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Republicans Finally Have a Plan to Replace Obamacare. But They Won’t Let Anyone See it.

by LakeshaWong Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Congressional lawmakers are scrambling to get their hands on the latest draft legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, after top Republicans moved to keep the new proposal out of sight and “under lock and key” in the basement of Congress.

Bloomberg reports the draft legislation will likely be reviewed by only members of the House Energy and Commerce panel Thursday, but physical copies of it will not be distributed for other lawmakers or the general public.

The extraordinary effort to conceal the contents of the latest replacement plan comes amid intense debate within the GOP over the extent to which the healthcare law should be changed: some favor a full repeal, while others in the party advocate keeping certain parts of the law intact. The current secrecy is also likely a response to last Friday’s leak of a now outdated version of the proposal.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) joined several other lawmakers on Thursday for the frantic search to find the draft bill:

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) was even spotted lamenting to a bust of President Abraham Lincoln during the hunt:

The spectacle on Thursday follows a wave of rowdy town halls across the country, where thousands of protesters packed into public meeting spaces to complain to Republican lawmakers about dismantling Obamacare. Several Republican lawmakers have since voiced serious concern over repeal efforts, and the potential fallout such a repeal could have on their political futures.

The secretive, hurried process to repeal and replace Obamacare also has its ironies; Republicans were furious with Democrats for what they saw as a rushed effort starting in 2009 to pass the healthcare law without any GOP input.

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Republicans Finally Have a Plan to Replace Obamacare. But They Won’t Let Anyone See it.

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Map of the Day: Access to Good Primary Care in America

by Kirk6534qgkfjf Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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I’m playing around with GeoFRED again while we all wait for the next three or four shoes to drop on the Jeff Sessions show. Here’s an interesting map: the rate of preventable hospital admissions. This is based on the number of hospital admissions for “ambulatory care sensitive conditions,” such as diabetes, asthma, and hypertension, which normally doesn’t require hospitalization if patients are being treated by good primary care doctors. Essentially, then, this map shows the places where good primary care isn’t widely available or isn’t doing its job.

What makes it interesting is that it doesn’t map all that closely to poverty. From Kentucky down to Louisiana, you have lots of counties with high poverty and a poor access to good primary care. But north of that you have the same thing even though poverty is relatively low. Out west, you have the opposite: a fair amount of poverty, but pretty good access to primary care. So what’s going on?

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Map of the Day: Access to Good Primary Care in America

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Watch These Protesters Outside the Department of Justice Demand Sessions’ Resignation

by RickPaceuorrp Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday at noon, a crowd of about 100 people and growing gathered outside the US Department of Justice to call for the resignation of attorney general Jeff Sessions, chanting “Fire Sessions” and “Dosvedanya Jeff Sessions,” in an event organized by MoveOn.org, a progressive advocacy group and political action committee.

The calls for resignation were triggered by allegations, published late Wednesday by the Washington Post, that Sessions misled Congress during his confirmation hearing when he denied having any contacts with representatives of the Russian government during the 2016 presidential race. The Post found that Sessions met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice at the height of the campaign—once in July 2016 and once in September. A growing number of Republicans in Congress are also calling on Sessions to resign over the allegations or recuse himself from any investigations.

You can watch the ongoing protest live below:

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Watch These Protesters Outside the Department of Justice Demand Sessions’ Resignation

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Jeff Sessions Is Now Officially Toxic

by MurielH13249 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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The chaos around Jeff Sessions continues today, with just about everyone now calling for Sessions to recuse himself in the investigation of ties between Trump and Russia. But not quite everyone:

Um, say what? You might want to rein it in a little, Devin. Let’s move on to one of your colleagues, shall we?

And this from Jake Tapper:

This sounds just like the Flynn affair. We have some chats with the Russian ambassador. We have denials of those chats. We have the discovery of those chats. And we have the White House saying that they were unaware of the chats.

I’m really not sure that President Trump can afford to fire a second top aide for lying to him about talking with the Russian ambassador, but the alternative is to let this thing continue to drag out. Jeff Sessions is now officially toxic.

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Jeff Sessions Is Now Officially Toxic

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What? Republicans Were Serious About Killing Obamacare?

by payoneerreview91 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before:

Kathy Watson was anxious about her health coverage even before she woke up gasping for breath last month and drove herself to the emergency room with a flare-up in her heart condition. After struggling for years without insurance, the 55-year-old former small-business owner — who has battled diabetes, high blood pressure and two cancers — credits Obamacare with saving her life.

Watson also voted for Donald Trump, believing the businessman would bring change. She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster. Now, as she watches the new president push to kill the law that provided her with a critical lifeline, Watson finds herself among many Trump supporters who must reconcile their votes with worries about the future of their healthcare.

Watson, a proud, salty woman who was uninsurable a few years ago, isn’t ready to renounce Trump. But she’s increasingly frustrated by his vague promises to replace Obamacare with something better. “I’ve been through enough,” Watson said recently, sitting on the patio outside her mobile home, down a sandy road in a rural corner of northern Florida. “I don’t want to go back.”

“She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster.” A lot of people seem to have done that. But this isn’t just because Trump was such a ridiculous, blustery candidate. It’s also because it’s what we’ve come to expect from Republicans, and everyone tends to give them a pass for it. They say absurd things routinely, but the general reaction is a shrug: Oh, they have to say that stuff for the base. They’re just checking boxes.

But now a lot of moderate conservatives are learning that it wasn’t just affinity politics after all. They’re actually going to try to do all those things they’ve been talking about for years. At this point, our best hope is that they’re too fractious and too incompetent to pull it off.

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What? Republicans Were Serious About Killing Obamacare?

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Quote of the Day: Boredom May Be Trump’s Worst Enemy

by GenieMcGuigan Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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From LA Times reporter Brian Bennett, writing about the possibility of President Trump brokering some kind of comprehensive immigration deal:

But immigration experts are skeptical Trump has the attention span or the desire to pass a sweeping immigration overhaul, a deeply complicated undertaking.

I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing versions of this sentence a lot over the next four years.

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Quote of the Day: Boredom May Be Trump’s Worst Enemy

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The Economy Is Not Booming

by UPNKatia977560 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin writes about the fabulous Trump economy:

The stock market reached yet another new high on Wednesday, the latest development to make a mockery of what savvy economic commentators thought they knew about the world.

Consider how things looked one year ago. The world economy seemed hopelessly trapped in a cycle of low growth and inflation. Markets recoiled at the mere possibility that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates. Populist political insurgencies seemed to threaten yet more financial market chaos.

Now, interest rates and inflation forecasts have risen substantially from last winter’s lows; financial markets are shrugging off — or even rallying at the possibility of — imminent Fed rate increases; and it is all taking place during Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Why do we keep hearing this? Once again, here’s the S&P 500 since the end of the Great Recession. I’ve even adjusted it for inflation just to be super fair:

There nothing there. The stock market is growing at precisely the same rate as it has for the past eight years. If you zoom in and take look at the S&P 500 just since Election Day, you see the same thing: it’s been bouncing tightly around a trend line the entire time. There has been no rally at the possibility of interest rate increases from the Fed.

As for inflation, I’ve already dealt with that today. It’s been closely following a trendline too, and literally nothing new has happened since the election. However, it is true that inflationary expectations started rising last June—though a little context helps here:

If you start your chart in mid-2016, you can make it look like inflationary expectations are taking off like a rocket. But in reality, we’re still nowhere close to where we were five years after the end of the Great Recession, and expectations have flattened out in the past couple of months.

Finally, economic growth. You can talk about animal spirits all you want, but GDP growth in the US has been running steadily between 1 percent and 3 percent since 2010. Last quarter it was 1.9 percent, and there’s no particular reason to think it’s about to take a sustained jump. As for the rest of the world, the IMF doesn’t seem especially optimistic:

US growth might be a little sluggish, but it’s still a lot better than China and Europe, which are projected to decline in 2017 and 2018. The rest of the world will do a little better, but only a little.

However, there is one part of the economy that has unquestionably been booming since Trump was elected: big Wall Street banks.

Wall Street has been kicking major ass since November 8. And why not? The economy may or may not be booming, but they’re pretty sure that Trump is going to lower their taxes and ease up on all those pesky regulations that Obama tried to force on them. If I were a big bank, I’d be pretty excited too.

I’m not especially trying to badmouth the economy here. It’s doing fine, if not great. Growth is decent, wages are showing signs of life, we’re getting close to full employment, and inflation is under control. As labor markets tighten, we might even some real improvement in wages and living standards. That’s not bad, especially compared to the rest of the world. But there’s really not much evidence that we’ve been in any kind of boom times since November. Growth is steady, the stock market is steady, employment is steady, and inflation is steady. Just because Wall Street is excited doesn’t mean they know something we don’t.

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The Economy Is Not Booming

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British, Dutch Passed Along Intel About Meetings Between Trump Team and Russia

by OlaWDHLsrir Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports today on new revelations about contacts between the Trump team and Russia during the last month of the Obama administration:

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.

Some of this is coming to light as a result of deliberate efforts by outgoing Obama officials:

Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration. At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that intelligence could be covered up or destroyed — or its sources exposed — once power changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.

….Some officials began asking specific questions at intelligence briefings, knowing the answers would be archived and could be easily unearthed by investigators….At intelligence agencies, there was a push to process as much raw intelligence as possible into analyses, and to keep the reports at a relatively low level of classification to ensure as wide a readership as possible across the government….There was also an effort to pass reports and other sensitive materials to Congress.

….Throughout the summer…European allies were starting to pass along information about people close to Mr. Trump meeting with Russians in the Netherlands, Britain and other countries….But it wasn’t until after the election, and after more intelligence had come in, that the administration began to grasp the scope of the suspected tampering and concluded that one goal of the campaign was to help tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor. In early December, Mr. Obama ordered the intelligence community to conduct a full assessment of the Russian campaign.

As the story acknowledges, it’s still unclear what all these meetings were about, but “the Russians, it appeared, were arguing about how far to go in interfering in the presidential election.”

This has the feel of a scandal that will pass into urban legend without anyone ever knowing for sure what actually happened. It’s pretty obvious at this point that something happened, but with every new disclosure it seems as if the truth drifts a little farther out of reach. Unless someone has a smoking gun tape somewhere, it’s not clear if this story will ever get resolved.

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British, Dutch Passed Along Intel About Meetings Between Trump Team and Russia

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Media Goes Wild Over Trump’s First Address to Congress

by KendraWager Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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During his first major address before Congress Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump managed to stick to his prepared remarks without veering off into one of his signature, often incomprehensible, rants. The unusually staid performance inspired lavish praise from pundits and commentators, with several members of the media even marking the occasion as the moment Trump officially became president.

“He became President of the United States in that moment, period,” CNN’s Van Jones said in a post-speech wrap-up. The frequent Trump critic even crowned it one of the most “extraordinary” hours he had ever witnessed in American politics.

But as pundits fawned over the speech, some pointed to Trump’s actions and policies during his first month in office, and the many inaccuracies and falsehoods he laid out in his speech, to caution against excessive optimism merely because he softened his tone. Examples included Trump’s move to eliminate key Obama-era environmental protections just hours before he told Congress he supported clean air and water, as well as his hard line approach to immigration, despite his new stance supporting compromises on the issue. Trump also began the speech by referring to Black History Month, an annual celebration he and his aides repeatedly botched last month.

By Wednesday morning, however, it’s obvious all Trump heard was the word “presidential.”

Watch the rare media love-fest below:

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Media Goes Wild Over Trump’s First Address to Congress

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Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

by CliffConde Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I noted that core PCE inflation—the measure used by the Fed—has been rising very, very slowly over the past two years. “At that rate, it should hit 2 percent by about 2019 or so,” I snarked.

But that got me curious. How fast is core PCE rising? So naturally I put it into a chart:

It turns out that by 2019 it would actually hit 2.2 percent at its current rate. This is still not something we should be very worried about.1

Of course, inflation isn’t just a trend independent of everything else. If the Fed changes interest rates, or President Trump balloons the deficit, or the dollar weakens and imports get a lot more expensive, then that will affect the inflation rate. But none of those things have happened yet, and until they do we still don’t really have anything to be worried about.

1In fact, it would probably be helpful to see inflation rise to 3 percent for a year or two. If it rises above that, then it’s might be time for the Fed to act.

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Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

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