The events of the last few days show why many conservatives could never support Trump in the recent election.
1. Much of the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have now been turned into cheerleaders and apologists for an amoral and unprincipled madman.
2. Trump has revoked the rules for civilized debate and the reliance on facts and objective truth. In the future, whenever we complain that a Democrat is lying or distorting, Trump is going to be thrown back in our faces.
3. Young people who are just starting to follow politics are being taught that the Republican Party is the party of lies and idiocy.
“House Republicans on Monday released long-anticipated legislation to supplant the Affordable Care Act with a more conservative vision for the nation’s health-care system, replacing federal insurance subsidies with a new form of individual tax credits and grants to help states shape their own policies.
Under two bills drafted by separate House committees, the government would no longer penalize Americans for failing to have health insurance but would try to encourage people to maintain coverage by allowing insurers to impose a surcharge of 30 percent for those who have a gap between health plans.
The legislation would preserve two of the most popular features of the 2010 health-care law, letting young adults stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26 and forbidding insurers to deny coverage or charge more to people with preexisting medical problems. It would also target Planned Parenthood, rendering the women’s health organization ineligible for Medicaid reimbursements or federal family planning grants — a key priority for antiabortion groups.”
———————–
“A handful of House conservatives on Monday evening criticized GOP leadership’s newly released Obamacare replacement bill, foreshadowing trouble for the repeal effort even after leaders tried to assuage the far-right.
Some House Freedom Caucus members dismissed the bill as creating a new “entitlement program” by offering health care tax credits to low-income Americans. A Republican Study Committee memo sent to chiefs of staff, obtained by POLITICO, echoed those comments and blasted the bill’s continuation of the Medicaid expansion for three years.
“This is Obamacare by a different form,” former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO. “They’re still keeping the taxes in place and Medicaid expansion, and they’re starting a new entitlement.”
Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat (R-Va.) piled on, telling POLITICO he’d vote against it in its current form because “the bill maintains many of the federal features including a new entitlement program as well as most of the insurance regulations.”
“Now [they] are saying we’re going to do repeal and replace but the bill does nothing of the sort,” he said. “[Speaker] Paul Ryan has always said the entire rationale for this bill is to bend the cost curve down, and so far I have seen no evidence that this bill will bring the cost curve down.””
—————————-
But… but… Haven’t you heard, Ryan’s a policy wonk, or something…. 🙄
“In releasing their healthcare plan on Monday, House Republican leaders sent a signal loud and clear: liberalism has already won.
Barring radical changes, Republicans will not be passing a bill that ushers in a new era of market-based healthcare. In reality, the GOP will either be passing legislation that rests on the same philosophical premise as Obamacare, or will pass nothing at all, and thus keep Obamacare itself in place.”
————-
“Supporters of the bill could argue that it does make changes to Obamacare – repealing taxes, reducing spending and scaling back some mandates and regulations. There are even a few areas in which one could argue the bill moves health policy in a more conservative direction relative to the pre-Obamacare status quo. It provides for expanded health savings accounts and, though it would spend more money than otherwise would have been the case before Obamacare, it would overhaul Medicaid into a program in which states are given a per capita grant and provided the flexibility to run their own programs.
But at the same time, the GOP bill preserves much of the regulatory structure of Obamacare; leaves the bias in favor of employer healthcare largely intact, replaces Obamacare’s subsidies with a different subsidy scheme, and still supports higher spending for Medicaid relative to what was the case before Obamacare.
Ultimately, it doesn’t do much to foster the development of a free market system. Under GOPcare, individuals would not be able to take insurance with them from job to job, because tax credits would not be available to people who have an offer of job-based insurance. They would not be able to purchase whatever plan they want, because the federal government will still be dictating what has to be in insurance policies, making insurance more expensive then it needs to be. If this bill passes, everybody would have to get their insurance either through government, their employer via tax subsidy, or be left to purchase government-designed health policies using federal subsidies.”
“A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, “would rock the technology world”, the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in “false flag” cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks’ source notes that it “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
“With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, “CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE”
———————-
Your Conspiracy Theory of the Day.
It’s already been noted that Trump, Spicer, and Bannon all use Samsungs, TV and phones, in the White House. You can see them in the background of Trump shots.
“Some schools across the country will close on March 8, the same day as the Day Without a Woman March, due to concerns they’ll be short-staffed.
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools in North Carolina will close. Durham Public Schools may close but have not reached a final decision. Chapel Hill-Carrboro Superintendent Jim Causby has decided to make March 8 a teacher workday and students will not have to make up the day:
“The expected absences would make it difficult to teach students on March 8 and to provide essential services including transportation and food service,” the school system said in an emailed statement Thursday.
“Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools values and supports its female employees,” the statement read. “However, the decision to close schools is not an endorsement of the planned demonstration. The decision is made solely to avoid operating school on a day when there are insufficient staff to provide instruction and basic school services.”
————-
“I wonder when parents will cause a ruckus about this, especially if they learn that the woman behind these stupid marches is Rasmea Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist, murderer, and liar:
On November 10, 2014, a federal jury in Detroit returned a guilty verdict against Rasmieh (Rasmea) Yousef Odeh for illegally procuring naturalization by falsely answering questions whether she “ever” had been convicted or imprisoned.
In fact, Rasmea was convicted in 1970 and imprisoned in Israel for 10 years in connection with a 1969 supermarket bombing in Jerusalem in which two university students were killed, and other security offenses including the attempted bombing of the British Consulate.”
————-
On second thought, it’s probably a good idea to keep the kids away from these teachers for as many days as possible.
“President Donald Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.
“I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored,” Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone’s conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.”
——–
“”This is the difference between being correct and right,” Mukasey said. “The president was not correct in saying President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower. However, I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general – at the Justice Department through the FISA court.”
But Binney told Sean Hannity’s radio show earlier Monday, “I think the FISA court’s basically totally irrelevant.”
The judges on the FISA court are “not even concerned, nor are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 12333 collection,” Binney said during the radio interview. “That’s all done outside of the courts. And outside of the Congress.”
Binney told Fox the laws that fall under the FISA court’s jurisdiction are “simply out there for show” and “trying to show that the government is following the law, and being looked at and overseen by the Senate and House intelligence committees and the courts.”
“That’s not the main collection program for NSA,” Binney said.”
AJ, Your witness Bonney left the NSA 16 years ago over policy disagreements. He sounds like a very knowledgeable and unbiased witness. I’m sure he has great first hand knowledge of what has been going on at the NSA recently. He sounds like the type of expert witness that could only be found by a crack journalist like Sean Hannity.
“Of the 144 detainees released under President Obama, the number now confirmed to have rejoined terrorist groups is seven, according to the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The number of detainees released under the Obama administration that intelligence analysts suspect have reengaged in terrorist activities is now 12.
In addition, another former detainee who was released under President George W. Bush is now also suspected of reengaging.
That bring the total to 118 of 676 former prisoners released under both presidents that are now confirmed to be reengaging in terrorism, while another 86 are suspected of doing so.
————–
There’s much the public knows thanks to them. Stuff they have a right to know, like when their govt is using their TV and phones to spy on them without a warrant, or cause. I’d call that a pretty useful public service.
And that’s not even mentioning what they did to Dems and Hillary. 🙂
WikiLeaks and Assange have always been primarily an Anti-American organization. Their promotion of Trump is consistent with their other activities designed to weaken the US.
Wandering Views 
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The events of the last few days show why many conservatives could never support Trump in the recent election.
1. Much of the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have now been turned into cheerleaders and apologists for an amoral and unprincipled madman.
2. Trump has revoked the rules for civilized debate and the reliance on facts and objective truth. In the future, whenever we complain that a Democrat is lying or distorting, Trump is going to be thrown back in our faces.
3. Young people who are just starting to follow politics are being taught that the Republican Party is the party of lies and idiocy.
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Jonah Goldberg was always funnier than Bret Stephens.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So far, Republican failure addressing Obamacare.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The House plan is out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/new-details-emerge-on-gop-plans-to-repeal-and-replace-obamacare/2017/03/06/04751e3e-028f-11e7-ad5b-d22680e18d10_story.html?utm_term=.d9bc49d8190e
“House Republicans on Monday released long-anticipated legislation to supplant the Affordable Care Act with a more conservative vision for the nation’s health-care system, replacing federal insurance subsidies with a new form of individual tax credits and grants to help states shape their own policies.
Under two bills drafted by separate House committees, the government would no longer penalize Americans for failing to have health insurance but would try to encourage people to maintain coverage by allowing insurers to impose a surcharge of 30 percent for those who have a gap between health plans.
The legislation would preserve two of the most popular features of the 2010 health-care law, letting young adults stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26 and forbidding insurers to deny coverage or charge more to people with preexisting medical problems. It would also target Planned Parenthood, rendering the women’s health organization ineligible for Medicaid reimbursements or federal family planning grants — a key priority for antiabortion groups.”
———————–
But conservatives are not fans.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/obamacare-repeal-conservatives-235753
“A handful of House conservatives on Monday evening criticized GOP leadership’s newly released Obamacare replacement bill, foreshadowing trouble for the repeal effort even after leaders tried to assuage the far-right.
Some House Freedom Caucus members dismissed the bill as creating a new “entitlement program” by offering health care tax credits to low-income Americans. A Republican Study Committee memo sent to chiefs of staff, obtained by POLITICO, echoed those comments and blasted the bill’s continuation of the Medicaid expansion for three years.
“This is Obamacare by a different form,” former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO. “They’re still keeping the taxes in place and Medicaid expansion, and they’re starting a new entitlement.”
Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat (R-Va.) piled on, telling POLITICO he’d vote against it in its current form because “the bill maintains many of the federal features including a new entitlement program as well as most of the insurance regulations.”
“Now [they] are saying we’re going to do repeal and replace but the bill does nothing of the sort,” he said. “[Speaker] Paul Ryan has always said the entire rationale for this bill is to bend the cost curve down, and so far I have seen no evidence that this bill will bring the cost curve down.””
—————————-
But… but… Haven’t you heard, Ryan’s a policy wonk, or something…. 🙄
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Fake news has real consequences…
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445548/democrats-unintended-consequences-media-collusion-partisan-overreach
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So once again, Ryan has caved to his inner RINO.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2616636
“In releasing their healthcare plan on Monday, House Republican leaders sent a signal loud and clear: liberalism has already won.
Barring radical changes, Republicans will not be passing a bill that ushers in a new era of market-based healthcare. In reality, the GOP will either be passing legislation that rests on the same philosophical premise as Obamacare, or will pass nothing at all, and thus keep Obamacare itself in place.”
————-
“Supporters of the bill could argue that it does make changes to Obamacare – repealing taxes, reducing spending and scaling back some mandates and regulations. There are even a few areas in which one could argue the bill moves health policy in a more conservative direction relative to the pre-Obamacare status quo. It provides for expanded health savings accounts and, though it would spend more money than otherwise would have been the case before Obamacare, it would overhaul Medicaid into a program in which states are given a per capita grant and provided the flexibility to run their own programs.
But at the same time, the GOP bill preserves much of the regulatory structure of Obamacare; leaves the bias in favor of employer healthcare largely intact, replaces Obamacare’s subsidies with a different subsidy scheme, and still supports higher spending for Medicaid relative to what was the case before Obamacare.
Ultimately, it doesn’t do much to foster the development of a free market system. Under GOPcare, individuals would not be able to take insurance with them from job to job, because tax credits would not be available to people who have an offer of job-based insurance. They would not be able to purchase whatever plan they want, because the federal government will still be dictating what has to be in insurance policies, making insurance more expensive then it needs to be. If this bill passes, everybody would have to get their insurance either through government, their employer via tax subsidy, or be left to purchase government-designed health policies using federal subsidies.”
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Good article, Tychicus. Victor David Hanson is one of my favorite Trumpkins.
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rw: Does that mean that you would edit any of your 8:53pm post from yesterday?
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This just gets more interesting as it goes.
Snowden 2.0 has struck.
We now know thanks to WikiLeaks that the CIA has the capability to hack and make it appear that the Russians did it.
With links galore, which have been strangely absent in the less detailed MSM reports on the matter. Gee, I wonder why?….. 🙄
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-07/wikileaks-hold-press-conference-vault-7-release-8am-eastern
“A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, “would rock the technology world”, the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in “false flag” cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks’ source notes that it “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
“With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding, “CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE”
———————-
Your Conspiracy Theory of the Day.
It’s already been noted that Trump, Spicer, and Bannon all use Samsungs, TV and phones, in the White House. You can see them in the background of Trump shots.
Hmmmmm……. They wouldn’t? Would they? 😨
———————-
Here’s less detail, from USAToday.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wikileaks-says-it-has-published-cia-hacking-codes/ar-AAnYGpS?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=U452DHP
LikeLiked by 1 person
They need a new meme, this one’s busted.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445522/russian-election-hacking-fbi-not-investigating-trump-campaign
“While You Weren’t Looking, the Democrat–Media Election-Hacking Narrative Just Collapsed”
LikeLiked by 2 people
So schools will be shut down in order for teachers to participate in a womens march run by a terrorist and murderer.
And these are the people educating our youth.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/03/day-without-a-woman-march-closing-schools/
“Some schools across the country will close on March 8, the same day as the Day Without a Woman March, due to concerns they’ll be short-staffed.
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools in North Carolina will close. Durham Public Schools may close but have not reached a final decision. Chapel Hill-Carrboro Superintendent Jim Causby has decided to make March 8 a teacher workday and students will not have to make up the day:
“The expected absences would make it difficult to teach students on March 8 and to provide essential services including transportation and food service,” the school system said in an emailed statement Thursday.
“Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools values and supports its female employees,” the statement read. “However, the decision to close schools is not an endorsement of the planned demonstration. The decision is made solely to avoid operating school on a day when there are insufficient staff to provide instruction and basic school services.”
————-
“I wonder when parents will cause a ruckus about this, especially if they learn that the woman behind these stupid marches is Rasmea Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist, murderer, and liar:
On November 10, 2014, a federal jury in Detroit returned a guilty verdict against Rasmieh (Rasmea) Yousef Odeh for illegally procuring naturalization by falsely answering questions whether she “ever” had been convicted or imprisoned.
In fact, Rasmea was convicted in 1970 and imprisoned in Israel for 10 years in connection with a 1969 supermarket bombing in Jerusalem in which two university students were killed, and other security offenses including the attempted bombing of the British Consulate.”
————-
On second thought, it’s probably a good idea to keep the kids away from these teachers for as many days as possible.
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Ryan’s milquetoast, of course, but I will be interested to see how Ted Cruz weighs in on the final version of the GOP health plan.
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Best quote of the day, from the link provided by Tychicus @11:25:
Not ideal, but I’ll take it over the alternative. :–)
LikeLiked by 3 people
Tychicus @12:41, No. That was the edited version.😄
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It just keeps getting worse….
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-03-07/nsa-whistleblower-bill-binney-says-trump-is-absolutely-right-about-wiretap-claims
“President Donald Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.
“I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored,” Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone’s conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.”
——–
“”This is the difference between being correct and right,” Mukasey said. “The president was not correct in saying President Obama ordered a tap on a server in Trump Tower. However, I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general – at the Justice Department through the FISA court.”
But Binney told Sean Hannity’s radio show earlier Monday, “I think the FISA court’s basically totally irrelevant.”
The judges on the FISA court are “not even concerned, nor are they involved in any way with the Executive Order 12333 collection,” Binney said during the radio interview. “That’s all done outside of the courts. And outside of the Congress.”
Binney told Fox the laws that fall under the FISA court’s jurisdiction are “simply out there for show” and “trying to show that the government is following the law, and being looked at and overseen by the Senate and House intelligence committees and the courts.”
“That’s not the main collection program for NSA,” Binney said.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
AJ, Your witness Bonney left the NSA 16 years ago over policy disagreements. He sounds like a very knowledgeable and unbiased witness. I’m sure he has great first hand knowledge of what has been going on at the NSA recently. He sounds like the type of expert witness that could only be found by a crack journalist like Sean Hannity.
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Speaking of Hannity, his hero Julian Asange is back to leaking CIA secrets after having finished his work helping Trump get elected.
https://twitter.com/stephenswsj/status/839162573215920128
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FBI Director James Comey, Senator Tom Cotton and Rep. Jason Chaffetz think Trump is full of bull.
However, that old guy that quit the NSA 16 years ago in a huff says Trump is right.
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Little Bush actually released 113 of the recidivists. Obama released 9. Hire poor Trump an intern to do research.
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Ricky,
Even those numbers are wrong.
But it’s not your fault, the actual numbers are often misreported.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/8/number-obama-released-gitmo-detainees-suspected-re/
“Of the 144 detainees released under President Obama, the number now confirmed to have rejoined terrorist groups is seven, according to the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The number of detainees released under the Obama administration that intelligence analysts suspect have reengaged in terrorist activities is now 12.
In addition, another former detainee who was released under President George W. Bush is now also suspected of reengaging.
That bring the total to 118 of 676 former prisoners released under both presidents that are now confirmed to be reengaging in terrorism, while another 86 are suspected of doing so.
————–
Click to access Summary_of_the_Reengagement_of_Detainees_Formerly_Held_at_GTMO_Ma%204_2016.pdf
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Ricky,
So you’re not a fan of WikiLeaks?
There’s much the public knows thanks to them. Stuff they have a right to know, like when their govt is using their TV and phones to spy on them without a warrant, or cause. I’d call that a pretty useful public service.
And that’s not even mentioning what they did to Dems and Hillary. 🙂
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WikiLeaks and Assange have always been primarily an Anti-American organization. Their promotion of Trump is consistent with their other activities designed to weaken the US.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439766/wait-we-all-trust-julian-assange-now-julian-assange
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