Weekend Reading, 3/25/2015

I was going to title this post "For the bookworms," but what I recommend in this post are not books.  So what would the online equivalent be?

In any case, you could do a lot worse than reading Masha Gessen's article on the normalization of the abnormal, on our everyday thoughts on the unthinkable, on how our minds are trying to cope with the new form of the American government where the incompetent rule, where family members (accountable to no-one) wield the kinds of powers they wield in dictatorships and where every new horror ultimately helps in getting us accustomed to this era of the end of democracy.

Gessen urges that we not follow in Trump's footsteps, that we not decide to fight fake with fake, that we not participate in the death of honest information, "infocide."

Sarah Posner writes about the fornication between Donald J. Trump and the American religious right.  She argues that the white supremacist flavor of the Trump administration does not bother some among the fundamentalists, as it's a return to their roots.  I would add that the religious right is also about the subjugation of women, and Trump's views align with that goal much better than the views of Hillary Clinton.  Still, I lost any remaining  respect I had for the beliefs of those American fundamentalists who voted for Trump.  Pharisees, they are.

 Those two are serious reads.  For something more outrageous and/or silly,  you can learn why the sexuality of women is like spaghetti and the sexuality of men is like waffles, as explained by a Christian sex educator at a school.  Munch, munch. 

Note, by the way, that those terms are justified elsewhere by a pseudo-scientific approach:  Men can compartmentalize sex, women's brains get all mushy like overboiled pasta, and that is not meant to be seen as delicious and appetizing.

Oklahoma Republican lawmaker George Faught, famous for his anti-abortion views,  gives us another frightening religious opinion about reproductive rights:

Asked by fellow state Representative Cory Williams about whether he considered rape to be the “will of God,” Faught boldly, if not necessarily unabashedly, answered in the affirmative.
“Well, you know, if you read the Bible, there’s actually a couple circumstances where that happened,” said Faught. “The Lord uses all circumstances. I mean, you can go down that path, but it’s a reality unfortunately.”
Williams then asked Faught whether he considered incest to be the “will of God” as well.
“Same answer,” said Faught. “Doesn’t deal with this bill.”

As far as I can tell, he has no religious training.

The Gazillion Dollar Question: Who Hated The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)?

The brave new world of Trumpcare must wait a while, because the master of the Art of the Deal failed to get a deal.  Sad!*

The reasons for that failure are many, but one of them surely was the large number of citizens who contacted their representatives in the US Congress and told them they don't like to lose their health insurance benefits.  Politicians worry about getting re-elected.

A recent poll, and an earlier one, tell us that the support for repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a minority position:  Only 17% of those surveyed in that last poll were all gung-ho about the wonderful future of Trumpcare:**

Disapproval of the Republican plan is 56 - 22 percent among men, 56 - 13 percent among women, 54 - 20 percent among white voters, 64 - 10 percent among non-white voters, 80 - 3 percent among Democrats, 58 - 14 percent among independent voters and by margins of 2-1 or more in every age group.

But but but, you might say:  Haven't the Republican politicians ranted and raved about "Obamacare" since it was established?

Indeed, and the support for repeal and replacements is still higher among Republicans.

Still, why would Trump insist that one of the first real moves of his reign would be the killing of the ACA?  Who are in that 17% or so who really want to see the ACA dead?

I couldn't immediately find data on that, but I suspect that it would be the moneyed folks whose taxes pay for some of the ACA.  Those people, of course, run much of the Republican propaganda by paying for it and also, thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, run much of the politics in this country.  Besides, they can afford to pay for their own health care costs out-of-pocket, if necessary, which means that they see the ACA as purely negative and harmful to their interests.

Finally, this clear failure to win by our Dear Leader (who promised that "we" would win so much we'd get tired of it) can also be attributed to earlier ignorance by far too many Americans*** and to that odd incompetence of the Republican Party:  Despite openly hating and criticizing the ACA they had no complete plan ready when the time would be right, but had to scribble up something in a few short weeks, and that something satisfied neither that part of their base which found the replacement not cruel enough nor those which found it too cruel.


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*  The battle may have been won but the war is ongoing.  That means the next step for the Trump administration is to try to make the ACA implode.  Perhaps the website can be made impossible to navigate, perhaps bureaucracy can be increased, perhaps nobody will try to fix any problems.  Wait a few years, and then repeal!  Success and profit.

*  As an aside, have a look at this part of the poll results:

When it is explained that federal funding for Planned Parenthood is used only for non- abortion health issues, American voters oppose cutting federal funding to Planned Parenthood 80 - 14 percent, including 60 - 32 percent among Republicans. In a simple question, without the explanation, voters oppose cutting Planned Parenthood funding 61 - 33 percent.

Voters also oppose 74 - 22 percent, including 54 - 39 percent among Republicans, cutting federal funding for Medicaid. 

Wow and wow.  Most Americans don't want to de-fund Planned Parenthood  or starve Medicaid to death, assuming the poll is representative.  We would never know this if we got our information from Fox News, Breitbart.com and other sites in the conservative media buble.

**  From last month:

A sizable minority of Americans don’t understand that Obamacare is just another name for the Affordable Care Act.

This finding, from a poll by Morning Consult, illustrates the extent of public confusion over a health law that President Trump and Republicans in Congress hope to repeal.

In the survey, 35 percent of respondents said either they thought Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act were different policies (17 percent) or didn’t know if they were the same or different (18 percent). This confusion was more pronounced among people 18 to 29 and those who earn less than $50,000 — two groups that could be significantly affected by repeal.

 

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words. Or Who Needs Mammograms.

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say*.  This one is about today's meeting between our Dear Leader and the so-called Freedom Caucus, an arch-conservative wing of the Republican Party which wants freedom for themselves only.  A central topic in the meeting:

Whether or not maternity care and mammograms should be considered "essential" treatments covered by all health insurance policies under the Republican proposal. ("I wouldn't want to lose my mammograms," quipped Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who supports scrapping the requirement. He apologized.)

The probability of breast cancer in that particular room is, of course, lower than the probability of prostate cancer.

It would be hard to find a better example why diversity in the corridors of power is important.

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* We are so inured seeing men as the default humanity that a picture of a large demonstration or protest in the Middle East, say,  showing nothing but men is routinely captured as "people protesting/demonstrating."  And we are certainly extremely accustomed to seeing only men in most pictures depicting people in power, with a few exceptions (such as Angela Merkel) who stick out because of being exceptions.

In the US this homogeneity also has a racial and ethnic characteristic.  But women tend to be absent in most countries of the world when power is depicted.  A few examples:

From China:

And from Saudi Arabia (about the founding of an organization to help young girls be their best):

How The Conservatives View Childbirth And Its Costs: Lessons from the Trump Care Debacle

The approach conservatives of all stripes take when it comes to having children is extremely weird, and I do mean extremely.  They interpret childbirth from three utterly and completely different angles:

1.  The race and religious wars angle, which demands that white and/or Christian women maximize the number of children they can possibly have.  The Quiverfull movement is an example of that line of thinking in the religious context:  Children are arrows in the man's quiver, of course prepared by their women.  Women are part of the war artillery and must keep shooting out babies. 

2.  The forced-birth angle, which values the lives of people extremely highly before they are born but pretty much not at all after they are born.  Because of the immense value of fetuses, women, in general, have the value of containers for the fetuses.  Decisions about children, before birth, are socialized.  Decisions about children, after birth, are privatized, and even that is viewed narrowly as the obligation of only their mothers.

3.  The children as ice-cream cones angle.  This is the one which comes up whenever people debate whether firms should provide maternity leave for childbirth or paid parental leave.  It also crops up whenever there's discussion about how the reason why women earn less, on average, is related to their childbirth and child-rearing duties.

In those situations you will hear conservatives pipe up about "choice."  If women "choose" to have children, well, they must expect to bear the costs of that choice all alone, just as others are not expected to pay for their BMWs.  From this angle childbirth is something private,  like buying a new pair of shoes, something which has nothing to do with the reproduction of the next generation.  There's certainly no need for the employers to coddle women by providing them with maternity benefits!  What are they going to demand next?  BMW vacations?

From that third angle, children are conceived through parthenogenesis and all costs and burdens of childbearing should fall on only their mothers.

I may have exaggerated a little here, but not a lot.  The basic rule in all of them is an attempt to socialize the benefits of children (as the conservatives view them) but to privatize all costs of children.  The women giving birth are regarded as the only people truly responsible for the costs of children.

The most recent example of 3.  can be found in what White House secretary, Sean Spacer, said:

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Thursday defended a newly promised provision in the GOP plan to repeal and replace Obamacare by saying that older men "can generally say" they will not need coverage for maternity care.

Republican leaders on Thursday signaled to hardline conservatives that the Senate may add a provision to the bill gutting Obamacare's Essential Health Benefits (EHB) rule, which mandates that insurance plans cover a basic minimum of health care services, including maternity care.
"A lot of people buy insurance not knowing what they're going to need," RealClearPolitics reporter Alexis Simendinger noted to Spicer during his daily briefing.
"Well, I think if you're an older man you can generally say you're not going to need maternity care," Spicer replied.

Such fun.  Unless that older man in the example is one of us divines, he was once born and needed obstetric care.


P.S.  If you are interested in knowing the parts of health insurance that I am never going to use, check out my two earlier posts on this topic.

The Neil Gorsuch Hearings

They should not have taken place at all, given that Merrick Garland was appointed by a lawfully elected president and never got a hearing.  If being a lame duck president is a valid excuse for something like that, then surely we have much  more valid excuses for refusing to give Gorsuch a hearing, what with the Russian connections, under investigation, and the possibility that Vlad "the Impaler" Putin put a finger or two on those election scales?  Whose candidate IS Gorsuch, after all? 

Well, we know that he is the candidate of the corporations and the extremely wealth handful of extremist right-wing families which fund most of our politics now:  The Koch brothers, the Mercer son-and-daughter, and so on.  But did any foreign power affect that particular choice?

That's preposterous from me.  Of course it is, but we live in an era where sarcasm is impossible, because what is happening is so much more extreme than most things I can create in the sick part of my brain.

Back to Gorsuch.  He is also the candidate of the forced-birthers, of course.  Then there are the questions how he views the rights of pregnant women, based on a law class he held.

One of the students who were present in that class, Jennifer R. Sisk, stated this:

H]e asked the class to raise their hands if they knew of a female who had used a company to get maternity benefits and then left right after having a baby. Judge Gorsuch specifically targeted females and maternity leave. This question was not about parents or men shifting priorities after having children. It was solely focused on women using their companies.

I do not remember if any students raised their hands, but it was no more than a small handful of students. At that point Judge Gorsuch became more animated saying “C’mon guys.” He then announced that all our hands should be raised because “many” women use their companies for maternity benefits and then leave the company after the baby is born.

When one student objected that employers can’t ask about family plans during a job interview, Sisk said Gorsuch denied that this was true: “Instead Judge Gorsuch told the class that not only could a future employer ask female interviewees about their pregnancy and family plans, companies must ask females about their family and pregnancy plans to protect the company.”

The university later confirmed to the committee that Sisk had raised these objections with them shortly after the class discussion.

Gorsuch, when asked about this incident at the hearings, insisted that his point had been the reverse:

Instead, Gorsuch said, he asked for a show of hands of how many students had been asked “an inappropriate question about your family planning” in an employment context.

“I am shocked every year how many young women raise their hand,” Gorsuch said.

Gorsuch also dodged questions from Durbin about whether he thinks it’s legally inappropriate to ask questions like these, and whether a company should be able to take a woman’s family choices into consideration during the hiring process.

Nor did Gorsuch address Sisk’s claims that he had told his law class companies must ask women these questions out of protection.

Hmm.  Won't it be wonderful when Gorsuch removes his hearings-mask and reveals his true opinions about whose side he might take in a legal case where the two sides are corporations and pregnant women?  I can hardly wait, sigh.

P.S.  I have earlier written about  parental leaves as a reason for firms not to hire young women.  Some of those problems could be removed or reduced by requiring new fathers to take some parental leave, too, and in those countries where the employers pay some of the costs of parental leave, requiring that the employers of the man who fathered the child chip in half the money.







  

Comey, Redux

This matters:

It's hard to think of another explanation for the different treatment of the Republican and Democratic emails except for Putin's desire to see Republicans and Trump in power.  His desire not to see Democrats and H. Clinton in power boils down to the same thing.

I have sometimes wondered how Comey sleeps at night, given that at least one analysis suggests that he gave us Trump by insinuating some dreadful law-breaking on Hillary Clinton's part, only about a week before the elections.

But then I remember that if one feels no particular love for democracy or peace or suffers from any other soppy values, well, that one can probably sleep sweetly.
And imagine his fame if Trump starts WWIII!  Comey would be in every history book or their future equivalents, assuming there would be a future.  Other than for cockroaches.

About Draining That Swamp...

Of lobbyists, which our Dear Leader promised to do:

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a Trump adviser, said the president needs to dispatch political allies to the agencies to monitor a bureaucracy that’s being targeted for reduction.
“If you drain the swamp, you better have someone who watches over the alligators,” Gingrich said. “These people are actively trying to undermine the new government. And they think it’s their moral obligation to do so.”
At the Transportation Department, former Pennsylvania lobbyist Anthony Pugliese shuttles back and forth between the White House and DOT headquarters on New Jersey Avenue SE, according to an agency official. His office is just 20 paces from Secretary Elaine Chao’s, the official said.

And

Many of the senior advisers lack expertise in their agency’s mission and came from the business or political world. They include Trump campaign aides, former Republican National Committee staffers, conservative activists, lobbyists and entrepreneurs.

Bolds are mine.

The linked article is not about draining the swamp, though of course Newt must  mention the alligators!  It's about having political aides patrol the various departments to see if everybody sings from the same songbook and if everybody is faithful to the Dear Leader!

Still, I found the bits I quote fun.  As fun as the way Trump has leapt into bed with the Wall Street while accusing Hillary Clinton of that all through his campaign.  Well, the pre-election part of his campaign.  He keeps having victory rallies even now...

Saturday Snacks for Thought: On Citizens United, Religious Fertility Wars and Some Fun

1.  Jane Mayer has written an excellent and important piece about the longer-term consequences of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision which gave every dollar the same political power.  Most of us could foresee what that might mean:  The very rich can now legally buy almost any administration they wish and create almost any laws they want.

And Mayer shows us, very carefully, how that led to Trump and the large number of white supremacists and possibly even a Nazi or two in his administration.  These shadowy super-billionaires Mayer writes about, using Mercer as her example, are the true deep "state" in the United States, our true overlords.

Granted, we still have voting for the hoi polloi, though it's more and more restricted for the black Americans every day.  But if you think of voting somewhat like picking a meal in a restaurant, remember that it's people like Mercer who wrote the menu, who decided what dishes should be on it.

A Question to My Readers

What kind of posts would you like more of on this here blog?  The Trump era creates an abundance of possibilities, and I find it hard to know where to focus my endeavors.

Merkel's Girl Cooties And Our Dear Leader

This is deliciously funny:  Our Dear Leader had to sit down with a female leader, a woman not picked to be near her merely based on her looks or genetic kinship, and he seems to have refused to shake hands with her.  It's those girl cooties.  They might infect this germophobic leader!

Or it could be that Trump is following the most conservative rules about men not being allowed to shake hands with women in some interpretations of Islam, because sexual desire might then result in wanton behavior!

Just kidding.  But here's a picture of the two world leaders:  One the new leader of the liberal West*, the other the new leader of pre-fascist West:

I love the body language in the picture.  The way Trump tries not to connect with Merkel, the way she is turned to him while he tries to turn away and narrow his body so that there would be no possible contact.  And yes, of course the picture might be those weird ones where someone is caught in mid-action and looks nothing like what actually happened.

But then there is this:

The body language was at times awkward. In an earlier photo opportunity in the White House, Mrs Merkel asked him quietly: "Do you want a handshake?" He looked forwards with his hands clasped and did not reply.

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*  The term "liberal" is not used here in its common American meaning.  Merkel is politically fairly conservative, something like a Blue Dog Democrat in the states.

The Vetting of Sebastian Gorka

I followed the Trump campaigns and rallies fairly closely last fall, but I never saw the coming of the Breitbart reign or the direct influence of so many white male supremacists in the administration.  It's as if they skittered and crawled out of the woodwork after Trump's victory, and suddenly we have the apocalyptic (in the sense of wanting one) Stephen Bannon as Trump's chief strategist.

But he is not the only extremist right-wing pseudo-Christianist white patriarch in the Trump administration.  Sebastian Gorka is most likely another one, maybe even a neo-Nazi.

You can decide for yourself by reading this interesting series of articles, in the order I link to them:  Begin with this one, read Gorka's answer and then the response from the author(s) of the original piece.  

An Atlantic article suggests that Gorka's presence in the administration at least demonstrates poor White House vetting skills.  The alternative explanation is, of course, that Gorka is exactly the kind of person Trump wants in his team.  Both are troubling possibilities.

So Trump lifted a rock and all sorts critters crawled out from under it.  This has echoes in the recent apparent rise in hate crimes, including the anti-Jewish and anti-Muslims threats.  Or so I believe.  It's as if such crimes are now more acceptable.  After all, the administration itself doesn't seem to mind.

Parsing Mulvaney on The Budget: Hard And Stupid Words

Mick Mulvaney, Trump's budget director, speaks like a manly man's man:*

“It is not a soft-power budget,” Mulvaney explained. “This is a hard-power budget, and that was done intentionally. The president very clearly wants to send a message to our allies and to our potential adversaries that this is a strong-power administration.”

STEM fields used to be called hard sciences, humanities soft.  The terms were intended to be derogatory to humanities, but they also captured a gendered flavor, given that the researchers in the former were mostly men and many in the latter were women:  Real men get hard!  Real men do hard stuff!  Girly men and girls can't get hard and can't get clear results.

Even if you don't agree with that comparison, it's exceedingly clear that Mulvaney talks war-talk.  Trump wants to show the world that the US military spending is insufficient, because it only amounts to spending as much as the next seven countries put together.

That's not hard enough!  Let's spend more than the rest of the whole world!  Let's spend double that!

For what purpose?  To protect Americans from death?  The same budget tells us that Trump does not want to do that.  After all, he is cutting medical research and scientific research, the kind of basic research which corporations cannot perform, the kind of basic research that might find cures for all the current killer diseases.

And he is cutting help to the poor.  That those cuts would also apply to Meals On Wheels**, a program which helps some frail elderly stay longer at home and provides them with proper nutrition,  is not surprising, given what Trump's health insurance plan taught us about the age of those most likely to be unable to afford insurance in it: Older individuals.  But do note that this "hard-power," "strong-power" budget plans to pay for more military might by skinning the weakest, oldest and frailest among us.

Mulvaney explained how the programs and contributions to be guillotined were picked:

White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney on Thursday defended the Trump administration’s proposed deep cuts to social welfare programs such as Meals on Wheels and after-school services, saying it’s unfair to taxpayers if such programs don’t show hard results.
“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney said during the White House news briefing, adding that “we're not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”

Did this man's brains leak out without him noticing?  And notice that "hard" word again:  Programs must show hard results.

How has the Meals on Wheels program failed to deliver?  Do the volunteers who transport the meals leave them somewhere en route?  Do they smear them on the walls or poison them with arsenic or what?

What are the hard results Mulvaney expects from a program such as after-school services or Meals on Wheels?  Should an elderly person sip the hot soup, suddenly rise up and do thirty pushups?  Should an after-school service produce PhDs from eight-year old children?  What is sufficiently hard or erect to qualify?

And if we use hard results to determine the budgetary allocations, it might be worth pointing*** that the military made a mess out of Iraq, that it lost the Vietnam war and that the US forces are still in Afghanistan which has not turned into a progressive paradise of equal rights for all.

This budget proposal is not going to be the final budget.  But it tells us what Trump has in his mind.  And that, my friends, is frightening.


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* Among the white supremacists and misogynists,  men who are viewed as not dominant and insufficiently oppressing are called cucks or beta males.  I'm sure the Alt Right and Bannon love this budget proposal.

**  The actual cut in federal aid are a fairly small percentage of the total funding of this nonprofit program and would not kill the program.  But clearly Trump's budget-makers never even noticed that the budget condoned the faster killing of frail elderly homebound individuals.

***  The blame belongs to those who make the decisions, of course.  My point is that the way Mulvaney explains what is to be cut could not explain why military spending is to be increased so much.  In a rational reality, that is.

The Trump Budget: Good News For All Sadists!

Now this budget is fun if you are a sadist.  It drowns the military in money so as to enable it to kill more people and it also withdraws money from those who are the weakest, frailest and the poorest among us.

It slashes the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) thereby  revving up the speed with which climate change will make certain parts of the world inhabitable.  That, in turn, will increase the floods of migrants to countries which still remain habitable.  But the budget then cuts US assistance to refugee organizations as well as general foreign aid, including the Food For Peace program which provides food assistance in emergencies.

The State Department will also find its budget severely cut. This decreases the money available for diplomacy, but who needs diplomats when we have guns and will buy many, many more?

It kills the National Endowments for Arts and Humanities, because only the coastal latte-sipping liberals need culture which, in any case, is girly stuff.*  Guns are guy stuff.

The poor get to bear much of the burden of making the military sated with money:

While border guards will have more prisons to lock up unauthorized immigrants, rural communities will lose grants and loans to build water facilities and financing to keep their airports open. As charter schools are bolstered, after-school and summer programs will lose money. As law enforcement agents get more help to fight the opioid epidemic, lower-income Americans will have less access to home energy aid, job training programs and legal services.

And

Trump has unveiled a budget that would slash or abolish programs that have provided low-income Americans with help on virtually all fronts, including affordable housing, banking, weatherizing homes, job training, paying home heating oil bills, and obtaining legal counsel in civil matters.

During the presidential campaign last year, Trump vowed that the solution to poverty was giving poor people incentives to work. But most of the proposed cuts in his budget target programs designed to help the working poor, as well as those who are jobless, cope.

Ironically, the white working class voters in rural areas, deemed by some to have been the group which won the election for Trump** are among the ones who are going to be whipped by this budget:

The White House budget cuts will fall hardest on the rural and small town communities that Trump won, where one in three people are living paycheck to paycheck — a rate that is 24 percent higher than in urban counties, according to a new analysis by the center.

Perhaps they will not be too unhappy, given that the urban poor appear to be the special focus for this budgetary sadism:

The administration’s reforms include eliminating funding for a $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program, one of the longest continuously run HUD programs that’s been in existence since 1974.

The program provides cities with money to address a range of community development needs such as affordable housing, rehabilitating homes in neighborhoods hardest hit by foreclosures, and preventing or eliminating slums and community blight. It also provides funding for Meals on Wheels, a national nonprofit that delivers food to homebound seniors.

Robert Rector, a senior fellow who focuses on welfare at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, calls the community block grants a “slush fund for urban government.”

During his campaigning Trump repeatedly promised to eradicate all poverty from low-income urban areas.  Is this the way he plans to achieve that?

The budget is unlikely to pass in its present form.  But it's a wake-up call for the new Trump Reich rules, a speech clearer than most of Trump's boasts on how he views the future of this country.

There will be a lot of aggressive posturing, money will not be spent on the poor but on a giant wall against the foreign poor.  Money will be spent on guns, not on plowshares, and money will be spent on preparing for war, not on preventing it.



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* Republicans have always wanted to kill these, always.  And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to get less money, too, despite its sharp recent tilt toward a conservative bias.

It's worth noting here that if Trump didn't take a Florida vacation most every weekend, we could afford to keep the National Endowments for Arts and Humanities.  But as I noted in the text, culture is girly crap.

** In the sense of the straw that broke the camel's back.  The vast majority of Trump voters were the same Republicans who voted for Romney in 2012, and we should not forget this.

Still, Trump is not honoring some of his promises that he gave at the rallies where he was adulated:

Parts of the budget proposal also appear to contradict Trump’s agenda. Trump has said he wants to eliminate all disease, but the budget chops funding for the National Institutes of Health by $5.8 billion, or close to 20 percent. He has said he wants to create a $1 trillion infrastructure program, but the proposal would eliminate a Transportation Department program that funds nearly $500 million in road projects. It does not include new funding amounts or a tax mechanism for Trump’s infrastructure program, postponing those decisions.

On Those Lower Insurance Prices After 2020 in (T)Rumpcare

The one thing Republican politicians like about the recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of their replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act (ACA)  is that the CBO estimates a drop in the price of individual insurance after 2020.* 

The premia will rise until then, because of the predicted exit of many young-and-healthy individuals from the insurance market.  Under the ACA, the individual mandate demanded that they, too, should buy coverage, but under the (T)Rumpcare that mandate is removed.  The loss of many young, low-risk individuals will raise the average premia for those who remain in the individual market.

So what changes after 2020, to cause a drop in the price of individual insurance? 

Is it the greater price competition in the wonderful "free" markets, as conservatives usually argue?  This

House Speaker Paul Ryan pressed that point in a series of appearances Monday night, suggesting that the budget office had found that the House bill would increase choice and competition and lead to lower prices. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, issued a statement saying, “The Congressional Budget Office agrees that the American Health Care Act will ultimately lower premiums and increase access to care.”

Sadly, no.  This is how the CBO explains its conclusions about the dropping price of insurance:

Starting in 2020, the increase in average premiums from repealing the individual mandate penalties would be more than offset by the combination of several factors that would decrease those premiums: grants to states from the Patient and State Stability Fund (which CBO and JCT expect to largely be used by states to limit the costs to insurers of enrollees with very high claims); the elimination of the requirement for insurers to offer plans covering certain percentages of the cost of covered benefits; and a younger mix of enrollees. By 2026, average premiums for single policyholders in the nongroup market under the legislation would be roughly 10 percent lower than under current law, CBO and JCT estimate.

That quote gives three reasons for the decrease in average premia.  Let's look at them in a reverse order:

First, the CBO expects the enrollees to be younger, on average.  Now why would that be the case?  It's not because the US demographics are starting to tilt that way.  Rather, it will be a direct consequence of many older people exiting the insurance market, because they can no longer afford the premia.  Note that the tax credits (which would replace the income-tied subsidies in the ACA) are twice as large for a sixty-year old than a twenty-year old but the premium that can be charged to the former are allowed to be five times as large as the premium charged to the latter.  This combination can be devastating for poorer older individuals:

The C.B.O. estimates that the price an average 64-year-old earning $26,500 would need to pay after using a subsidy would increase from $1,700 under Obamacare to $14,600 under the Republican plan.

Note that the exit of the older, poorer and sicker individuals from the market is not because of greater consumer choice or greater competition or greater efficiency in the insurance marketplace.  It's a direct consequence of increasing the pool of the uninsured, and in one sense the price of insurance to that group is extremely high, so high that they are not buying any coverage.

The second reason for the CBO to predict lower premia after 2020 isn't about consumer choice, greater competition or greater efficiency, either, unless we interpret those concepts in an unusual way. 

That reason is that insurers no longer need to offer plans which cover a certain percentage of the cost of the covered benefits, which means that consumers get less coverage for any given level of premia.

Here's the 60,000 dollar question for you:  Has the price of insurance dropped if the bundle you are buying costs less, but also has a lot less insurance in it?  How can you tell?**

Finally, the CBO points out that the Republicans in power plan to give states grants from the Patient and State Stability Fund, and those grants can be used to pay for the care of high-risk consumers and/or for the subsidies of poor consumers.  They would reduce the average price of insurance in the individual market, true.  But Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times suggests that the Patient and State Stability Fund is set to expire after 2026.  Oddly enough, the CBO evaluation period conveniently ends at that year, too.

Thus, it's possible that these particular grants to the states would no longer help keeping the premia down in, say, 2027.

So what are we to conclude from all this? 

That none of the predicted decreases in the price of individual insurance are caused by greater price competition which then produces greater efficiency.  Instead, average premia might drop because many higher-risk older individuals become unemployed (while desperately counting days to the start of Medicare coverage), because the contents of some insurance bundles are watered down, and because of some price subsidies for high-risk and/or poorer individuals.

It's also worth reiterating that the average drop in the price of individual insurance doesn't benefit everyone equally.  Rather, the people most likely to see that drop are the ones least likely to need health care (the young low-risk consumers):

By 2026, the budget office projected, “premiums in the nongroup market would be 20 percent to 25 percent lower for a 21-year-old and 8 percent to 10 percent lower for a 40-year-old — but 20 percent to 25 percent higher for a 64-year-old.” 

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* IHA=I Hate Acronyms
 

Nobody Could Have Predicted! That (T)Rumpcare Would Result in Many More Uninsured!

All the fuss over whether it's 24 million people who will lose their health insurance under (T)Rumpcare or 26 million!  I know that our Dear Leader has promised all Murkans almost free health care with the most excellent quality, and I know that he is still promising great price reductions in a few years.

But our Dear Leader lives in the Alternative Reality where his job is to be adulated and that happens best when he promises people the impossible.

From this reality it was certain-sure from day one that the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would lead to many people losing either some or all of their health insurance. 

After all, there is no other way for the Republicans to achieve the real goal of that repeal and replacement.  This:

Two of the biggest tax cuts in Republican proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act would deliver roughly $157 billion over the coming decade to those with incomes of $1 million or more, according to a congressional analysis.
The assessment was made by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel that provides research on tax issues.
It is not unusual for tax cuts to benefit mostly the wealthiest, but still save some money for a majority of Americans. But the benefits of these reductions would be aimed squarely at the top.

And once we take all that money out of the system, the obvious result will be less coverage for someone.  If the (T)Rumpcare plan passes, it's going to be the poorer consumers who will suffer and also those older consumers whose premia might rise so much that they would drop out of the market altogether.  Ironically, the average price of insurance could then drop, given that the group of older consumers with their higher-than-average health risks has shrunk.

More about that dropping price in my next post!

On Nude Photos of Women, Name Swapping at Work, Women's Repro Rights Endangered by Religions And Race Wars, and Female Power

An additional cost the Trump Reich has placed on us is that it sucks all the air and energy out of the coverage of any other topic.  Democracy is imperiled!  How can I sleep or make love or eat chocolate or write about women's issues?
Well, here's a summary on many women's issues I have collected while hyperventilating because democracy is at risk and because Trump wants to speed up climate change. But these other things are happening, too:

A Blogger Mystery

One evening this week my blog received 80,000 hits from Romania.  In one hour.  I'm not a celebrity in Romania (yet), and those hits have nothing to do with who might read this measly blog.  I also often receive similar "attacks" from China and Russia, though Romania really is the most insistent, the most stubborn and the most faithful.

Of course I want to know what all this means.  My working theory is that the Blogger itself is facing giant DoS attacks, and somehow allocates all that useless traffic across lots of blogs so as to defeat the attacks.  A bookkeeping maneuver, in other words.

But I could be wrong. 

What Trump-Voters Are Getting From Our Dear Leader And Other Political News

1.  I had a post written on what gifts Trump and the Republican Congress are giving to some in their base when it comes to the repeal and replacement of Obamacare (aka the ACA), but then I found that post already written, and better:

Take it altogether, and a sort of ironic picture unfolds. “The typical person who is going to lose the most in this scenario is a lower-income person in their 60s who lives in a rural area, where the person who gains is the affluent millennial urbanite,” Cynthia Cox, an analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. In other words, the Republican plan doesn't just screw the poor. It screws Trump voters in particular, while giving a hand to a lot of young people who probably voted for Hillary. Go figure.

Paul Ryan is also a gift that keeps on giving wonderful presents to the middle-income-class Trump voters:

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday said he’s “not that concerned” about criticism of the wealthy getting a tax cut under the GOP’s new health care bill.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Ryan it’s “kind of a hard sell” to argue the wealthy should get a tax cut under the American Health Care Act. Ryan brushed it off.
“I’m not that concerned about it, because we said we were going to repeal all the Obamacare taxes,” Ryan said. “This is one of the Obamacare taxes.”

He's not that concerned, because canceling those taxes was the whole point of the Republican campaign against the ACA.  And neither is he concerned that the way to fund those tax breaks is by taking it off the skins of the poor.

2.  I haven't written much on all those intricate Russian connections to the Trump campaign, because that is specialist work.  But it all sounds like one of the John le Carre spy novels, except with idiots.

And Here We Go Again! Why Should Guys Pay For Prenatal Care in Insurance?

I love this idiocy, I love it.  My earlier explanation for the many reasons why insurance makes us pay for all sorts of stuff we ourselves don't consume can be found in this earlier post.

But Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) didn't read that post, sadly, and so he put his big, hairy foot in his mouth:

The law also required plans to cover pregnancy and childbirth. That’s where the fireworks started in the Energy and Commerce Committee.
“What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?” Doyle asked Shimkus, using the formal parlance of congressional committees.
“What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus said.
At that point, one could hear the room start to stir.
“I’m just . . . is that not correct?” Shimkus said. “And should they?”

As I wrote before, I will from now on refuse to pay for any treatment that I would never need:  Prostate cancer, testicular cancer, male impotence treatments, vasectomies,  male hair loss treatments, the treatment of genetic diseases that can't be found in my genetic inheritance, treatment for any accidents caused by hazardous sports I don't participate in (skydiving, water-skiing, mountaineering, racing), the treatment of any tropical disease (to be changed if I myself choose to travel in the tropics) etc..

And as I wrote before, prenatal treatment should probably be paid by the child who is going to be born, because most of it is to benefit that child.  Why would the women be lumbered with all of it?  Since the child cannot pay yet, why shouldn't the man whose child it will be also pay for that treatment?  Parents, in general, are supposed to support their children financially.

Rep. Shimkus was never born, of course.  He was formed from the primordial slime by some chance event, I assume.

But mostly I love Shimkus's statement because it is such a clear example of how the right thinks about reproduction:  It's the wimminz job, and no, we are not going to make any part of it easier.  No, we are not going to have paid maternity leaves, no, we are not going to stop pregnancy discrimination, no, we are not going to let women have reproductive choice.  And no, we are not going to pay for any of it.

Ah Women! What Would We Do Without Them? Putin and Trump on International Women's Day.

It's the International Women's Day which some are rapidly turning into an alternative Mothers' Day (you get flowers!  you get chocolates!)  and away from its actual roots which are to do with demanding improvements in the lives of the millions and millions of women who are second and third class citizens in their own countries, cultures and religions.

It's to demand that laws take rape and domestic violence seriously, to give you just one example of the underlying demand for gender equality.

The purpose of the day is also to highlight women's economic, social political and intellectual achievements*, partly to talk back to the misogynists and those who listen to them.

But the day turns into something quite different in the paws of Vlad "the Impaler" Putin and Donald "the Pussygrabber" Trump.  Here is our Dear Leader, on the International Women's Day:

And here is Vlad:

Dear women: mothers, grandmothers, daughters, wives, friends, our nearest and dearest ones, please accept my heartfelt congratulations on International Women’s Day!
You fill this world with beauty and vitality, giving warmth and comfort, cordiality and harmony with your tenderness and generosity of spirit.
You care day and night for your children, grandchildren and your family. Even today, on International Women’s Day, you are still caught up in your routine, working tirelessly, always on time. We often ask ourselves, how do they manage it all?

The messages are almost the same, my sweetings, though Vlad places women firmly in their unpaid care roles inside the family,  while Donny gives a nod to the idea that women might be useful in other jobs, too.   They are both full of awe and respect!  Vlad can't even understand how those overworked women manage to do it all!  But he is grateful for it, especially for not having to do it himself, I guess, and for not having to pay them much in the labor market.

Neither autocrat acknowledges the real purpose of the International Women's Day which in my view  is about the change that is needed.  That's because neither autocrat wants that change, so the plan is to flatter women in general and turn this day into something that Hallmark cards can profit from.  From its original purpose of making women's lives less oppressed on the global level and of raising the respect of women as human beings.

A celebration of status quo is the way I read Putin's and Trump's messages.  If that's the way we are going, then there really should be a widely-celebrated and equally vacuous International Men's Day.

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* Examples of the last one can be found here, here, here, here and here.  I have only picked STEM field examples, given that it is the field where the battles rage the hottest.  But there are many other examples that little girls and boys should learn about.

Four Points on the Proposed (T)Rumpcare (It's the Greatest!)

1.  We are now allowed a few sneaky peeks into what might (1)  become (T)Rumpcare:  the proposed substitute for the Affordable Care Act (ACA).  I agree with Andy Slavitt's tweet thread (25 tweets long) on its main points (2), in particular this:

The Republican opposition to ACA  was always about the way it was funded from extra taxes on the wealthy.  Those taxes would disappear in the proposed (T)Rumpcare plan:

“Households at the top of the U.S. income ladder would see taxes on their wages and investments drop under the House Republicans’ new health-care proposal,” the Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin notes. “As expected, the bill repeals a 3.8% tax on investment income and a 0.9% tax on wages. Both levies affect only the highest-earning households, those individuals making at least $200,000 and married couples making more than $250,000.”
“The Republican plan (also) includes a tax break for insurance company executives making over $500,000 per year,”  BuzzFeed’s Paul McLeod observes. “Companies can generally deduct employee salaries as a business expense but in 2013 the ACA capped the deductions on health insurance executive salaries at $500,000. The average compensation for top health insurance executives is in the millions. In 2014 the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies found that this cap generated $72 million in additional tax revenue.” The draft explicitly eliminates the cap, so the more insurance companies pay their executives the less they will pay in taxes.

Women's Free Stuff in the ACA. Is It Unfair?

So I was reading this article about how the repeal of the ACA would particularly harm women, and came across this little pearl at the end of the article.  It's a statement by an organization which opposes giving women "free stuff:"

The Commonwealth Foundation, a free-market think tank in Harrisburg, said the ACA is forcing benefits, and extra costs, on people who may not want them.
Elizabeth Stelle, the foundation's policy analysis director, said the organization wants people to have more choices so they don't have to pay for services they're not going to use.
For example, she thinks women should be allowed to choose if they want preventive services and birth control covered under their plans.
She noted the cost for services haven't declined, but have been spread to other areas. She said the reason women were paying more for health care before the ACA is because they require more health care.
"The alternative, under the ACA, which I think is extremely unfair, is we then asked single men, for example, to essentially pay for maternity coverage that they had no intention of ever using. I don't think it's fair to ask somebody to pay for coverage they're never going to use," Stelle said.

Very interesting.  Let's take a few sentences out of that quote for closer perusal: 

She said the reason women were paying more for health care before the ACA is because they require more health care.

Stelle's statement is about the individual health insurance market, not about employer-based group health insurance.  In the former women indeed were usually quoted higher prices for the coverage packet, and that higher quote was justified in the way Stelle does here.

But there's a flaw in the basic assumption.  Well, two flaws:

First, much of the greater health care use by women is not for themselves but for the infants they give birth to*.  Pregnancy and birth-related expenses shouldn't be assigned to just the mother.  Perhaps they shouldn't be assigned to her at all, with the exception of the costs of caring for any complications to her health.  An alternative view would be that those health care costs are the first expense of the new person who is born.

Second, women tend to see the health care sector more for routine visits, checkups and preventive care, all of which drive up their usage figures.  But to the extent such care prevents more expensive treatments later, their overall lifetime costs might be lowered, right?

And there is evidence that the average annual cost of men's care begins to exceed the costs of women's care later in life.  Why that doesn't raise men's premia in the individual markets is because the age at which this becomes visible is also the age at which individuals begin to qualify for Medicare, the federal health insurance system for old age.  Thus, from one angle men's higher health care use in older age is subsidized by the society.

The other paragraph in the above quote that is worth closer scrutiny is this one:

"The alternative, under the ACA, which I think is extremely unfair, is we then asked single men, for example, to essentially pay for maternity coverage that they had no intention of ever using. I don't think it's fair to ask somebody to pay for coverage they're never going to use,"

Great!  I will from now on refuse to pay for anyone's vasectomies, testicular cancer care, impotency treatments, prostate cancer or the treatment after accidents which were caused by skydiving, downhill skiing, boating or race driving.  I will also refuse to pay for the care of any congenital disease that doesn't affect my genetic group.

Note, also, that the  "single man" in Stelle's example was once born and most likely used medical care in that context, and that the only reason he could now view maternity benefits as not having anything to do with him is because his birth is in the past.  Things are different for future "single men."

The wider problems in those opinions are  a)  that the more we slice-and-dice the insurable pool of people into smaller sub-groups, the lower will the benefits of insurance ultimately be, and b) that the opinion fails to understand the public benefits of, say, subsidized contraception for the poor.

It helps to reduce unintended pregnancies, helps to reduce abortions and helps to reduce the costs associated with the avoided pregnancies and deliveries.  Many of those costs would have to be paid from public sector subsidies.  It's quite possible that the net savings to some imaginary (and celibate) single man would be greater if the ACA contraceptive benefits were retained.  In other words, he would pay less for the IUDs in his insurance premium than he would later have to pay in taxes under the alternative repeal-the-benefits scenario.

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*  And these infants have fathers.  Those fathers should bear some responsibility for the costs, I would think.
The same blindness is common when free contraception is discussed.  That the male partner of a woman receives 100% of the benefit, assuming he doesn't want to become a father, and 0% of the possible medical side-effects of, say, the contraceptive pill, sounds to me like a deal not to be sneezed at.  But the Rush Limbaughs of this world think the situation is the unfairest one can imagine:  Sluts being subsidized for sluttery.
    

In the Trump Reality the Sky Has Flying Unicorns. Their Poop is Polka-Dotted.

And they poop on us.  That's why our Dear Leader tweeted yesterday about the previous president, calling him "sick" or "bad," two adjectives in his sock drawer of twenty or so adjectives.  Don't be misdirected by all those expert opinions on how unlikely it is that Obama would have wiretapped the Trump Tower last October.  It's true, if our Dear Leader says that it is true, and all the rest is unicorn poop in this alternative reality.*

What a genius move from our Dear Leader!  When the truly ominous evidence is finally revealed about his Russian Connection, not a single Trump-voter will believe it!  Obama's fault, you know, all those fake facts.  Had we had Breitbart News during the Nixon era, nobody would ever have believed in Watergate.

More unicorn poop:  The US State Department has a tradition of publishing its annual human rights report with lots of fanfare.  Previous secretaries of state have been present at the occasion, but the current secretary of state-cum-Exxon, Rex Tillerson, didn't turn up for the 2017 presentation.  He didn't even send anyone at all.

Human rights organizations are worried that Tillerson's behavior is a signal:  The new US will pee on that horrible politically correct concept of human rights.

Alternatively, Tillerson might not even know about the occasion, given that Bannon has his hairy hands around the neck of the State Department, which is very close to death altogether.  The rumor is that Trump's son-in-law will take care of any future diplomacy that might be necessary.  Bannon prefers the concept of an apocalyptic war (which he will watch from a distance) as a form of muscular foreign diplomacy (remember that Miller crowed about the alpha males being back in power?).**

Finally, the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is chock full of unicorn poop:  Everyone will get perfect insurance coverage for pretty much no money!  Quality of health care will be higher!

But the possible replacements the Republicans let us peek at have several serious problems:*** 

- Health Savings Accounts are promoted.  For them to make sense, the individual must be able to save for the costs of treatment beforehand, and the tax subsidies they include are regressive.  That means the wealthier earners get bigger savings!

- The contents of the insurance packages are not specified properly.  Imagine a random family being offered two insurance packages with different price tags.  How can the family decide between them if they don't cover the same services?
We can't even tell which actually IS cheaper under those conditions.

- And any return to pre-ACA times will also return us to the situation where millions of individuals will have no health insurance.

I wonder what will rain down on us in the future.  Maybe we will be told that the unicorn poop isn't unicorn poop at all, but a very nutritious snack.  Like manna from heaven. 
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*  Can you tell me what point there might be in trying to write a fact-based blog, my sweet and erudite readers?  This is the post-factual reality, where the emotions of anger, lust and rage rule. But then I can do emotional posts, too. (Weeps bitter tears, kicks in the garage door, once again, and tears off half the scales.)

**  This paragraph is an example of my new style of not linking to any evidence.  Actually, you can find the evidence in my previous posts, because my conscience still fights the idea of just letting fly with whatever opinions I happen to have, even though that's how it now goes.

Also, don't look into Miller's empty eyes.  You could fall in and never find your way back to humanity.

***  These three are just a sampling.  There are other problems, many described here. 

And Republicans insist on using the inherently wrong assumption that price competition in health care would work.  It cannot work, because quality of care is not directly comparable or measurable, with the exception of fairly routine services provided as preventive care or dental checkups etc.  Also, the supply side is not atomic, there are barriers to entry and monopoly power among the suppliers.

A Study on the Era of Alternative Facts

This media study is important:

Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

These are information bubbles, and not the easily bursting kind.  Though the tendency is more noticeable on the right, I see weaker versions of it on the left, too.

I have spent time surfing various right-wing and left-wing sites.  Here are my observations:

1.  It's not just that the same events are presented differently on the right and on the left: which events are viewed as news also varies.  The reason for the Benghazi-craze of so many Republicans is that Benghazi was in "their" news for very long time periods,* whereas other similar terrorist attacks came and went fairly quickly.

2.  Even for the same news, the evidence marshaled to support a particular point of view differs.  As an example, lefties are likely to discuss  Trump's deportation policies by linking to horrible stories about families torn apart in ICE operations, whereas righties are seeing the same policies framed by stories about crimes undocumented aliens have committed.

3.  Where the right-wing sites do differ, perhaps because they are more polarized, is in the creation of odd alternative realities.  George Soros as the man who held Hillary Clinton's puppet strings and who finances almost all left-wing activism in this country is one such alternative reality.  I have never managed to squeeze one dime out of Mr. Soros, sigh.

Another example of those alternative realities is the Pizzagate "scandal," fabricated out of nothing and spread all over the extreme right websites.

This study casts light on the question why so many individuals would believe in something so bizarre.  The answer is that anything repeated often enough becomes part of established truths, if nobody is allowed to offer different evidence. 

4.  The basic biased framework can be strengthened by those who participate on various sites.

My example of that comes from a misogynistic Facebook page, but similar examples would apply to any right-wing site (and, in theory, to any political site).

That particular page is all about the violence committed by women, especially against men, and readers bring in links to stories about female murderers or batterers from all over the world.   These links give the site the appearance of being factual about the great danger of criminal women, but that is only because no links are introduced about the crimes committed by men, including against women.  The latter are statistically many times more common than the former.  Yet the participants on that site appear quite unaware of that fact.

5.  Even when a conservative site uses studies or statistics to bolster its point of view, those almost always omit any studies or statistics which do not support the arguments the site wishes to make.  That is not unexpected for propaganda, but unacceptable for a site, such as Breitbart, which pretends to be a news site.

Do read the whole description of the study.  It's informative, and it lays out the problem we really have to deal with.  If different people believe in different realities we are going to be in great and continuous trouble as a country.


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* Fox News' coverage has similar aspects.  For example, vast amounts of time is spent covering any cases where a mother may have murdered her children, even if the cases have no national significance, while other murder cases are not reported at all.

Thanks to Cole d'Biers at Eschaton for the link to the study.

Demolishing the Administative State And Other Bannon Presidency Issues

Remember when Stephen Bannon told us that one goal of the Trump administration is to demolish the administrative state?

Hence the people that Trump (read: Bannon) has nominated.  Their true purpose in most cases is to destroy the departments Republicans loathe.  Betsy deVos to run down public schools and teachers' unions (by doling out cheap lottery tickets, aka vouchers), Scott Pruitt to despoil the Environmental Protection Agency (a quarter of its budget is under threat) and so on.

From that angle this Atlantic article on the State Department is most interesting:

Right now, those I’ve spoken to in the department seem to know very little about what’s going on. The staffer told me that she finds out what’s going on at State from the news—which she spends all day reading because, after years of having her day scheduled down to 15 minute blocks, she has nothing else to do. And even the news itself isn’t coming from official sources. There hasn’t been a State Department press briefing, once a daily ritual, since the new administration took over five weeks ago—though they’re scheduled to resume March 6. These briefings weren’t just for journalists. They also served as a crucial set of cues for U.S. diplomats all over the world about policy priorities, and how to talk about them. With no daily messaging, and almost no guidance from Washington, people in far-flung posts are flying blind even as the pace of their diplomacy hasn’t abated.

Assuming this description is valid, how much of the chaos is due to incompetence and how much of it is a feature, not a bug, of Bannon's plans?

Imagine staffers getting their information from where I get mine:  The news!

Well, at least we don't have to worry about Hillary Clinton's private emails.  That both Pruitt and Pence appear to have used private email accounts for official bidness is not a problem, of course.  They are Republicans and also have no girl cooties.

My New Idol

Siiri Rantanen is a

retired cross-country skier from Finland. She competed in the 1952, 1956 and 1960 Olympics and won a medal in each of them: a gold and a bronze in the 3×5 km relay in 1956–60 and another bronze in the individual 10 km in 1952; she placed 5th and 15th over 10 km in 1956 and 1960, respectively. She also won five medals at the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships.[

And here she skis at the age of 92.

The Presidential Speech

Olympic ski jumping is roughly scored on the basis of style and distance, presidential speeches by style and contents.  But yesterday's speech by our Dear Leader was almost completely scored on the basis of style.  The distance, which here equals the contents of the speech, didn't seem to affect the scoring of the speech.

Far too many in the media, especially the pundits, saw their task as only the scoring of Trump's style.  Someone had written him an indoor version of his campaign speech, with more opaque language, more hidden code words and zero direct insults.  He read that speech from a teleprompter, and the crowds cheered!

Van Jones called him presidential.  Tom Brokaw called his speech the most presidential yet.  Karl Jonathan called him presidential.

That the contents of the speech changed not one single thing in his policies didn't seem to matter.  He called for all Americans to come together and to support his extreme right-wing radical policies, and some pundits were impressed.

But of course it was a good speech.  It was emotional, telling the listeners about the current hell that is the US of A, but also telling them that rescue is coming, that Donald Trump will ride in on his white charger, that he will rescue us all.*

 We will all then ride into the glorious sunset together, holding hands, ride  into that America where there are no constraints, where all promises will be fulfilled, where all crime will be eradicated, all poverty cured,  and where the Statue of Liberty no longer opens her arms to the tired, poor and huddled masses, but only to those who have an engineering degree and a trust fund.

Yes, it was a good speech, because Trump's speeches are scored not on the same basis as the speeches of previous presidents but on the trump-o-meter:  His own past awkward history.  Compared to that history, reading relatively smoothly from a teleprompter indeed is a presidential achievement.

It was also a terrible speech, filled with misinterpreted or flawed data and promises which cannot be kept by anyone not divine.  If it made the listener feel good that was caused by those impossible promises and the rapid leaps over what the actual solutions might be that create this paradise we are all lurching towards.

And it was a terrible speech because it presented the very policies Trump is pursuing as something wonderful:  He still tells us that cutting health insurance will make it more available, that it is imperative to move money from the poorer to the richer by reducing taxation of corporations and the one percent,  that it is equally imperative to close the doors of this country to all but those whom the corporations want to employ without paying for the necessary training.  He  still plans to play the Lone Cowboy in international politics, he still plans to put a stop to reproductive choice for women and his plans still smell of white** nationalism.

Given all this, why did some pundits decide that the speech made Trump "presidential?"  Is it because he was more fluent, less rude and less childish than before?  Or is it because he has frightened the press by calling it the "enemy of the people?"  Or are we still using the false equivalences in political coverage where every criticism of a Republican president should be matched with at least one praise?

Remember Hillary Clinton's email coverage?   Can you imagine how this speech would have been scored for style if it had been given by president Hillary Clinton?  Or what the conservatives would now say if president Clinton had ordered the Yemen raid to take place and then put the blame for its botched nature firmly on the generals?  Yet it was the presence of the widow of the fallen Navy Seal at the speech which offered Trump the best opportunity for creating an emotional national moment of patriotic sacrifice and compassion.***

It's worth pointing out that someone in the White House found it astonishing how easily the press was tamed.  All that was needed were style points.****
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* Well, not all, of course.  But the right types of people.
**  White male nationalism, really, because Trump's focus on the armed forces, the military and infrastructure projects are all aimed at increasing jobs in traditionally male occupations and because he supports limitations on women's reproductive choice, perhaps to pass the control of that to other authority figures in their lives.
***  For a different view, read this.
**** And, to be fair, the fact Trump (or his speech writer) finally made a statement against the racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic attacks which seem to have sprouted up everywhere since his election.

Real Men Are Wallets?

This is a billboard in or near Winston-Salem, North Carolina:

It has been purchased by a company which wishes to remain anonymous.

When I saw the picture, I immediately started adding various words to the end of the first sentence.  I think "sex" would win.*

America First? The Gutting of Foreign Aid.

Trump's budget plan includes cutting foreign aid, which is currently about one percent of all federal spending, or one dollar out of each one hundred spent.  Cutting foreign aid to zero wouldn't do much to reduce the federal deficit, but it could weaken the powers of US foreign diplomacy to avert unrest in this world.

Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post speculates that a focus on cutting foreign aid comes about because not even the Republicans are that keen to cut domestic programs, to give more money to the military.  She also describes a recent poll which shows that many people are uninformed of the tiny size of foreign aid in the overall federal spending:

Rampell notes: "In fact, of all the programs included in this survey, “foreign aid” garnered the highest share of responses calling it a major contributor to federal debt."

This is fascinating.  A 2015 survey also noted that people vastly overestimate how much is spent on foreign aid:

A large majority of the public overestimates the amount of the federal budget that is spent on foreign aid. Similar to past Kaiser polls, just 1 in 20 correctly state that 1 percent or less of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid. About half say it is more than 10 percent of the budget, and, on average, Americans say that spending on foreign aid makes up roughly a quarter of the federal budget.

Bolds are mine.

I wasn't able to find the size estimates by political affiliation, but more Republicans than Democrats believe that foreign aid contributes to the national debt, and 63% of Trump voters in the recent survey believe that foreign aid greatly contributes to the federal debt, while only 34% of Clinton voters agreed with them.

All this makes me wonder about the confidence of beliefs which are not based on factual data.  This article is worth reading in that context.

Trump:"Nobody Knew That Health Care Could Be So Complicated." Call Me Nobody Then.

I am going to embroider these sentences on the pillow I punch when my red-hot anger gets too much for me:

“I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” Trump said. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

This is the deep wisdom our Dear Leader shared with us, concerning the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)  he promised his flock during the campaign. 

Well, call me Nobody, because I knew how complicated constructing a health insurance system is.  And imagine this: People even study those complications for years and years, and get degrees in that field.

That means there are quite a few of us Nobodies.

Sigh.  Enough Americans voted for a Know-Nothing, and now we are all going to suffer for that.

A small reminder:  The Republicans want to kill the ACA not because the flaws it has but because of the taxes that the wealthier taxpayers must pay to fund it.

Any replacement they might concoct is going to mean less access to good quality health care for low-income individuals.   Otherwise those "tax cuts" can't be funded.

Trump: The US Needs More Weapons.

Trump is going to ask more money for military spending.  It's supposed to come from cuts in the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.  Because there is no climate change, at all. 

To put that request into perspective, note this:

The U.S. outpaces all other nations in military expenditures. World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total.
U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined.

The US already spends as much as the next seven big-spending countries in the world.  Clearly there is no amount that can ever be enough, just as there is no minimum amount that the Republicans would be willing to leave into Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

Perhaps that is because the very rich don't see Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security as programs which defend them against premature death, poverty, pain and suffering?  But they do fear imaginary hobgoblins under their beds and want more bombs to keep them away.