of them say a pro-fact-checking stance is really an anti-Trump stance.

  Emphasis mine.  And gee, I can't imagine why they'd think that.