Trump just said in New Hampshire that he's going to unleash competition on U.S. healthcare after he repeals Obamacare, specifically by allowing Americans to buy health insurance across state lines.
Trump said the insurance companies are making a killing on Obamacare. The fact is, insurance companies are taking about 3 cents of every healthcare dollar in profit.
The problem is that U.S. medical care is too damn expensive. Insurance companies chip away at the edges and screw us in the process, through recission, yes, but they aren't the real problem.
Buying a cracker-jack health policy from a rinky-dink insurance provider in Rhode Island isn't going to do a thing for the cost of your care at home; it's only going to hit you when you actually need it that your insurance policy doesn't cover s**t.
Showing posts with label GOP primaries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GOP primaries. Show all posts
Saturday, February 6, 2016
Ted Cruz: The first talk radio presidential candidate
Ted Cruz is the first talk radio presidential candidate, so it's no wonder Glenn Beck has endorsed him. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and others also gush over him.
I say that because Cruz, like a talk radio host, owes his popularity to staking out the "purest" (read: most extreme) views within his party, without any hope of ever getting what he wants.
Cruz has never compromised in the Senate, he only grandstands, meaning he gets nothing done. He's a shameless self-promoter who has zero endorsements from his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who can't stand him.
It's amazing that Cruz looks like a strong candidate for the GOP nomination, having just won Iowa. (But not without some dirty tricks.)
It just goes to show that talk radio runs the GOP. Too bad talk radio takes zero responsibility for governing, just like Ted Cruz.
Now if you want a good look at the real Ted Cruz, in his young and striving young-adult years, read this:
http://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-and-track-down-a-ted-cr-1752337625
I say that because Cruz, like a talk radio host, owes his popularity to staking out the "purest" (read: most extreme) views within his party, without any hope of ever getting what he wants.
Cruz has never compromised in the Senate, he only grandstands, meaning he gets nothing done. He's a shameless self-promoter who has zero endorsements from his Republican colleagues in the Senate, who can't stand him.
It's amazing that Cruz looks like a strong candidate for the GOP nomination, having just won Iowa. (But not without some dirty tricks.)
It just goes to show that talk radio runs the GOP. Too bad talk radio takes zero responsibility for governing, just like Ted Cruz.
Now if you want a good look at the real Ted Cruz, in his young and striving young-adult years, read this:
http://theslot.jezebel.com/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-and-track-down-a-ted-cr-1752337625
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
GOP candidate reveals Tea Parties' true motivation
You can read the rest of this article about one of the last "Republican Establishmentarians" fighting (albeit passively) for his political life, but what I found fascinating was this frank admission from Tea Party challenger, Glenn Beck/Breitbart darling and Senator wannabe Chris McDaniel of Mississippi [emphasis mine]:
McDaniel, however, routinely casts his mission not as a break with the past but as a bulwark against a frightening future."Millions in this country feel like strangers in this land," he says. "An older America is passing away. A newer America is rising to take its place. We recoil from that culture. It’s foreign to us. It’s offensive to us." This is a remarkably frank declaration of the vision of the Tea Party embraced by liberal social scientists: an expression, above all, of old white people's anxieties at the prospect of an urbanizing, liberalizing, diversifying America.
Tea Partiers can talk all they want about being for smaller government and fiscal conservatism -- they are -- but that's not what really drives them emotionally, it's not what gets their back up.
It's the "culture wars" -- more precisely, the demographic destiny of America -- that alternately worries and infuriates them.
America is getting less white and more liberal and this trend will only continue. The old white Tea Parties know it and it drives them nuts.
By Molly Ball
June 3, 2014 | The Atlantic
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Taibbi: GOP makes 'circular firing squad' for lack of targets
Here's Taibbi's take-away from the GOP presidential primaries so far, culminating in the Arizona debate:
"This is where the Republican Party is now. They've run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They've already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!"This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask![...]"These people have run out of others to blame, run out of bystanders to suspect, run out of decent family people to dismiss as Godless, sex-crazed perverts. They're turning the gun on themselves now. It might be justice, or it might just be sad. Whatever it is, it's remarkable to watch."
Or, as somebody else noted, even Ronald Reagan wouldn't be considered Reaganeque enough by today's hardcore rightwing electorate.
Not that my opinion or Taibbi's matters to Republicans, nevertheless, I've been trying to keep silent about just how crazy the available GOP choices are, so as not to jinx anything. Too bad it looks like Gingrich is out of the running. My next best choice is Rick "Every Sperm is Sacred" Santorum. (Fifty percent of American voters are women, you dumbass.) Of course Romney, the nominee apparent, will be fun to watch squirming as he denies perhaps his best achievement as governor of Massachusetts, "Romneycare."
Nope, nobody can pass the GOP's Primary Purity Test; but it's fascinating to watch them all try. Then it will be even more fun to watch the eventual nominee try and take it all back as he runs to the middle: "No, no, America. That's not what I meant! I'm not that crazy!"
By Matt Taibbi
February 23, 2012 | Rolling Stone
GOP plans would blow up national debt
Here's how much the tax & spend plans of "fiscally responsible" GOP candidates would grow the U.S. national debt over 10 years, according to non-partisan U.S. Budget Watch:
Gingrich: $7 trillion
Romney: $2.6 trillion
Santorum: $4.5 trillion
By Lori Montgomery
February 23, 2012 | Washington Post
Friday, February 17, 2012
Megadeth for Santorum!
Well this seals it. If the man who sang "99 Ways to Die" supports Rick Santorum, that's all I need to know.
I know, I know, some of you are still waiting to see who Ted Nugent will endorse. Too many good choices out there!
February 16, 2012
By Steve Inskeep | NPR
URL: http://n.pr/xDue8X
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Face of Evil revealed: We've been had!
Aha!
Folks, we've been had. Our thanks to Michele Bachmann for this life-saving revelation. This is like that part in the movie when the hero who has been chasing the bad guy the whole time suddenly realizes the devil is the other guy who is now walking up to the dais to applause and handshakes.
It wasn't Obama... it was Cain all along! Don't you see? It was a big diversion. Cain is the Anti-Christ!
He could have made it the 8-8-8 or the 10-10-10 plan, but no, Cain chose 9-9-9. (6-6-6 would have been too obvious).
The signs are all there. I mean, Herman Cain -- Herman CAIN. Come on! Cain killed Abel! And Quoth Wikipedia:
"In the Greek New Testament, Cain is referred to as εκ του πονηρου. In at least one translation this is rendered 'from the evil one', while others have 'of the evil one.' Some interpreters take this to mean that Cain was literally the son of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. A parallel idea can be found in Jewish tradition, that the serpent (Hebrew nahash נחש) from the Garden of Eden was father to firstborn Cain."
We shoulda known something was up when he was black. We've gotta stop this before it's too late and nominate Romney!
By Alexander Burns
October 11, 2011 | Politico
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Why Tea Party candidates won't be elected
The Tea Parties have done their job: they helped win an election and scared the herd of "RINOs" back to the far right, purging the GOP of any free-thinkers or moderates. And if the GOP takes the presidency in 2012, you can stick a fork in them immediately: their anger will turn to joy; and anger not joy is their fuel. In any case they will fade, fade, fade away.
Why Tea Party candidates won't win any elections next year: because mainstream Republicans now spout the same ideas.
By David Weigel
August 24, 2011 | Slate
Jamie Radtke was supposed to be the Tea Party's next giant-killer. She'd put together the biggest movement convention ever, a two-day gathering in Richmond, Va., under the banner of her Virginia Tea Party Patriots. When George Allen took the stage, subliminally begging the grassroots to support his comeback bid for Senate, the irony was just too sweet: Radtke used to work for this guy, and now he was kowtowing to her.
And so, two days after Christmas 2010, Radtke announced her Senate campaign. It was national news for reporters looking for the next Christine O'Donnell, the next Joe Miller, the next Sharron Angle. When three freshmen senators launched the Tea Party Caucus in January 2011, she scored an invite to speak at the meeting. Rand Paul talked for five minutes. She talked for seven. In short order she started appearing, and talking, at all sorts of Tea Party events in Washington. She raised more than $250,000—not much, only one-tenth as much as Allen, but not fringe candidate money.
So, how's the giant-killing quest going? Terribly. Earlier this month, a Public Policy Polling survey gave Allen a 68 percent-to-6 percent lead over Radtke, with the rest of the vote split among more marginal candidates. Tea Party activists in the state say they've been focused on this year's state elections, and anyway, she's not unifying the movement.
On Wednesday, the Radtke campaign euthanized its old win-over-the-tastemakers strategy by attacking RedState blogger Erick Erickson and claiming that he hadn't done enough to promote her. Not so, said Erickson: He endorsed her, and then she proceeded to induce comas whenever she talked to activists, and then she screwed him over.
And that's one measure of how the next round of Tea Party challenges is going. Another: Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who actually tied Sen. Orrin Hatch in some polls of Utah Republicans, just announced he was taking a pass on the campaign. Another: Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, whom Erickson says is now the ripest Tea Party target for 2012, is waiting to see whether a conservative state senator will jump into his primary, split up the conservative vote, and help him win. Another? Sure, why not. Sen. Olympia Snowe may be beatable in Maine, but she's only got to beat a fractured field of nobodies.
Are we witnessing the end of the Tea Party's electoral rebellion? Did the GOP civil war reach Appomattox, and nobody noticed? Those questions assume that the Tea Party's goal was to purge Republicans in primaries. That was just one of the movement's goals, and we're finding out that, yes, it may have run its course.
In 2010, when they wanted to take out Republicans, the Tea Party had relatively easy pickings. Their three biggest victories were in Delaware, Alaska, and Utah. Delaware and Alaska are, respectively, the 45th and 47th most populous states. Only 57,582 Republicans voted in the Christine O'Donnell-Mike Castle primary; only 109,750 voted in the Joe Miller-Lisa Murkowski primary. Utah nominates all candidates at party conventions, which put Sen. Bob Bennett's fate at the hands of 3,500-odd Republicans. Compare that to the stakes in Indiana. In 2010, when Dan Coats lucked out and beat a split conservative field for the GOP's Senate nod, he won more than 217,225 out of 550,000 votes.
So: It's hard winning elections. It's even harder because the Republican "establishment," insofar as such a thing still exists, consists of fairly smart people who know what happened last time. When Bob Bennett's slayer, Mike Lee, arrived in the Senate, Hatch started copying his homework and showing up at every Lee presser. He kept up his outreach to Utah's Tea Party leaders, like classic car dealer David Kirkham. He used his powerful position as ranking member of the finance committee to add credibility to Tea Party arguments about the debt, like the idea that the administration was fibbing about the impact of passing the Aug. 2 deadline without raising the debt limit.
Yet when Chaffetz passed on the race, those Tea Partiers Hatch had been courting were still shocked. "It was quite surprising," Kirkham says. "He'll still be vigorously challenged. We're looking for someone who's been more reliably conservative, but we had been working really hard to work with Hatch."
This was a victory that looked like a loss. The Tea Party, the Club for Growth—the whole movement has succeeded in driving Republicans further to the right. Nuking a few moderates in primaries was only part of that—a great story for the horse-race media, but not something that would keep up as the GOP was purified. Think about the Tea Party as repeating (and perfecting) the strategy liberals used in 2006 and after, when online activists and unions banded together to beat Joe Lieberman in his U.S. Senate primary in Connecticut.
Lieberman ended up returning to the Senate. Liberals would oust only a couple more Democrats, like Maryland's Rep. Al Wynn, in the next election cycle. But the Lieberman challenge drew a neon line in front of the party's candidates: Oppose the Iraq War, oppose the surge, or you go nowhere. The party's presidential candidates obeyed. Its next presidential nominee won the primaries in a squeaker in part because he, alone among the frontrunners, had always opposed the Iraq War.
Republicans seem to have figured this out. It's increasingly likely that no incumbent Republican will lose a primary to a Tea Partier in 2012. The movement can consolidate its gains. Safe districts and the fear of primaries do more to keep Republicans straight than the occasional wins.
But some activists still like to think about bloodying up the party some more. Virginia activists, while bearish on Radtke, are bemused and annoyed that Allen has his own prefab Tea Party group to make it look like he's gotten right with them. It's possible that Lugar could go down—even if the primary is split, even if his main challenger, Richard Mourdock, keeps pulling in weak numbers. "That would all make it more difficult," says George Ethridge of the Corydon Tea Party, "but Mourdock can beat Lugar."
What about Utah, where a likely coup just turned into a frantic search for a self-funding candidate with great hair? Kirkham hasn't talked to Hatch recently, but he wants to keep putting the fear in him.
"He scored a touchdown, but he shouldn't be dancing in the end zone," he says. "The game is still on."
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Poor comedian Ron Paul: 'I get no respect, I tell ya!'
It's an interesting journalistic conundrum: Should the MSM give Ron Paul "equal time," when they, Republicans, and everybody else knows Ron Paul is a joke candidate with a reckless ideology sprinkled with a few good ideas (like, end the trillion-dollar wars -- doy!) that even most libertarians are afraid of realizing 100% but don't care because they know their worldview never will accepted, and who doesn't have a shot in hell at getting nominated by the GOP, much less get elected President?
My first response is, No, the media should not give Ron Paul equal time. Contrary to what some people think, the media's job is not to act as human dictaphones relaying to us the talking points of famous and powerful people. Instead, journalists are charged with providing us facts in their proper context, with analysis where appropriate. And the facts that Ron Paul does well in early primaries, has a small but rabidly loyal fan base, and raises lots of small contributions on the Internet are not the whole story; his repeated pathetic failure to attract his own party's attention despite having lots of chances is the real story.
I digress, but: If Ron Paul is so hardcore about being a libertarian, why doesn't he run as a libertarian anymore? At a certain point, don't you get the message that your party doesn't want you? Ralph Nader got that message a long, long time ago. Is it because Ron Paul likes being a 13-time Congressman from Texas a little too much? Even worse than ignoring him though, his party took the Tea thing that Paul invented before there was astroturfing, and then not so politely told Little Ronnie to go back to the kids' table empty-handed. His party shamelessly stole from him, and then refused to give him any credit, and continued to roll its eyes at him like a lunatic. I mean, his son, who was elected to the Senate from Kentucky for the first time by watering down his dad's nutty speeches, instantly became more famous and influential than Ron. What a slap in the face that must have been for dad!....
Upon reflection, however, perhaps there is an important place for the perennial losers like Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, who, one could argue, act as the party's conscience, and who tug more electable candidates back in the correct ideological direction. Another way to spin this is, they give us voters a chance to see how far the front-runners are willing to go, how much they are willing to pander to the ideological fringes just to get nominated -- all the while sweating how they're going to take it all back in the general election when faced with moderate/independent voters who want bland oatmeal.
In the end it doesn't really matter. In any case, Ron Paul supporters will blame the lib'rul media for Paul's "invisibility cloak," -- the same invisibility cloak that liberal Ralph Nader wears, courtesy of the same lib'rul media -- although it was lib'rul comedian Jon Stewart who busted FOX and the MSM for going out of its way to make Paul the veritable "13th floor" of the GOP Hotel. Watch it:
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