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bugcthulhu:

truthdogg:

Here’s what’s next for the Affordable Care Act.

Trump and Graham both showed us their cards today, and clearly conveyed that ACA destruction now moves from Paul Ryan to Tom Price.

If the bill is dead, as it appears to be, the internal sabotage of the ACA will ramp up very quickly. This has already been going on at a state level since its implementation, but the GOP put Price at HHS specifically because of his hatred for the law. It will now be strategically underfunded and poorly administrated as a matter of course.

The intent will be to sabotage its new popularity by sabotaging its function.

By all reasonable measures this shouldn’t work. Voters should see through this charade. People have been learning that they like having health insurance that’s reliable and the law’s popularity is up, but confirmation bias is a powerful thing. Conservatives know that all they need to in order to shore up their activist base is to demonstrate government failure. We’ve seen this play before, and it works in the US, just like it would work anywhere that voter turnout is low enough for an activist base to influence an election.

Because Ryan didn’t give in to the Freedom Caucus’s demands to destroy health insurance for almost everyone, he’ll now be painted as a reasonable moderate by a media clamoring to interview a sane-looking person from the right. The Republican Party will immediately attack him for that stance, as they shift to their old standby “it would’ve worked if only it was more conservative” argument, to spin the deliberate destruction.

We hear this argument after every GOP-initiated disaster or GOP loss. It is as predictable as the setting sun.

Call it “explode” or call it “collapse,” this familiar strategy of deliberately bad government starts today.

well there you go they’re running on spite now

wilwheaton:

Aryeh Cohen-Wade had a scathing indictment of the GOP’s complicity in creating Trump and the current clown car of fail in their primary.

The whole thing is brilliant, but this: “They all know they can make a lot of $$$ by fooling frightened elderly white people–the raison d'être of Fox News.“

This is the crux of it. The GOP treats its base like marks in a long con, and Trump is the ultimate conman. He’s beaten them at their own game. He is the match that lit the trash pile they’ve been pouring gasoline on for 40 years.

unbossed:

They pile out of the clown car and slap each other with rubber hammers until the final bell rings, whereupon the moderator rips the heart from the chest of the weakest and takes a bite. “Not crazy enough!” the moderator shouts to the crowd and the process is repeated every few months until only one is standing.

“Al Qaeda still wants to kill us but we’ve been pretty successful at keeping them from doing that. For some reason we needed a new boogeyman. I wonder why?
 
We’ve spent trillions on Homeland Security, outfitted every Barney Fife in the nation with robo-cop gear and allowed the government to spy on Americans at will. I don’t know about you but I kind of expect that all of that should actually be worth something. If we’re going to run around tearing our hair out every time somebody puts out a scary video maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that strategy.
 
This is not to say that there isn’t a threat for the people in the Middle East and there is a legitimate argument to be made that it requires intervention from outside the region lest the whole place blows up even further. (I’m not sure we won’t make things worse —- we usually do — but I understand the arguments for it.) What is galling is the fact that they continue to treat us like children and tell us spooky bedtime stories so they can scare us into supporting their commercial/geopolitical goals. Maybe those goals are worth pursuing but we’ll never know because we’re chasing evil Ninjas who are allegedly coming over the border to unleash mushroom clouds on American cities.
 
[…]
 
Al Qaeda has a strategy to create dramatic terrorist attacks on the West. We’ve known this for a long, long time. That has not changed. ISIS is a different problem. The fact that the war hawks pimped this line about ISIS being worse than Al Qaeda should make everyone skeptical of what they are hearing about this whole thing —- and skeptical of the motivations behind it. How many times do we have to be lied to?”

—

So they aren’t more dangerous to us than al Qaeda after all? Why would they have said that?

When I suggested that the GOP was trying to make us really super afraid of ISIS because there’s an election coming up, and they do this before every election going back a decade, the stupidsphere lost its collective shit at me, and said that I believed — I am not making this up — that ISIS is “a Republican plot to win elections.” Of course, that’s not what I said, but boy when those idiots get stuck on a narrative, they *really* go all-in with it.

ISIS is bad news, and especially bad news to its region, but we don’t need to be wetting our pants about them here in America, because, in spite of what the GOP and the bedwetters in the stupidsphere want us to believe, the entire stupid homeland security apparatus has been pretty good at keeping the bad guys out of America (unless you count the handful of morons who were entrapped by FBI, posing as terrorists, who never would have gotten a single idea off the ground otherwise.)

The stupidsphere desperately wants to start dropping bombs all over the place, because they don’t know how to do anything else, and they really need to feel macho, facts be damned.

(via wilwheaton)

“Most cruelly, many of the states that have refused to accept the Medicaid expansion are those where Medicaid benefits are most stingy to begin with. Each state sets its own eligibility levels, and not too surprisingly, states run by Republicans tend to set them extremely low. So for instance, if you’re a single parent in Alabama with two kids and you earn a princely $3,221 a year, the state considers you too wealthy to get Medicaid. In Texas, which has more people living without health insurance than any other state, that figure is $3,737. Millions of the working poor could have gotten coverage from Medicaid through the expansion, but their state legislators and governors quite literally believe that it’s better for a poor person to have no health coverage at all than to get coverage from the government.
 
By one analysis, 5.2 million Americans who could have gotten Medicaid if their states had accepted the expansion will remain uninsured. And if you asked those people in a poll whether Obamacare had helped them, they’d quite reasonably say no.
 
So Republicans in those states can laugh all the way to election night. They got to screw the poor, which, let’s be honest, they were inclined to do anyway, and in doing so they also did political damage to the Obama administration. Quite a trick.”

— Republicans work like dogs to undermine the law and make sure it helps as few people as possible, then hold up their success at denying the law’s benefits to their own citizens as evidence that the law was misconceived in the first place. (via wilwheaton)