If you can’t make the women’s march on Washington, there are sister events! They are going on everywhere, not just here in uStates, but all over the world. Check out the sisters page, and see if you can find a march near you. (There are even three here in nDakota!)
World of Wonder has more details.
CREDIT: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite.
On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate of how many people will become uninsured if Republicans move forward with their likely plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the numbers are brutal. Thirty-two million people would lose their health insurance by 2026, and premiums would double in the same time frame.
Americans would also see a sharp and immediate drop in insurance rates. According to the CBO, “the number of people who are uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first new plan year following enactment of the bill.”
The CBO examined a bill pushed by Republicans in the previous Congress, the “Restoring Americans’ Healthcare Freedom Reconciliation Act of 2015,” which would phase out provisions of the Affordable Care Act that help make health insurance affordable — including subsidies for plans purchased on Obamacare exchanges and the law’s Medicaid expansion. It would also immediately repeal provisions, such as the law’s individual mandate, which are intended to bring people into the insurance market.
At the same time, this bill would also leave in place certain regulatory reforms, such as the requirement that insurers cover people with preexisting conditions.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I faced doubled premiums, that would be the end of healthcare coverage for me, and as someone who needs to have spinal and neck injections every 3 months, well, that would stop too, because I know damn well I couldn’t cover the procedure out of pocket. That would leave me in massive pain with no respite, because without the injections, I don’t get pain med scrips.
Nevertheless, partial repeal would lead to a massive expansion of the uninsurance rate. Indeed, many people would be unable to obtain insurance at any price. As CBO explains, “roughly 10 percent of the population would be living in an area that had no insurer participating in the nongroup market.”
A Massachusetts study found that “for every 830 adults gaining insurance coverage there was one fewer death per year.” If this figure is applied to the 32 million who will lose insurance if key provisions of Obamacare are repealed, it means that about 38,500 people will die every year who otherwise would have lived in Republicans succeed in their plans to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act.
Yeah. All that shit about death panels? Well, now we know for sure who doesn’t care about people dying, but that’s hardly news. Naturally, rethuglicans are attempting to discredit and dispute the report, but they are still offering nothing but vacant looks towards anyone who expects details about the so-called replacement plan.
Republicans have indeed suggested several possible replacements for the Affordable Care Act, such as dismantling state insurance regulation, giving states more leeway to deny Medicaid coverage to people who are now eligible, and tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy. To date, they have not settled on a specific replacement plan, however, and the ideas they have floated so far would insure only a fraction of the people currently insured under the Affordable Care Act.
So, what we have to look forward to in this brave new world? Taxes, Pain, Death.
Via Think Progress.
Trump humps flag. Twitter.
Trump has disclosed to The London Times that his first day of working as president will be Monday, January 23rd, because I guess now presidents of whole countries don’t work weekends.
“One of the first orders I’m gonna sign — day one — which I will consider to be Monday as opposed to Friday or Saturday. Right? I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and getting it mixed up with lots of celebration,” Trump told the London Times.
Stephen Colbert had something to say about that one:
Via Raw Story.
Waving Grizzly gif on Twitter.
Betsy DeVos’s hearing veered straight into the absurd, citing potential grizzlies:
However, nothing quite caught the flavor of how poorly her hearing went than her response to Sen. Chis Murphy (D-CT) who asked her, “Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?”
After saying the availability of guns should be “best left to locales and states to decide,” Devos replied to further questioning on guns on campus by adding, “I will refer back to Senator Enzi (R-WY) and the school he was talking about in Wyoming … I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”
Ms. DeVos is not only singularly lacking any qualification to head up the Department of Education, she’s not exactly stellar in the thinking department. She did note she had a bleeding heart:
If the question is around gun violence and the results of that, please know that my heart bleeds and is broken for those families that have lost any individual due to gun violence.”
Buuuuuuut…potential grizzlies, man! I’m hearing Cheech & Chong in my head. The twittersphere erupted over the potential grizzly bears.
Mo Gaffney@mogaffney
So DeVos won’t say guns don’t belong in schools. Except says yes when grizzlies are near. How many grizzly adjacent schools r there?
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Adam B. @AllThingsBooks“We need guns in schools because of grizzly bears.” You know what else stops bears? Doors.
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Sarcasticsapien @Sarcasticsapien
I’m confused. Betsy DeVos wants to bring God into schools but also guns because I guess God isn’t powerful enough to stop grizzly bears.
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Gary @mrgaryhuangI must REALLY live in a liberal bubble. I didn’t think grizzly bears were even remotely a problem in public schools.
More Tweets at Raw Story. Also covering this story, Think Progress.
Gov. Paul LePage (YouTube/screen grab).
Supreme asshole bigot LePage is at it again, this time saying that Rep. John Lewis needed to show more gratitude to white people. C’mon, boy, tap those shoes and tip that hat, yeah? All the racist goons are delighting in slamming Rep. Lewis and all people of colour.
The Portland Press Herald reports that LePage slammed Lewis for questioning President-elect Donald Trump’s legitimacy during a regular appearance on a local talk radio show, and he said Lewis needed to show more gratitude to past white presidents who worked to free black people from slavery.
“John Lewis ought to look at history,” the governor told the George Hale and Ric Tyler Show on the Bangor-based radio station WVOM. “It was Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, it was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant who fought against Jim Crow laws. A simple thank you would suffice.”
Christopher Cousins of the Bangor Daily News writes that LePage is simply incorrect when it comes to the history of Jim Crow laws, however, as Hayes agreed to “an informal deal after a contested election that gave him the White House in exchange for promising to pull Northern troops out of the South,” which thus “allowed Jim Crow laws to take root.”
As usual, white bigots who just can’t keep their mouths shut also can’t manage to check a few facts first. How about a “fuck you, go back to school” instead of a thank you? I think that would suffice.
LePage, who this past summer was caught on tape calling a Maine lawmaker a “son of a b*tch socialist c*cksucker,” also criticized the American left for being “so hateful” and “trying to bully us out of believing our constitution.”
:Laughs: Oh, there really isn’t any need for commentary, bigoted cons always manage to swallow both their feet before anyone can get a word in edgewise.
Via Raw Story.
People are a tad upset with republicans, as Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers found out…
I think people should shout a little louder, you could still hear some of the bullshit.
Via Raw Story.
Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn, left, his son Michael G. Flynn, second from left, and Boris Epshteyn, a spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump, third from left, board an elevator at Trump Tower in New York on November 17, 2016. CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File.
On Monday night, Michael Flynn Jr. — son of and former chief of staff for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — tweeted out a story published on Voltaire Network entitled, “General Flynn’s Proposals to Reform Intelligence.”
The story, published last month with a Damascus dateline and authored by Thierry Meyssan — a 9/11 truther who published a book in 2002 entitled, “The Big Lie” — previews how Flynn plans to rollback “the big reforms that took place during the Bush and Obama years.”
Perhaps most significantly, the story says the “radical overhaul” Flynn is planning involves the elimination of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, an office created by President Bush in 2004, with power centralized under Flynn instead.
“The 16 agencies should no longer be accountable to the National Intelligence Director but only to the National Security Adviser,” Meyssan writes. “In other words, they will be accountable to General Flynn personally.”
The story cites anonymous sources, which some informed observers believe include Flynn Jr. himself.
[…]
In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly bashed reputable outlets like CNN as “FAKE NEWS” while linking to content from staunchly pro-Trump sites like One America News and LifeZette. In his most recent post on Gab, a social media platform that caters to white nationalists, Flynn Jr. struck a similarly anti-mainstream media tone, writing, “Im sick of these fake news media a$$holes pulling at strings, trying to pit Trumps cabinet against each other. Piece of advice, good number of his cabinet sat across from (in @GenFlynn case interrogated) members of Al Qaeda so nothing LSM can OR WILL EVER do to shake these TRUE PATRIOTS!!”
The full, depressing story is at Think Progress. We are in so much trouble.
Mark Trahant has an in-depth article about the problems of no healthcare. In related news, Trump’s Health and Human Services pick is busy trying to fan the stench of corruption away from himself, but the stink is speaking loudly:
Washington (CNN)Rep. Tom Price last year purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would have directly benefited the company, raising new ethics concerns for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary.
Price bought between $1,001 to $15,000 worth of shares last March in Zimmer Biomet, according to House records reviewed by CNN.Less than a week after the transaction, the Georgia Republican congressman introduced the HIP Act, legislation that would have delayed until 2018 a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) regulation that industry analysts warned would significantly hurt Zimmer Biomet financially once fully implemented.
Full story at CNN.
The various posters made by Shepard Fairey for this week’s Inauguration in Washington, DC (via Kickstarter).
(graphic by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic).
The #J20 Art Strike is imminent and we’ve compiled a running list of spaces that will be closing for Inauguration Day. The Art Strike is intended as an act of solidarity with the broader slate of #J20 events and, as the movement’s site puts it, as a
tactic among others to combat the normalization of Trumpism — a toxic mix of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, militarism, and oligarchic rule. Like any tactic, it is not an end in itself, but rather an intervention that will ramify into the future. It is not a strike against art, theater, or any other cultural form. It is an invitation to motivate these activities anew, to reimagine these spaces as places where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced.
Since there are thousands of spaces across the country, we decided to start local and contact New York-area galleries and art nonprofits to see which would be closing — museums will be listed in a separate post. Below this list is another listing of those spaces organizing special programming for January 20, the day of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Full article at Hyperallergic.
(image courtesy Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Beth Fiedorek, and Alexandra Leon).
In solidarity with the nationwide #J20 movement, students at CalArts in Southern California are organizing a walkout “against the president of Donald J. Trump on inauguration day, January 20,” in their words.
Organized by students Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Beth Fiedorek, and Alexandra Leon, the event is slated to take place at noon local time. The official flyer includes the #J20 Art Strike statement that was released last week. CalArts is considered one of the leading art schools in the country, if not the world.
Hyperallergic reached out to the organizers to understand their motivation for the action. “Organizing around J20 at CalArts was catalyzed by that particular reaction that occurs to political angst when it meets a vacuum,” Fiedorek and Leon told Hyperallergic.
Full article at Hyperallergic.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Scott Heppell, File.
Less than a week ago, Trump, via his ‘team’ announced there would be no new foreign deals, in an attempt to quiet critics who keep noting he will not deal with his conflicts of interest. It was also stated that all pending deals would be off the table. Naturally, it didn’t take long for Trump to blithely break his word, which is utterly worthless. As usual, Trump found a way to skate around his statements, and he’s busy sliming over Scotland once again.
A multi-million dollar expansion of President-elect Donald Trump’s golf resort in Scotland is reportedly underway — less than a week after Trump’s attorney told reporters that the president-elect had, in an effort to distance himself from conflicts of interests with regards to his businesses, “ordered that all pending deals be terminated.”
According to the Guardian, which first reported the story on Sunday, the Trump Organization is moving forward with a plan to greatly expand the president-elect’s Trump International Golf Course Scotland, located in Aberdeenshire. The plans include construction of another 18-hole golf course, a new 450-room five-star hotel, a timeshare complex, and a private housing estate. The expansion would greatly increase the value of the property to the Trump Organization, according to the Guardian’s report.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization told the Guardian that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction” and therefore the Trump Organization plans to proceed with the deal, despite Trump’s assertion that he would no longer pursue foreign investments relating to his company.
I doubt the residents of Balmedie, Scotland are pleased by this move. If you don’t know why Trump is almost universally loathed and reviled by residents of Scotland, have a read. Then you can start wondering which parts of uStates are going to get smothered under the same Trump slime.
Elizabeth Warren speaks to reporters at MLK Breakfast in Boston (Gintautas Dumcius/Twitter).
Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke out on behalf of Rep. John Lewis, and normally I’d be fine with that, but on reading, there was a howling screech of brakes in the brain:
“Donald Trump hasn’t put his life on the line for anyone except Donald Trump,” Warren said. “John Lewis has earned the right to raise questions about [election] legitimacy.
“Earned the right.” No. No, no, no. This is a very bad sign of just how quickly fascist shit was normalised. Since when does anyone have to earn the right to criticize government? If that was the case, all those yapping republicans would have had to shut up over the last eight years. Not only that, but with the electoral college clusterfuck, the casual dismissal of 3 million votes, and all the highly questionable activities in Russia, who the hell wouldn’t be raising questions about the legitimacy of the election? (Not counting Trumpoids, these are not thinking people.) Rep. Lewis is absolutely right in raising questions, someone has to have the courage to do it. That said, as a citizen of this country, he has every right to ask all the questions he likes, this is not something which needs to be earned. Rep. Lewis is far from alone in raising these questions too.
I imagine Sen. Warren was trying to emphasize Rep. Lewis’s integrity and achievements, but this was not done well. We all need to take care of how we express ourselves, and to make sure we are not finding our language tumbling down the slippery slide of fascism.
The Sunday Herald, Scotland.
President Trump: The Inauguration.
4pm, BBC One/ STV.After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive, and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the “What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War” setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build and ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.
A standing ovation to the writers at Scotland’s The Sunday Herald.
Via Raw Story.
