“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not
my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” — Donald Trump, February 17, 2017
A round up of the most interesting, useful and entertaining recent articles and observations on Trump, the Republicans, and politics generally from the enemies of the American People:
To begin directly on point, Steve Benen notes how the Trump team is not even trying to hide the purpose of their shameful, damaging attacks on a free press:
A couple of weeks ago, a deputy assistant to the president in Donald Trump’s White House, made a curious argument during a radio interview. The official said Team Trump will continue to repeat its “fake news” talking point until news organizations stop “attacking” the president.
The official added, “[U]ntil the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, ‘fake news.’ … That’s the reality.”
Even for Trump World, it was an odd thing to say. White House officials will keep saying “fake news,” not because the news is fake, but as part of a name-calling exercise responding to coverage Trump and his aides don’t like.
The above-quoted official is Sebastian Gorka – another former Breitbart News alum who was previously considered to be too fringe and extreme for acceptable politics. As Steve Benen warns:
The broader point is that Republican politics has been radicalized to such a ridiculous degree that practically no conservative is too extreme to play a key role in helping run the executive branch of a global superpower.
I’m reminded anew of the critically important 2012 thesis from Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who famously wrote that the contemporary GOP “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition…. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
Thanks to this year’s election results, these insurgent outliers are now running the White House.
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Jonathan Bernstein has a smart piece debunking the Republicans’ utterly fake discourse about deficits:
Budget deficits are, of course, the difference between revenues and spending. Call that, I don't know, the technical definition.
War-on-budgeting Republicans appear to be talking about something very different when they talk "deficits." They aren't comparing revenues to spending at all. Instead, they appear to be comparing revenues to what they consider the ideal amount of revenues, and spending on various programs to ideal spending on those programs.
If one thinks like that, then raising taxes isn't merely a bad way to cut government deficits; it actually adds to the "deficit," if we assume taxes are currently at or above ideal levels. Similarly, cutting spending on the Pentagon won't reduce the deficit if military spending is below ideal levels, it will add to the deficit by increasing the distance between current spending and proper spending.
If anyone doubts the Republicans’ lack of sincerity on debt and deficit issues, they may be surprised by a little reported piece — the first thing Republicans did with their new control of Congress was to authorize $10 trillion in new debt:
On January 4, the Senate Republicans voted with near-unanimity on a concurrent budget resolution, which, among other things, established a January 27 deadline for repealing the Affordable Care Act. It also authorized literally trillions in new national debt. How much debt, exactly? Well, Trump thought $19 trillion in debt was an outrage. I wonder how he'll explain another $10 trillion in debt to his Pepe-The-Frog disciples because in this resolution, the Senate Republicans voted to authorize a national debt of $29 trillion over the next ten years.
$29 trillion.
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Stan Collander at Forbes, in “GOP Grand Scheme On Obamacare Repeal & Tax Reform Quickly Goes South,” has a very revealing explanation of why the Republican controlled Congress has been stalled on passing any legislative agenda. It is (barely) wonky but the key is that the Republicans’ failure to come up with an ACA replacement is greatly damaging their ability to pass permanent tax breaks for the wealthy. (Who could have guessed that these two items were related?) And it is all about the filibuster:
Knowing that a Senate filibuster was virtually certain on ACA repeal and highly probable on tax reform, the GOP plan was to use the reconciliation process -- which prevents filibusters -- to pass them both.
To do that, for the first time in the 43-year history of the congressional budget process, Congress would pass 2 budget resolutions -- the first for fiscal 2017; the second for 2018 -- in the same year. The FY17 budget resolution, which would be adopted in January, would include reconciliation instructions that would lead to the end of Obamacare. The FY18 budget resolution, which would be adopted in May or June, would include instructions that would result in a GOP tax reform package being enacted.
This seemed very doable immediately after the election given the Republican political euphoria. With a GOP-controlled House and Senate and Donald Trump in the White House, passing 2 budget resolutions and two reconciliation bills appeared to be not just possible, but inevitable. And Congress did indeed adopt a 2017 budget resolution in January.
But adopting the 2017 budget resolution has been the only part of the GOP's grand scheme that has come together on schedule. What's yet to occur may bring the whole plan to a screeching halt and make it impossible for ACA repeal and tax reform to happen quickly. The worst case scenario is that the once slam-dunk GOP grand scheme will end up preventing both ACA repeal and tax reform from happening at all.
I wouldn't get too comfortable with that last conclusion. But Collander’s piece provides important and chilling in-the-weeds details as to how these two issues are intertwined. Republicans are not just seeking to eliminate health insurance from millions of people, but need to use the associated tax and spending cuts and legislative maneuvers as a vehicle to lock in deep tax cuts for the rich in a way that stymied the Bush administration.
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On a related point, the recent “New Republican health care blueprint falls far short.”
We’re a long way from having a real, detailed GOP plan to consider, but we can at least take a closer look at what Ryan & Co. have come up with thus far, which is better than literally nothing.
The bad news is, you’re really not going to like the Republican outline. A
New York Times editorial yesterday summarized the key provisions nicely:
In a half-baked policy paper released on Thursday, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, trotted out washed-up ideas for “improving” the country’s health care system that would do anything but. For example, the paper calls for reducing spending on Medicaid, which now provides insurance to more than 74 million poor, disabled and older people. Many millions of them would be cast out of the program.
The Republican plan would also force most people who don’t get their health insurance through an employer to pay more by slashing subsidies that the A.C.A., or Obamacare, now provides. The proposal would allow families to sock away more money in health savings accounts, which may sound good at first but would primarily benefit affluent people who can afford to save more.
Another note: no one should be allowed to purport to discuss “health insurance reform” while prominently pushing “health savings accounts” because the latter is literally the opposite of insurance. Sure, one could incrementally try to save to reach the cost of replacing a home destroyed by fire, but people get (and your mortgage bank requires) home fire insurance precisely so that your life savings are not wiped out and because everyone recognizes this as a risk that most probably cannot be saved for. This is what insurance is for. Plus, to the extent “health savings accounts” are discussed at all, why not just provide that all uninsured medical expenses are tax deductible? Why impose the absurdity of making you race to save appropriate amounts, and declare that you are shit-out-of-luck if you get sick in January (when your account is low) but better off in November (when your account is higher)? The only explanation is to maintain the “worker bee” terror and treadmill existence of constantly scrambling in fear to ameliorate life’s (un)certainties.
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Folks should keep a periodic eye on Daniel Larison from the American Conservative, who has been tirelessly documenting the stupidity and immorality of the U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen. This theater has attracted little to no attention since it began under President Obama, and close observers will note that the Trump people are very eager to expand this as a new front for increased U.S. involvement. “The Ongoing Disgrace of U.S. Support for the War on Yemen”:
The U.S. continues to aid and abet the coalition as it carries out war crimes such as these, and based on what we’ve been hearing from the new administration that support is only going to increase. Our government is providing the weapons and fuel that allow coalition planes to blow up women and children at funerals, and it is doing this just so we can “reassure” a few despotic governments. U.S. support for the indefensible war on Yemen is an ongoing disgrace and an enduring blot on our country’s reputation.
Yemen, of course, is where President Trump ordered his own (weakly reported) Benghazi-like debacle — over dinner with a few advisors.
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Finally, for those who are happy to see that Andrew Sullivan has returned to a weekly column (or, others), below is a short, very interesting (and typically Sullivan) BBC video exploring what Plato can teach us about Donald Trump. (It is surprisingly a lot.)
Please weigh in or add any other important or overlooked reporting and punditry.