Saturday, March 25, 2017

No Man To Do Business With



Yesterday was quite a day. The Republican repudiation of Barack Obama's health care bill went down to defeat. Ezra Klein doesn't mince words:

Let’s be clear about what happened here. The American Health Care Act failed because it was a terrible piece of legislation. It would have thrown 24 million people off insurance and raised deductibles for millions more — and the savings would’ve gone to pay for tax cuts for millionaires. It broke virtually all of Donald Trump’s campaign promises, and was opposed not just by Democrats but also by Republicans.

This is a failure for Speaker Paul Ryan on many levels. He wrote this bill, and when the speaker takes over the process like that, the upside is it’s supposed to create legislation that can pass. On this most basic task, Ryan failed, and failed spectacularly.

But beyond the legislative and tactical deficiencies, the AHCA reflected a deeper failure of moral and policy imagination. Ryan spent the latter half of Barack Obama’s presidency promising to repair the Republican Party’s relationship with the poor (remember Ryan’s “poverty tour”?). He’s spent every day since the passage of Obamacare saying the Republicans could do better. This is what he came up with? The GOP put their greatest policy mind in charge of the House of Representatives and they got ... this?

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of an intellectually and morally bankrupt party. He is the prefect CEO for such an organization. He now claims that he will move on to tax reform and building a wall which the American people -- not the Mexicans -- will pay for.

But it won't be easy accomplishing those objectives. He also plans to build the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. However, the same kind of public opposition to Trumpcare will greet those projects.

Yesterday, Mr. Trudeau applauded the rebirth of Keystone XL. Not a wise move, Justin. Just ask all those Americans who almost lost their health care what it's like to do business with the Great Orange Id.

Image: Sputnik News

4 comments:

the salamander said...

.. all else aside, intelligent & coherent folk
just need to examine Trump University.. as rock solid fact..
Historic & hysterical failure, deceit, deception, fraud

On a tiny miniscule scale.. that's the Trump presidential regime
with GOP riding upon the beast.. pretending to 'have a plan'
Genius hidden background creep Bannon & fellow front man grifter Trump
playing some sort of whiny fake news surrealism scam..

The whole bag of shite are windbags or windigos
pimps to Big Energy.. freedom to pollute, destroy & extract
Trump needs to retreat to the 'Trumple Tower'
and/or Mar A Lago with his lifetime Secret Service gang
Bannon back to barking Breitbart idiocy..

Get Ivanka the hell out of White House & Classified Docs
and Price & Kellyanne can get on with best seller tell all's ..
Its all a stupendous farce.. the various perps & complicits revealed

Here in Canada eh
we can trust the Conservative Leadership
and bizzaro offshoots like Jason Kenney, O'Leary, Ambrose
who knelt at the foot of Republican, Tea Party wisdom
for advice on how to fabricate fictional fantasy 'steady hand'
at the tiller.. so to speak

Earth to mainstream media.. hello .. hello ..
is anybody out there .. hello hello ...
hell ... ..

Owen Gray said...

Grifters all, salamander.

The Mound of Sound said...

Next up, supposedly, is tax reform. Of course they'll probably need a budget before they can meddle with shifting the tax burden increasingly on the shoulders of middle income earners. The tax breaks wrapped up in the cadaver of Ryan's health care farce showed where they're headed. And let's forget Trump's real baby, another $54-billion for America's military.

Then there's his trillion dollar infrastructure initiative. Like Trudeau's programme that will probably be a licence for private sector vultures to rape the populace for generations to come.

Do these jackasses have any vision at all?

Owen Gray said...

No vision and no conscience, Mound.