Today's Tweet

Quite possibly the best pair of T-Shirts i have ever seen pic.twitter.com/40R3K6DmjA

— Brad (@MovesLikeZagger) June 22, 2017

Well Well

Vox:

A majority of Americans, 51 percent, have a favorable view of the Affordable Care Act, the law’s highest mark ever in the seven-year tracking poll; 41 percent said they had an unfavorable view.
--and--

Half of Americans also said they thought they would be better off if Obamacare remained the law of the land, versus 36 percent who thought they would be better off under the Republican bill.

I'll make one radical assumption by saying: Maybe a bunch of the Leftie Purists managed to get their heads outa their asses long enough to stop insisting that "fucked over completely" is somehow better than "fucked over a little (or even a lot)".

The main thing here, Lefties, is that you don't get to prescribe punishment for me in order to pressure me into serving your political goals.

There is nothing good about losing what we gained with Obamacare because it just doesn't go far enough to satisfy your pixie-dusted dreams of unicorns and universality.

There is no silver lining in having 45* as POTUS. Damage is being done to our institutions that will take decades (if not generations) to repair.

So if you think the shit we're going thru now, and the shit yet to come, is all good in the end because it's sure to transform the voting public into good little Liberals, then y'all can go fuck yourself with a horny toad.

Like Mother Blue Gal always tells us:

When you win, you chop wood and carry water.

When you lose, you chop wood and carry water.

(I'll add my bit to the end of that):

When you get some of what you want, but not everything,

You chop the fucking wood and you carry the fucking water.

Rachel

Rachel Maddow via Stitcher (audio only) - the A Block is good and long and ties things together pretty well:

Obama Speaks

Obama's remarks on the AHCA via Facebook:

The Senate bill, unveiled today, is not a health care bill. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America.

Try Not To Forget

In all the political brouhaha, especially the Blue Team vs Red Team tribal bullshit, and even more especially the Both-Sides bullshit, there's something that needs to be kept in mind here:

Rage from the right end of the political spectrum gave us the KKK, Atlas Shrugged and Dick Nixon.

Rage from the left gave us Molly Ivins, Social Security and the Weekend.

Today's Tweet

Senator Whitehouse brings it.

Wow. "We're not stupid!" That's what a Republican staffer told a reporter about why they've kept their health care bill secret. pic.twitter.com/hxTuC8PMK1

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) June 21, 2017

Today's Deep Thought

Not knowing how much there is to know leads to the false belief that you know more than you do, 

and to the desire to prove it in public.

Keith

To tape or not to tape.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

I try. Lord knows how I try. I try to maintain a certain equilibrium about all of my fellow citizens. We're all in this great democratic experiment together, after all. I think we have an obligation as a self-governing democratic republic to make government work best for all our people. I believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, and in the political commons to which we all have a right and in which we all have a stake. Economic anxiety in de-industrialized America is very real and it is a real danger to all of what we can achieve together. It is now, and it was in 1980, when I drove from Youngstown to Toledo to Flint to Grand Rapids as we wound into the election that brought us Ronald Reagan.

(So, by the way, is the intractable poverty of people, working class and otherwise, who are not white.)

So, I try. Lord knows how I try.

But what am I supposed to do when so many of my fellow citizens guzzle snake oil by the gallon and call it champagne?

I think what hangs us up the most is that we're all clinging rather desperately to the Presumption of Regularity.  We need something that looks and feels more like normal. So we project that need onto an awful lot of what's going on.  Especially with 45* making such forceful and deliberate efforts to vacate the norm.

Add it all up and we're danger-close to a charge of False Consciousness, but what else we got?

AHCA

75% of us are on record saying we don't want ACA repealed. We want it fixed and strengthened.

What's the big bugbear according to Business "conservatives"?  Uncertainty.  

You really can't make a case that AHCA does anything at all to make Americans feel more certain. Especially the way the Repubs are going about it.

But, hey at least they've given us a chance to see it before they jam it up our collective ass. 

The AHCA was released today - in all it's 142 page glory.

I haven't slogged all the way thru it yet, but so far, it's a little like the old bit about watching the original Star Trek - everybody knows the young guy you don't recognize (usually a Red Shirt) will be dead before the opening credits.  And 4 or 5 minutes after that first commercial, you'll know the gist of the story because there's only a handful of themes (kinda like this little blog here), and it always works out just fine for the Executive Elite (not at all like this little blog).  Which frees you up so you can go do something worthwhile - like picking fly shit outa your pepper shaker.

Anyway, so it is with practically everything these GOP boneheads come up with.  They put a nice face on it, but it's pretty much always about taking tax dollars from you and me, and putting them into the pockets of their in-laws, their lobby pals, and their campaign contributors.

It's money laundering. Why do you think the GOP in congress is doing nothing about 45*?  When it comes to washing money, he's one of the best - they're too busy taking lessons from this jagoff.

If you wanna know about a problem here in USAmerica Inc, look to who benefits from the continuing existence of the problem, or who profits from "solving" it. 

If you work it just right, you can get a 2-fer, like The War On Drugs and Coin-Operated Prisons.

AHCA is off to a good start in that regard. The Insurers get to go back to the bad ol' days of a Pick-n-Choose customer base, plus they get to siphon bunches of dollars out of the Treasury by playing in the High Risk Pool.  And that's just the shit I can see from here.

The rich get richer and the rest of us get fucked with our pants on.