45,000 Americans died every year just because they didn't have insurance. Unacceptable.

The recent op-ed piece by Paul Hollis and John Kay was one big lie from start to finish. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats did not "ram" Obamacare through. Negotiations between Democrats and Republicans began as soon as Obama took office in January of 2009. The ACA was not signed until March 23, 2010 — after much debate and many votes. The Republicans were pretty clear that they could not possibly care less about the plight of uninsured Americans. They still don't. The ACA was outright sabotaged from Day One by the Republicans in Congress and their stooges in the red states. Did some folks lose their existing policies after the ACA was passed? Yes, but this was almost entirely due to the fact that old-style catastrophic coverage plans are no longer considered as real insurance. Those plans provided slim coverage with high deductibles and still weren't cheap. They have been replaced with actual insurance that provides real, reliable coverage at a reasonable price. There were generous subsidies offered to those who couldn't afford to pay. Did some people end up worse off? Again — yes — but if you balance the few hundred thousand individuals who are paying more now against the 20 million who couldn't get insurance before, there is no comparison. Premiums are currently on the rise. However, so are the subsidies. According to the Kaiser Foundation, in all but two states, a 40-year-old non-smoker earning $40,000 a year will see NO increase in his net out-of-pocket because as his premiums go up, so do the subsidies. In Massachusetts, where Obamacare was invented by a Republican, over 97 percent of the people have health insurance. The mandate that forces you to buy insurance is solely the product of the conservative Heritage Foundation. It wanted to prevent what it referred to as "freeloaders" on our healthcare system. Until this GOP plan was adopted by a Democratic president, conservatives thought that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. When President Obama agreed, they dropped it like a hot rock. This was part one of the million-part-plan by the GOP to make Obama a single-term president. Big picture: the ACA has achieved its primary goal of reducing by nearly half the number of uninsured in the United States. In Louisiana alone, we went from 22 percent of our citizens with no health insurance to 12.5 percent. There is still work to do. Trump and the Republicans are not willing to do it. All they want is to take us back to where we were eight years ago when, according to the Harvard Medical School, 45,000 Americans died every year just because they didn't have insurance. Unacceptable.

http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/letters/article_63797998-f92f-11e6-998e-fbe514c44dad.html

Medicaid Expansion in Louisiana

Finally, under a Democratic Governor, Medicaid was expanded in Louisiana. Article: The Louisiana Department of Health announced on Thursday that enrollment is at 400,635 new enrollees. A recent Gallup report found the uninsured rate in Louisiana fell by nearly half from 21.7 percent in 2013 to 12.5 percent in 2016.According to stats from LDH, more than 58,700 adults have now received at least one preventive or primary care service after enrolling in the expansion. Sixty-seven women have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, and 1,193 adults newly diagnosed with diabetes, among other outcomes cited. Michele Kidd Sutton, president and CEO of North Oaks Health System in Hammond, said in the LDH release that the hospital has seen a 60 percent increase in mammograms for Medicaid patients, 61 percent increase in bone density screenings and a 26 percent increase in cervical cancer screenings. These are all real people, with real needs, who have had their lives changed for the better.

http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/article_9e784c0a-f479-11e6-be71-57eae137bd8e.html

Trump Can't Build a Wall Without the Real Estate

Mr. Trump fails to take into account the major hurdle the wall faces: eminent domain. To build the wall, the U.S. would need to own all 1,954 miles of the border. Most of this land is now private property—especially in Texas, where the U.S. government owns only 100 miles of the 1,254-mile border. To acquire the rest of the land it would need, Washington would need to employ eminent domain, the authority under the Fifth Amendment to seize private property for public use upon payment of “just compensation.” Recent history shows that’s easier said than done. In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act with strong bipartisan backing, including the support of New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, now Senate minority leader. The law authorized construction of a border fence along 700 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, including 100 miles in Texas. Lawmakers expected swift completion of the project. Instead, a decade later, there are unfenced gaps—because the fence had to have holes to accommodate local ranchers whose cattle graze on the southern side, but also due to property owners’ fighting land seizures in federal court.

At the end of 2016, more than 120 separate cases pertaining to eminent-domain seizures for the fence were still active in the U.S. court system. In 2009 the Department of Homeland Security inspector general issued a report that noted, “Acquiring real property from non-federal owners is a costly, time-consuming process requiring negotiations and sometimes condemnation.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cant-build-a-border-wall-without-the-real-estate-1487290376

In Today's Newspapers/Quotes

The Trump opposition-Democrats, unions, Never Trumpers-now know that if they can turn three Republican senators against him, he won’t matter. ~Daniel Henninger from Wall Street Journal

 

And now with Betsy DeVos at the helm, we have something we’ve never seen before-widespread fear of the Education Department by the left. So it’s not time to wait four more years to try to dismantle the department. The time for that is now. ~Neal P. McCluskey from Cato Institute

 

“This is not about who won the election. This is about concerns about intuitional integrity,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior intelligence official. “It’s probably unprecedented to have this difficult a relationship between agencies.” “I can’t recall ever seeing this level of friction. And it’s just not good for the country.”

 

Trump’s fear of opening his tax returns to public scrutiny could go beyond reveling what Donald Jr. called family’s considerable business dealings with
Russia. The release could also expose a net worth well below the billion-dollar mark. ~ Froma Harrop

 

Steve Schmidt, who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration. “This is something entirely different. The ineptitude, the sloppiness, the incompetence and the chaos are unprecedented.”

 

Let’s talk about the swamp. If we have learned anything about the Trump presidency, it is that Mr. Trump and his chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, despise the Washington swamp, which includes the city’s lobbyists, all of its bureaucrats, every member of the media, the entire congressional delegation and their staffs. Forgotten now is that Nixon didn’t resign because of anything proven by the anonymous torrent, but only after he saw he’d lost the support of his own party in Congress. We’re not there, yet. ~Daniel Henninger from Wall Street Journal

 

How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief

He's made the paranoid style of American politics go mainstream.

Nowhere is Trump's embrace of oddball ideas and cranks more evident than his courtship of Jones, a 42-year-old Texan who built a lucrative media empire by hawking anti-radiation tablets and fulminating about "false flag" operations and the globalist cabal. It was previously unthinkable for a major-party nominee to appear on Jones' show (broadcast from "FEMA Region 6"), but Trump is an exception. Stone has appeared regularly on Jones' daily program, and the two were inseparable at the GOP convention, where they co-hosted a pro-Trump rally. Campaign aides and Donald Trump Jr. have promoted Infowars stories on social media. And Trump himself, who phoned into Jones' show last December for a friendly chat, has welcomed the host's support and parroted his message to a degree that has shocked even Jones. "It is surreal to talk about issues here on air, and then word-for-word hear Trump say it two days later," Jones confessed on the air in early August.
But it's not just Clinton who's in the crosshairs of the Trump-Jones conspiracy machine—it's electoral democracy itself. This summer, Jones warned of an attempt at "rigging" the election to deny Trump the presidency. He proposed sending teams of cameramen to polling sites to document the "illegals" voting for Clinton. By early August, Trump was channeling Jones in his stump speech. "I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest," he said. He told the Washington Post that he feared unscrupulous Democrats would try to "vote 10 times." By injecting so much distrust into electoral results, Trump could delegitimize a Clinton victory, setting himself up as a bomb-thrower in exile.
No wonder Jones has told listeners that he's urged Trump to keep pushing the "rigged election" narrative. The Infowars host filmed a short segment wondering if the Democrats would try to have him killed. After all, by calling him out, Clinton did something his enemies, those globalist tyrants and UN stooges, had spent years avoiding at all costs. "You don't say, 'Alex Jones'! You never say the name Alex Jones!" he said. "But more and more, they have to speak the name that no one says." For once, he had a point—a lot of people were saying it.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/trump-infowars-alex-jones-clinton-conspiracy-theories

Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump

Stephen Bannon and Donald Trump --The question should be what are their beliefs and what ideas are they basing their actions? What is behind this Muslim Ban? And the deeper reason for the soon to see more and more rounding up of undocumented immigrants? Both men seem to be showing the country they want to burn everything down which includes Washington Establishment, our norms and our institutions. But Why? And what will come next after everything comes crashing down? To get anywhere with answering these questions the Alt-Right must be studied.

 

Article: In July, Bannon, who soon would leave Breitbart to become a top campaign aide to Trump, was interviewed by journalist Sarah Posner. He proudly declared of Breitbart, "We're the platform for the alt-right." The alt-right is an extreme but not well-defined wing of the conservative movement that rants against immigrants, Muslims, the globalist agenda, and multiculturalism and that generally advocates white nationalism (if not white supremacism—in this world, there is a difference). The alt-right also generates a hefty amount of anti-Semitism.

In March, the website published an article headlined "An Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right," which was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent figure in the movement. It noted that the alt-right opposed "full 'integration'" of racial groups: "The alt-right believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved.”

 

What does Spencer, the intellectual guru of the movement, advocate? He is quite explicit: an all-white United States. This is not a secret. In a recent interview with Mother Jones, Spencer explained his belief that America's white population is endangered, due to multiculturalism and immigration, and he advocated "a renewed Roman Empire," a dictatorship where only white people could be citizens. "You cannot view another white person as your enemy," he remarked. His goal is a white ethnostate. How to get there may be unclear. He added that he hoped America's nonwhites can be convinced to leave the country on their accord: "It's like presenting to an African that this hasn't worked out. We haven't made each other happier. We are going to have to take part in this paradigmatic shift together." During the campaign, Spencer declared, Trump "loves white people." 

Race is central to the alt-right. Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, notes, "The alt-right, in a nutshell, believes that Western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity." That is, being white.

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/why-its-fair-and-necessary-call-trumps-chief-strategist-stephen-bannon-white-nationalist

 

 

Hitler Reacts to Donald Trump Becoming President

In Trump's mind, it's always really sunny. And that's terrifying

I rehash this weather history because it’s not subject to debate. This is tantamount to Trump declaring black is white or day is night. It was overcast, and he declared that it was “really sunny.” This disconnect from reality is my biggest fear about Trump, more than any one policy he has proposed. My worry is the president of the United States is barking mad.

 

“More than anyone else I have ever met,” Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art of the Deal,” told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer at the time, “Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” My Post colleague Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger, picked up on this theme in an important post this week, recalling Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) description of Trump as somebody who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies” and “his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.” Rubin raised the prospect that Trump might eventually need to be declared unfit to serve under the 25th Amendment if he can’t “separate what he wants to believe and what exists.”

 

 

That’s why it’s unnerving that Trump not only decided that he saw 1 million or 1.5 million people watching his inauguration but also that he pressured the head of the National Park Service to support his fantasy.

 

That’s why it’s frightening not only that Trump embraces the fantasy that millions voted illegally but also that he supports the falsehood by citing a Pew Center on the States report that says nothing about voter fraud — and by claiming pro golfer Bernhard Langer was turned away from voting in Florida while other, suspicious-looking people were permitted to cast provisional ballots. Langer, a German citizen, can’t vote in the United States, and it turns out he witnessed no such thing.

 

When Trump caused international havoc with tweets about China, North Korea and others, there was speculation that he was pursuing the “madman theory” to unsettle adversaries by making them think he’s crazy.

 

He’s doing such a convincing job of it that I worry that being a madman isn’t Trump’s theory but his reality.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/in-trumps-mind-its-always-really-sunny-and-thats-terrifying/2017/01/27/ff0a6278-e499-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.827ea135f595

 

 

Progressive Bubble

In Time Magazine article titled - The California Republic Comes Roaring Back.  Back in his studio in San Francisco, artist Eric Rewitzer takes issue with the notion that he lives in a bubble, though the reality he describes sounds rather bubble-like—a place where people all believe in the same progressive future. "When Trump won, it reminded me how comfortable I had become in just accepting that progress was going to continue. If the bubble is anything, it's a sense of comfort that we're doing the right thing," he says. "What happened after the election is I felt I have to stand up. I can't take for granted that this is the way good people think everywhere."

 

In Trump’s Washington, Nothing Feels Stable

Last week’s executive order on immigration continues to reverberate. The handling of the order further legitimized the desire of many congressional Republicans to distance themselves from the president, something they feel they’ll eventually have to do anyway because they know how to evaluate political horse flesh, and when they look at him they see Chief Crazy Horse. What went wrong has been fully adjudicated in the press. But this should be said: The president and his advisers are confusing boldness with aggression. They mean to make breakthroughs and instead cause breakdowns. The overcharged circuits are leaving them singed, too. People don’t respect you when you create chaos. Prudence is not weakness, and carefulness is a virtue, not a vice. If all this was spontaneous, the left is strong indeed. If it was a matter of superior organization, that’s impressive too. You should never let your enemy know its own strength. They discovered it in the Women’s March, know it more deeply now, and demonstrated it to Democrats on the Hill. It was after the demonstrations that Democratic senators started boycotting the confirmation hearings. They now have their own tea party to push them around. Americans want an America that looks after itself, but they don’t admire bigotry or respect prejudice. They’re embarrassed by it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-trumps-washington-nothing-feels-stable-1486081546

We Ignore Trump at our Peril

 

I wish I could agree with those who say we should pay little attention to President Trump’s verbal eruptions and focus only on concrete actions, but I can’t. It matters that the most powerful man in the world insists on “facts” that are nothing but self-aggrandizing fantasy. It matters that the president of the United States seems incapable of publicly admitting any error. It matters that Trump’s need for adulation appears to be insatiable.

My point is that Trump’s off-the-wall statements and Twitter rants cannot be dismissed as mere attempts to distract. We have a president who is obsessed with his public standing, given to outlandish statements, eager to believe in conspiracy theories and unwilling to admit when he is wrong. To our peril, his character and moods will shape his policies. ~ Eugene Robinson/The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-ignore-trump-at-our-peril/2017/01/26/1d8bf630-e3ff-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?postshare=5201485535240116&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.d7749fd02829

 

Trump's bigotry, fearmongering will make America weak again

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2017/02/trumps_bigotry_fearmongering_w.html#incart_river_index


So, what does this mean for the United States under Trump?

First, Trump's policies aren't about making us safer, but about pandering to the racists, bigots and xenophobes in his base.

Second, members of Congress and others who enable or who tacitly approve these policies will bear the indelible stains of the hate and ignorance that inspired them.

Third, a nation that crafts foreign and domestic policies out of fear, hatred and ignorance is a nation in decline.

Fourth, the ban (and the White House has repeatedly called it a "ban"), endangers our people and emboldens our enemies by targeting a specific faith.

 

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, a finalist for Trump's secretary of state, told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 1, "We must also remember that Islamic extremists want to portray this fight as a clash of civilizations, with America at war against Islam. We must not let them do that."

With his ban, Trump is encouraging them to do just that.

The choice is ours. We can abide hateful policies that erode our democracy and threaten our moral standing -- or we can defend American values. Trump hopes we'll do the former. To save our country, we must do the latter.

Robert Mann, an author and former U.S. Senate and gubernatorial staffer, holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

The Johnson Amendment and Trump

Trump proposes to get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment. The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sees the separation of church and state as a blessing, not a curse, quickly issued a statement that repealing the Johnson Amendment would not further the religious liberty that it fights for. "Politicizing churches does them no favors," the statement says. "The promised repeal is an attack on the integrity of both our charitable organizations and campaign finance system. Inviting churches to intervene in campaigns with tax-deductible offerings would fundamentally change our houses of worship. It would usher our partisan divisions into the pews and harm the church's ability to provide refuge."

Trump's announcement has the whiff of political payoff rather than addressing a real policy need. Going after the Johnson Amendment is little more than political pandering. ~ Tim Morris at Times Picayune

To Conservative Voters

To conservative voters: You have been given a gift. The gift is this: Your guy won, your team has the house and the senate. And it's going....not great. My charge to you: figure out how you want to be represented in history. You are on the cusp of being the party that rose up and fought for what you told us you stood for, or you can be the people we have to explain to our children, when they asked why no one fought the breakdown of our democracy.

If you voted for the president or a republican senator because you believe in fiscal conservatism, you should be furious that your tax dollars are going to build a wall that will have zero impact on the effects of immigration.

If you hate the left because of "Political Correctness," you need to be asking yourself if you're okay with the President censoring communications from MULTIPLE government organizations like the National Park Service, the EPA and more.

If you voted because you hated Secretary Clinton's email server, I expect you to be calling your representatives to ask why Steve Bannon and others continue to use their unsecured personal emails and why your president is using an unsecured android device still.

If you voted because you believed they would be better protection against terrorists, you need to ask yourself why it's okay that your president just took away $130 million in anti-terror funds from New York with his punishment of Sanctuary Cities.

If you are angry that your insurance is too expensive, you should ask why your senators are repealing ACA without a replacement, an action that will leave 20 million people without insurance at all.

If you believe the Clinton initiative provided unequal treatment to countries that supported their foundation, you should be livid that your president has moved to block visas from Muslim countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, but not places where he has business ties like Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

This is an opportunity to prove that you voted for the reasons you told me you did. I am taking you seriously, I am taking you literally.