I jokingly said that maybe Rand Paul is working for the Russians with his distraction tactics during the worst of the Trump/Russia stuff, but now McCain has said the same in response to Paul blocking Montenegro from joining the EU.

Maybe someone should look into his business dealings. The block does fit with his longstanding opinion on expanding military, I guess, but it seems like having another ally would be a good thing, especially since the Russians have tried to overthrow the government of montenegro in the past.

When does Candidate Trump get off the stump and take office to move the country forward?

it's to join NATO, not the EU

i'm not sure why it would join or why NATO would want it? maybe i'm missing something. it isn't rated very highly on the democratic scale.

This whole talk about cost of coverage is significantly BS IMO. I am not sure I recall a year that my health care expenditure went down, in fact I think it mostly had been increasing between 10-15% year. Sure there are instances in AHA where the increases are dramatically more.

There were fireworks one year when our plan changed to a lower level of coverage at a higher price point, around an 18% rise, while the WaPo was running a series on the CEO of that firm having like a half dozen houses, a baker dozen cars, and was making just over something crazy like $100M a year with an insurer that had a presence in like 3 states and the district.

my coverage went down when the first year of the ACA took effect. It's come back up to where it was

(insert joke ACA helps the rich)

thephan wrote:This whole talk about cost of coverage is significantly BS IMO. I am not sure I recall a year that my health care expenditure went down, in fact I think it mostly had been increasing between 10-15% year. Sure there are instances in AHA where the increases are dramatically more.

There were fireworks one year when our plan changed to a lower level of coverage at a higher price point, around an 18% rise, while the WaPo was running a series on the CEO of that firm having like a half dozen houses, a baker dozen cars, and was making just over something crazy like $100M a year with an insurer that had a presence in like 3 states and the district.

healthcare costs since 1960
upshot: it's actually slowed down over the past 15 years or so in comparison to the 2nd half of the 20th century

one of the biggest reasons is people live so damn long; another is we realized mental health is a real thing and that costs money.

people have paid less out of pocket expenses as the government has stepped in; this is why GOPCare is so unpopular:


perhaps they should pay more (it's a control!), but good luck telling people that.

The Berks County Sheriff, who is in my opinion a POS, wants to enroll in the ICE program that basically deputizes the office to act on behalf of ICE. the city police, the city mayor, the local DA, all oppose this. should be fun!

pacino wrote:The Berks County Sheriff, who is in my opinion a POS, wants to enroll in the ICE program that basically deputizes the office to act on behalf of ICE. the city police, the city mayor, the local DA, all oppose this. should be fun!

That is just horrible.

thephan wrote:

pacino wrote:The Berks County Sheriff, who is in my opinion a POS, wants to enroll in the ICE program that basically deputizes the office to act on behalf of ICE. the city police, the city mayor, the local DA, all oppose this. should be fun!

That is just horrible.

they promised there would be no racial profiling, so i believe them!

thephan wrote:When does Candidate Trump get off the stump and take office to move the country forward?

He'll be off the stump after tomorrow so he can cost taxpayers millions and go play golf at Mara Lago, so there's that.

pacino wrote:people have paid less out of pocket expenses as the government has stepped in; this is why GOPCare is so unpopular:


perhaps they should pay more (it's a control!), but good luck telling people that.

Well....

health treatment financing policy is one snarled mess, and down, as often as not, is up.

Take your chart. Looks like a happy story: people have paid a diminishing share of health treatment costs over time, yay!

The trouble is, people pay absolute dollars - and THAT figure has gone up, up, up, regardless who's been in charge. What's missing from the picture is the rate at which prices for health treatment have increased. That startling figure, perennially higher than general inflation, has dragged the dollar amount of low PERCENTAGE shares of cost upward, faster than pay for most people. Like, other than the top 5-10% or so.

there are plenty of follow-on implications, and many many many people, rightly or wrongly, in the medical-industrial complex with their hands out.

tl;dr US health care financing policy sucks
'

blorp

the local Reading Eagle wrote an editorial that local congressmen (Costello, Smucker, Meehan, Dent) should hold local town halls.

The comments section is decidedly against it because of anarchists! and shouting! and we had a town hall on november 8th!

I think most news outlets should just do away with comments sections

i barely even know him!:

World Patent Marketing and its owner, Scott J. Cooper, are accused by the Federal Trade Commission of defrauding thousands of clients in the last few years to the tune of millions of dollars, and then harassing customers who threatened to report the scam.

Mast, a Republican and military veteran who represents part of Palm Beach County, was named a member of the company’s advisory board in February 2016, shortly before Cooper donated more than $5,000 to Mast’s election campaign.

In an interview, Mast insisted he had only met Cooper face-to-face on two occasions — including a party last month celebrating the freshman lawmaker's victory — and did not know where Cooper obtained footage of him used in a promotional video for the firm. Mast also said Cooper did not have his permission to use his image.

"[Cooper] was somebody who was introduced to me," Mast said. "I was aware that I became a member of a board through a press release someone else sent to me. I didn't even know."

Cooper tweeted a photo on Feb. 22, 2017 of Mast and him together at a bar. The two men are smiling with drinks in their hands and Cooper has his arm around the Florida lawmaker.

“Florida Congressman Brian Mast and World Patent Marketing CEO Scott Cooper finally relax after the swearing in...,” Cooper captioned the tweet.

Cooper has also described Mast as a “former WPM board member” in multiple social media posts recently. At one point, the cover photo for World Patent Marketing’s Facebook page was a picture of Mast, a double amputee, walking down the Capitol steps.

“Keep up the amazing work Congressman Mast - World Patent Marketing stands behind you!!!” the group wrote in a post on its Facebook page accompanied by a video of Mast speaking on the House floor Jan. 6, 2017.

"He does know me, just like thousands of other people who supported me," Mast added when asked why Cooper attended his swearing-in party. "This is stuff taken off social media, and Facebook. I never authorized it."

Mast said Cooper "was one of those people who bounces from idea to idea to idea. I don't know if he thought he was doing something good for himself, or if he thought he was doing something good for me. I couldn't say. But there was never a discussion of 'Would you consider doing this?' or 'I'd like for you to do this' or anything else."

in all honesty, Cooper does seem like a classic scam artist puffing up a relationship that barely exists

jerseyhoya wrote:Jeff Flake channels my feelings on the constitutionality (yes) and wisdom (not so much) of the latest travel EO.

Fuck Jeff flake

That proposed Hard Power Budget is something else. Hard to put in words that make sense.

In other news, Mick Mulvaney should not speak where people can actually hear what he is saying.

more good news for liberals:

Some domestic programs, such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Institute of Peace, the Chemical Safety Board, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports PBS and NPR, are on the chopping block for elimination entirely. Trump is pushing numerous such cuts, long sought by conservative Republicans, in the spending plan, while allocating “more money for things like private and public school choice,” Mulvaney said.

“There's a lot of programs that simply cannot justify their existence, and that's where we zeroed in,” Mulvaney said, referring specifically to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant that funds anti-poverty programs nationwide was eliminated.

The Department of Interior’s budget would shrink by 12 percent, HUD’s budget by 13.2 percent and the Department of Education by 13 percent. The Department of Agriculture would face steep cuts too, of 21 percent.

The Trump budget allocates $54 billion more to defense and law enforcement programs than Congress approved this year, a roughly 10 percent increase, while cutting foreign aid as part of a reorientation that Trump has termed “America First.” Trump also asks for a $30 billion supplemental payment for national security and the border in the current year. Mulvaney said funding for the Department of Homeland Security would grow by approximately 6 percent.

Funding for the United Nations would be reduced as America would pledge not to pay for more than 25 percent of the costs of peacekeeping internationally. Funding for the World Bank would be pared back by $650 million, as well.

really glad we shook the consciousness; this is so good for liberals

and something for the MAGA crowd, too:

But the National Institutes of Health would absorb a $5.8 billion cut despite Trump's talk in a recent address to Congress of finding "cures to the illnesses that have always plagued us." Subsidies for airlines serving rural airports in Trump strongholds would be eliminated. Also zeroed out would be funding for subsidies of Amtrak's money-losing long-distance routes, and a $500 million per-year "TIGER Grant" program for highway projects created by Obama.

pacino wrote:

thephan wrote:

pacino wrote:The Berks County Sheriff, who is in my opinion a POS, wants to enroll in the ICE program that basically deputizes the office to act on behalf of ICE. the city police, the city mayor, the local DA, all oppose this. should be fun!

That is just horrible.

they promised there would be no racial profiling, so i believe them!

There will be no racial profiling but we do want to get in on all this harassment of brown people.