When It Comes to Medical Care, Republicans Have No Concept of "Horror"

A couple of days ago, on the Facebook, the Indiana Republican Party (motto: "If You Think Mike Pence Is Bad, Have You Met the Rest of Us?") posted a simple request. "What's your Obamacare horror story?" it asked. "Let us know." No doubt, the IN-GOP thought it would get some old farmers saying how the Negro President made them have to change providers after 30 years with Ol' Doc Cornhole or some such nonsense.

Instead, what can charitably be described as a "shitstorm like a tornado hit a sewer line" occurred. People poured out their hearts with tales of how the Affordable Care Act saved their lives or the lives of loved ones or how it helped make living easier for them. "I had a lump in my breast, but I was uninsured...so I waited. The Affordable Care Act was passed and I went to a doctor. I had Stage III cancer. I got treatment and I'm okay now. I will be forever grateful to President Obama for leading the fight to get EVERY AMERICAN insured" is an example of how many of the responses went. And a bunch of the people posting were pissed that Republicans want to take their health insurance away.

The reaction isn't that shocking. By just about any measure, Obamacare has been ridiculously successful, with some hitches, yes, that have been exacerbated because Republican twat mites have refused to work on getting rid of the hitches. What is kind of shockingly sad, though, is what constitutes horror to Republicans.

Look at what the IN-GOP asked for up there: "Did you lose a doctor that you liked? Have your premiums increased? Did your insurer leave the exchange? Are burdensome regulations hurting your small business?"

So "horror" for them is that some people paid more, that small businesses might have to do a thing or two, or that you might have to find a new doctor because your insurance changed. It's not that you might have to watch your wife die of treatable breast cancer or you might need an expensive medication for your heart disease or your kid's pre-existing condition means she can't get insurance to cover her asthma treatment or your brother is an opioid addict and is going to be kicked out of any treatment. No, that's not horror enough. The real horror is that rich fucks might have to have a little less money. The real horror is that we have to act like we're a fucking society, dependent on each other, and not just a bunch of asshole individuals pretending like our actions don't have an effect on others.

Well, motherfuckers, I'd rather pay some more for my health insurance and I'd rather have to change doctors than tell millions of people that I don't think they should get the care they need because I'm such a greedy, selfish prick.

Republicans wouldn't know horror if it rose up out of Mitch McConnell's asshole and ate their faces.

By the way, even the questions the IN-GOP asks are bullshit. Here's one person responding to the last one, about small businesses: "Before the ACA, my company didn't offer insurance benefits to the hundred or so employees at my location. Now, we have a choice of plans. Amazing what a little pressure can accomplish."

Yeah, it is amazing. That's a better word than "horror."

Francis Hopkinson, One of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Was a Sarcastic Bastard

(This is a rerun from last year that, sadly, still applies.)

One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence representing New Jersey, Francis Hopkinson was a smart-ass and one sarcastic bastard. Sure, he was a lawyer, judge (appointed by George Washington), harpsichordist and composer, and a designer of the American flag. But he once asked "whether a Quarter Cask of the public wine" could be payment for his work because that's how the Founders rolled.

In his essays, he could be total dickhead to anyone who pissed him off, including those who thought the United States was better off under the rule of England. For instance, he wrote "On Peace, Liberty, and Independence" in the early 1780s as part of a series of university orations, where he was a snarky fucker, mocking those who were against civil liberties springing from self-rule: "Had Great-Britain succeeded in her views with respect to this country, we should not have been put to the laborious task of framing laws for our own government, a task which we seem but indifferently qualified to perform; we should have been rid of the intolerable plague, the heart-burnings, feuds, cabals, and chicaneries attending popular elections, and we should have been eased of the enormous expense of assemblymen's wages, com|missions, fees and salaries to the officers of government, and a thousand other charges and inconveniences to which we must now be subjected: we should have had nothing more to do, but to pay when called upon, and obey when commanded."

And what he wrote about what independence means when it comes to positions on other nations could be rejiggered just a little to be used on those who would exploit stupidity and xenophobia to maintain power:

"Whilst we were dependent upon Great Britain, we had no trouble in studying the characters, customs, and manners of foreign nations; the English were so kind as to furnish us with all their ideas on these subjects. They told us, that the French are a trifling and contemptible nation;that the Spaniards are proud, sullen, and revengeful; the Germans, ostentatious; the Hollanders, boors; the Russians, savages; and, in short, that the English were themselves the only people fit to live and govern the word, as if all other nations held their dominions by usurpation. How easy was it to believe all this? Implicit faith saves an infinity of trouble. How happy were we in submitting to the government, adopting the prejudices, and aping the manners of a nation, which we conceived to be the glory of the world, and the perfection of human nature?

"Whereas, now, we are under the painful necessity of altering our sentiments. We are compelled by actual experience to acknowledge, that the French are a brave, generous, and polished people: and that none of the other nations are, in truth, such as they have been represented to us. Our commercial connections will convince us that human nature is fundamentally the same in every country. That good and bad men are to be found in every climate; and that the people of England have not actually monopolized all the virtue and wisdom of the world. Every conviction of error is a violence done to the mind, inasmuch as the forcible eradication of a prejudice must be attended with a painful sensation. The blind man is happy in his blindness, and the ignorant content with his ignorance. The wisest of men has somewhere told us that the increase of wisdom is the increase of sorrow."

That is some kick-ass shit right there, a punch right in the Trumps.

In Brief: Things People on Fox "News" Called Obama "Unpresidential" For

Just for shits and giggles, as the many Trump taint-sniffers at Fox "news" attempt to justify nearly every deranged tweet from the Shitheel in Chief, I decided to take a look-see at the old transcripts from the real FNN. Shockingly, in that it wasn't shocking at all, the syphilitic whores over on Fox took umbrage at anything President Obama did.

For instance, when Obama said that Latinos needed to vote in their interests in the 2010 midterm election, Stuart Varney offered, "It is unpresidential, it's highly divisive." So encouraging people to vote? Unpresidential.

A Fox panel in September 2009 had a discussion about when President Obama called Kanye West a "jackass." Posited host Jon Scott, "If the most powerful man in the world says something unpresidential on a live mic, is that news or not?" Likewise, Brian Kilmeade asked about a 2010 Obama appearance on Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show, "Do you think this is unpresidential?" This all seems so very quaint now, doesn't it?

Back when Greta Van Susteren had a job and it was at Fox, she took Obama to task for some mild criticism of her employer by President Obama: "I don't think that a president should ever look unpresidential and get into a food fight." She had then-Republican House Whip Eric Cantor on to declare that this was beyond the pale. Of course, in the same October 2009 segment, talking about the possiblity of Obama going on a certain Fox show, Van Susteren said, laughably, "You know, not in a million years do I think Sean Hannity would be disrespectful."

And, finally, because time is a flat circle, here is motherfuckin' Kellyanne Conway on Hannity's Hategasm Jizzorama: "I always find it to be so undignified and so unpresidential for President Obama to pick on what he considers to be right-wing media. You're the president of the United States. Go destroy ISIS and get millions of women out of extreme poverty, please. That's your day job." When did she say that? A little over a year ago. June 3, 2016. And she still hasn't burst into flames from the methane of her own bullshit.

This is not to mention the tan suit, that time Common performed at the White House, Obama's feet on the desk, the Dijon mustard (no really), the golfing, fer fuck's sake, and every other time racist mountains were made out of racist molehills. Meanwhile, as far as Fox is concerned now, with a few exceptions, like Shepard Smith and the occasional surge of integrity from Chris Wallace, Donald Trump is just about a model for being presidential and should be treated with the utmost respect, deference, and lovingly-lapped analingus.

(Bonus fun: You know how everyone was all a-Twitter over former Bush White House communications director Nicolle Wallace for ripping into Trump for his treatment of women? Here's what she told Hannity in 2010 about Obama: "He never sides with the American people.")

Everything Is Bullshit Right Now

This morning, the goddamned president of this country, a man who can be best described as "looking like a pot of rotting fondue, " got on his phone to tweet out an attack on the hosts of the show Morning Joe, MSNBC's a.m. gabfest featuring Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. "I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!" Donald Trump's nubby digits pounded out in the course of two tweets.

He probably saw a report on Sean Hannity's Scatatorium of Fecal Horrors, airing every night on Fox "news," where Trump's chief coprophagist, Sean Hannity, criticized and mocked Scarborough and Brzezinski for criticizing the president. As reprehensible as the sexism and ageism of Trump's tweets were (and unoriginal - c'mon, Donny, you already call Bernie Sanders "Crazy"), it's just one more pile of bullshit in a field strewn with heaps of bullshit for, indeed, we are living in a bullshit time filled with bullshit people and their bullshit ideas.

Beyond the bullshit healthcare plan that may or may not be on life support and the bullshit cruel, about-to-be reinstated travel ban that prevents grandparents from visiting their grandkids, today Congress is gonna vote on a bullshit mandatory sentencing bill. Kate's Law says that undocumented immigrants who return to the United States after being deported will get 5 years in prison. It's a goddamned gift to the private prison industrial complex, and it'll do fuck-all to make the country any safer. The bullshit thing has been around for a couple of years, and now that Trump has decided that undocumented immigrants are just murderers waiting for victims, it's gonna pass and fuck up progress made in reducing the prison population.

We can wander around this field of bullshit and comment on each and every turd. There's Trump talking at a fundraiser for Trump last night at Trump's hotel in DC.  So people who are donating to the 2020 campaign - yeah, that's what this was for - are lining Trump's pockets because you can bet the hotel charged a shitload for its use. The President tore into Nancy Pelosi and, of course, CNN because it's not like he has a fucking country to run or anything.

We can go to the edges of Bullshit Plain and look at the National Rifle Association's bullshit recruiting video that says, essentially, arm yourselves or liberal Hottentots will climb your fences to take away your "freedom." In her best dominatrix voice, Dana Loesch tells us all about how liberal protesters "scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding." The message is clear: "We members of the NRA are all a bunch of fucking cowards who have to hide behind our guns and pretend that it's gonna be go-time." (That's not an actual quote, but it pretty much could be.)

It's all bullshit, man. To go back to the sexism, yesterday, the goddamned president stopped in the middle of a phone call with the prime minister of Ireland to tell an Irish reporter who happened to be a woman that she has "a nice smile" and to the PM, who happens to be a man, "I bet she treats you well." Between this and the Mika Brzezinski tweets, Trump is just returning to acting like the chick-humping Rat Pack-wannabe lothario that he always thought he was, just without style, class, or talent. And he's insulting women everywhere by connecting their worth to what he thinks about their looks. (This is not to mention his bizarre and disturbing fascination with women bleeding. Man, the cutting and menstruation porn he must watch is disturbing as hell. Don't Google that.)

Of course, his staff defended him because what the fuck else are they gonna do? Say he's wrong and should apologize? Quit? Be honorable human beings? Fuck, no. They more or less said that Brzezinski was asking for it, that Trump will always "punch back" ten times harder (which is just five times harder when adjusted for hand size), as if it's somehow ok that the President of the United States feels the need to swing at everything.

It's all bullshit. It's all a waste of time and effort and none of it does any good for anyone, arguably not even for Trump himself, who just seems destined to drown in bullshit.

And the worst, most depressing piece of bullshit in the whole field is that Trump's idiot hordes will gobble it all up like the good shit eaters that they are, happy to smile at us and show us their stained teeth. They love the bullshit. They voted because they wanted the bullshit served to them on paper plates. They don't care if they die of exposure and infection on Bullshit Plain. As long as this bullshit time gives them bullshit to gulp down, they'll keep asking for more.

The rest of us are just told we need to learn to live with the smell.

In Brief: Repealing Obamacare Will Wreck Some Towns and Cities (Updated)

Yesterday, NPR did a story on Steubenville, Ohio, a former coal town in the eastern part of the state. The unemployment rate of 7% is above the state and national numbers, and the entire area now relies on another industry for a great many of its jobs: health care. Yeah, Trinity Health System "provides about 1,500 full-time jobs and close to 500 part-time jobs, more than Jefferson County's top 10 manufacturing companies combined."

Jefferson County has a lot of pretty damn poor people and a sadly not unexpected problem with opioid addiction. So the Medicaid expansion was important to the physical health of the region, as well as the financial. If the Republicans get to slash Medicaid in the way it wants to, it'll screw up people's lives in Steubenville in more ways than just medically. A quarter of the private sector jobs in the town are in health care-related fields, with a bunch more dependent on the spending of those workers. In a place teetering on the brink of desperation, gutting Medicaid funding will push it over the edge.

When the military said it didn't need any more M1 Abrams tanks, which are built in Lima, Ohio, the budget passed by Congress last year contained a half-billion dollars for more tanks. One of the main reasons was the economic blow that central Ohio would take if that funding was cut or sent elsewhere. If we can do it for weapons, we can do it for lives.

Because, see, despite all evidence to the contrary, Republicans insist on calling the Affordable Care Act a "job-killer." But it's very specifically a job creator, and the money that has come into many smaller cities and towns has been a life preserver in the number of workers that hospitals and other medical facilities have had to employ. This goes up and down the economic ladder, from maintenance people to doctors.

In 2015, the New York Times looked at several communities that are surviving because of hospitals that have been flourishing due to the expanded access to medical care under the ACA. Beatrice, Nebraska, the Community Hospital and Health Center is the biggest employer in the area. The same goes for Batesville, Indiana; Centreville, Mississippi; and many more. To put it simply, the only reason a good many people even have jobs in those places is because of the ACA and Barack Obama, the man they were told to despise.

The cuts that most Republicans want will wreck these towns and counties. It's one more effect of the active cruelty of their bill. It's one more way that Democrats should be riling voters up about what the GOP wants to do to them. Start with going after Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio's 6th district, where Steubenville is.

And, yes, every town mentioned here voted for Donald Trump, who lied and promised them the sky and can only give them dust.

Update: The Commonwealth Fund looked at the potential impact of the House bill on employment. Despite an initial uptick in jobs created, the full effect of the bill would be an economic hit that might help put us in a recession: "By 2026, 924,000 jobs would be lost, gross state products would be $93 billion lower, and business output would be $148 billion less. About three-quarters of jobs lost (725,000) would be in the health care sector. States which expanded Medicaid would experience faster and deeper economic losses."

Also, the cuts to Medicaid and the insurance exemptions that will be allowed in the House and the Senate ACA-killing bills would "devastate" rural communities due to loss of nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals, as well as a lack of care for people addicted to opioids. "The combined impact of these losses—health insurance coverage, addiction treatment, jobs, and the threats to economic drivers such as hospitals and nursing homes—will most certainly lead to further hardship in communities throughout the United States," David Blumenthal, president of the Commonwealth Fund, writes.

Random Observations on the CBO Score of the Senate's "Health Care" Bill

The Congressional Budget Office is out with its analysis of the Senate's bullshit version of the House's bullshit so-called "health care" bill (which is actually just a fancy way of saying, "Tax cuts for rich fucks"). The title of the Senate bill is even stupider than the "American Health Care Act." It's the "Better Care Reconciliation Act" because, see, it's better, get it? Except, of course, not really.

1. When you hear anthropomorphic banana slug Mitch McConnell or bitch-faced John Cornyn or portly salesman Donald Trump dismiss the CBO score as "politically-motivated" or some such nonsense, just remember: the reason that Senate GOP majority allegedly started from scratch on a bill repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act is that the House bill was too harsh. How did they know it was too harsh? Because of the fucking CBO score of what the effects of the bill would be. The wacky-ass House voted before the CBO estimates came out, so the mighty Senate was going to be all grown up about it by having a he-man woman-haters club of male Republicans write the bill in super-secret and then attempt to ram it through like a fist into an unlubed sphincter.

1a. Oh, they talked a big game way back in early May. Sen. Lamar Alexander said, "There will be no artificial deadlines." Which is just hilarious now since Alexander chairs the committee that deals with health care issues and they will not be having any hearings.

2. As you've probably read by now, the BCRA is estimated to boot 22 million Americans off their health insurance, with 15 million of those losing coverage next year. And you gotta give the GOP a little credit here for not kicking everything down the road. They'll get to look their constituents in the face and say, "Yeah, fuckos, I took away your cancer treatments and got you hooked even deeper on opioids. Now vote for me or I'm lettin' the raping Mexicans back in." And those fuckos will probably vote for their GOP member of Congress, thinking that dying of cancer is a fair trade-off if the raping Mexicans stay out.

2a. Most of the people who will lose coverage are on Medicaid, which is gonna get cut to the tune of $772 billion over ten years, and earn less than 200% of the poverty level, with people 55 to 64 getting punched in the tit more than anyone else.

2b. To put this in perspective, about one out of every 20 people in the United States will lose their health insurance next year if this bill passes.

3. There are two things that Republicans are going to point to in this CBO report as some kind of amazingly awesome shit. One is that it says that, by 2026, premiums will be 20% lower than if things kept on like they are now. But that's because the BCRA reduces coverage by allowing states to apply for waivers for things like "maternity care, mental health care, rehabilitative and habilitative treatment, and certain very expensive drugs." If you don't have to cover mental health or, you know, opioid addiction or, fucking hell, pregnant women, then that'll tend to lower costs. And this bill will jack up deductibles and cost sharing. In one scenario involving a hypothetical single, 40-year-old man, the CBO says that, because of changes to the law, the same insurance he has now will cover only 58% of care where it used to cover 87%. But his premium will be $100 less a year, so bully for him.

3a. The other big news that Republicans are humping like weasels on Cialis is that the deficit reduction is much more than under the House plan, to the tune of $321 billion over 10 years. So $32 billion a year. Which, in a federal budget of nearly $4 trillion is like a flea fart in a tornado. It's like saying, "Look, I saved money by getting a grande iced mocha instead of a venti. I'm frugal" and you're kind of a douche.

4. Most of the rest of the bill, as analyzed by the CBO (and others), ping-pongs between dickish and cruel. From reducing funds for women's health (including eliminating any money for Planned Parenthood) so that 15% fewer women will have access to care to repealing funding for the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which assists with things like immunizations and research into better health practices to the tremendous hike in premiums for people just below Medicare age to the fact that low-income people simply won't be able to afford insurance, this bill just isn't "mean." It's fucking pathetic and a goddamned embarrassment.

4a. And yet there are Republicans for whom this doesn't go far enough,  who don't see this as an Obamacare repeal, who haven't harmed the black president enough, who won't be happy until they're dancing on the bones of their duped voters. But those are the ones who will probably shitcan this thing. Strange bedfellows, motherfuckers, in strange times.

5. But, hey, rich fucks get a half-trillion bucks in tax cuts, so drinks are on them. Lots of drinks. Enough to ease the pain. Because there is no guarantee that this thing's going down, not when you have to rely on alleged moderate Republicans and spineless worms like McCain, not when elected officials and cabinet members feel free to just lie about it without consequence, not when rich fucks can get richer off the diminishing health of the poor and other people they deem unworthy of the security they get to enjoy in their land of the free and home of the savage.

The Comey "Tapes" Lie: Chaos Is Trump's Greatest Weapon

The first time Trump tweeted about it, it was fucked up enough: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!" The fuck did that mean, "tapes," with the suspicious quotation marks around it? Is that supposed to provide him with an out, like when he first put the quotes around "wires tapped" when he accused President Obama of spying on him?

Trump and his staff teased about whether or not there were tapes of Oval Office meetings, to the point that congressional committees with subpoena power started to get antsy about it. The Trumparazzi were coy, saying that they'd tell the public at some vague point in the future. Trump himself said that journalists would be "disappointed" with the answer, which is a way of saying, "I ain't got any tapes," but not really a definitive "yes" or "no."

Now, finally, forced to say something before shit got litigious, Trump sent out another fucked up thing (in two tweets): "With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are 'tapes' or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings." Motherfucker, you're the one who brought up all that shit and the idea that there might be tapes. Or, you know, "tapes."

You can take this, as David Frum did, that Trump was forced to admit he lied and that every leader around the world will think, "Fuck this lying piece of orangutan dung." But, see, we all knew he was a liar. The only people Donald Trump gives a fuck about are, in order of importance, 1. Donald Trump. And, as proven by the slavering love given to him last night at his pep rally of doom, the only thing that Trump's idiot hordes give a fuck about is that their mad king continues to piss off liberals. They'll be gasping for breath in their black lungs that don't get covered by insurance, but, yeah, stick it to the pussies, Mr. President, hack, hack, hack.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, heads of states understand that they are dealing with a sociopath and have adjusted accordingly, mostly to our detriment. But the real fear here is not that China's leaders will think that Trump's not telling the truth. The real issue is that China's leaders, congressional leaders, and most Americans have no fucking clue what the fuck Trump is going to do and whether he's telling the truth about anything. And the real problem is that there are too many Americans who don't give a happy monkey fuck whether or not he's lying.

In other words, chaos is Trump's strongest weapon, and he wields it without cease. He is deliberately sowing chaos into the politics of the nation and, indeed, the world. To put it simply, this crazy son of a bastard is completely unpredictable, something Trump himself bragged about himself during the campaign, as if it was an asset in an unstable world to be the most unstable force.

His speech to a group of some of the dumbest victims in American history last night in Iowa City is a prime example. He rambled about his victory (again), he said that Mexico would pay for the wall (his "Free Bird"), and he bizarrely asserted that he would propose legislation that is exactly the same as a law that's been around since Bill Clinton signed it (on welfare benefits for immigrants). He lied about the Paris Accord, he lied about environmental policy, he lied about arms sales to Saudi Arabia, he lied, lied, lied.

Which gets us back to the "tapes." Of course there are no tapes. Or recordings. Or are there and he knows that they make him look bad? Or does someone else have recordings, which Trump implies is a possibility? What the fuck is the full story? No, no, of course, there are no tape. Or are there? That's the nature of his answer.

Again, it is wrong to read this as anything other than an attempt to keep his opponents off their game, forcing them to reply to lies, which he follows with something dunderheaded like, "Yeah, like you know." And it keeps him just popular enough to give Republicans cover to enact the worst policies while we try to figure out what fucking world we're living in now, a world that is so destabilized that the ground underneath our feet is ever-shifting until it collapses and swallows us and, god, please let that be soon.