One Reason Why The Senate Sucks And Will Never Find Trump Guilty

James Madison should have fought harder

"He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had." -Chief of Staff John Kelly (from Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in The White House)

Unless the Kremlin manages to steal the election again, it's likely that the Democrats will win a substantial majority in the House. Starting next January, Speaker Pelosi could have 250 votes to the GOP's 185, give or take. If reports from Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee (which includes 3 of Congress' intellectual giants-- Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, and Jamie Raskin-- come up with the evidence to impeach, it won't be that hard for the House to do it, despite all the New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party the DCCC is stocking Congress with. But what happens then?

Trump would then be tried by the Senate. No matter which party gets the majority-- and it will be close (possibly depending on whether or not Beto beats Cruz)-- it would be hard to imagine the Senate finding Trump guilty regardless of what Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee find. Even if you want to discount the fact that Doug Jones (D-AL) is up for reelection in 2020 and will be reluctant to vote against Trump, the Democrats are would need 67 votes, meaning more than a dozen Republicans regardless of how well they do in November. That's virtually impossible, unless Mueller can prove definitively that Trump was taking boatloads of cash from Putin to-- for example-- wreck NATO and undermine U.S. alliances worldwide.

And there's more than just basic math in play here. A couple of weeks ago Justin Fox, writing for Bloomberg News and Dave Wasserman, writing for the New York Times explained how inherently un-representative (or anti-democratic) the Senate is-- and was meant to be. Wasserman: "a majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population... much whiter, more rural and pro-Trump than the nation as a whole. In effect, geography could again be Mr. Trump’s greatest protector: After all, the Senate-- not the House-- would have the final say on any impeachment proceedings."

Justin Fox's OpEd, The Senate Has Always Been Wildly Unrepresentative just to the reasons why it was created that way. "The primary author of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, wanted to replace the ineffectual governance by sovereign states of the Articles of the Confederation with a national system built on individual representation, and thought it obvious that Senate seats should be apportioned on the basis of population. He also seemed confident that his view would prevail, writing to George Washington a few weeks before the start of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that:

A majority of the States, and those of greatest influence, will regard it as favorable to them. To the Northern States it will be recommended by their present populousness; to the Southern by their expected advantage in this respect. The lesser States must in every event yield to the predominant will. But the consideration which particularly urges a change in the representation is that it will obviate the principal objections of the larger States to the necessary concessions of power.

But, as Fox pointed out, "the lesser states did not yield and the larger states did," which resulted in the un-representative, anachronistic Senate of 2018. He referenced an essay by Philip Bump who pointed out that by 2040, 70% of the population will live in just 15 states and thus select only 30% of U.S. Senators. The huge populations of California and Texas are especially viewed as unfair (in those two states) and there has been talk about breaking up into several states and even about seceding from the Union.

Fox explains that 10 states growing the fastest are losing per-person Senate representation (above) while in the states losing population, residents "have been gaining lots of per-person Senate clout" (below).

Juan Williams took a shot at this yesterday for The Hill, noting that "Republican control of Capitol Hill and the White House is based on a 'fake majority.'... America’s politics are being run by a cabal in the Senate that fails to represent 82 percent of the American people." The results that Williams sees are catastrophic-- especially in terms of the Supreme Court.

For starters, the 18 percent controlling the Senate have their own right-wing agenda beyond protecting an unpopular president.

They want a Supreme Court majority that reflects their views and not the views of the majority of the people.

To take control of the court they blocked President Obama-- a Democrat twice elected with a majority of the popular vote as well as a majority of the electoral college-- for close to a year from appointing a centrist judge to the high court.

Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who will preside over this week’s hearings, refused to even give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone an up or down vote.

And now having already replaced Garland and installed a solid conservative-- Neil Gorsuch-- the Senate Republicans, who represent fewer than 1-in-5 Americans, are about to force another conservative on the Supreme Court.

If they succeed in locking in another conservative, this time Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they will cement a conservative majority on the court for decades in an act that might be described as tyranny.

It is not just the Senate that is acting against the will of the majority.

Remember that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed, there is nothing stopping the 5-4 conservative majority on the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and denying millions of American women the right to an abortion.

This despite the fact that only 29 percent of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases, according to a July Quinnipiac poll. The vast majority of Americans, 64 percent, want it legal in all or most cases.

Then there is the tyranny of Trump-led GOP efforts to cripple the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

With Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ.) death, there is nothing stopping the 18-percent-Senate-majority from passing their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and strip health care from millions of Americans-- even though the latest Kaiser poll taken over the summer shows that 50 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the ACA compared to 41 percent who view it unfavorably.

A June Quinnipiac poll similarly found that 51 percent want the ACA to remain in place and 44 percent want it repealed. McCain famously killed the repeal effort because, for all their complaints, Republicans never came up with a better bill to help Americans with the high cost of healthcare.

Will the Arizona Republican who is appointed to fill his seat display the same courage?

Then there is the tyranny of GOP tax cuts.

The 18-percent-Senate-majority passed tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest one percent of Americans.

Forty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the Trump tax law, according to Quinnipiac polling.

An August Fox poll found that ObamaCare is now more popular than the Republican tax cuts. More than half of voters, 51 percent, favor ObamaCare compared to 40 percent who approved of the tax cuts.

That finding is bolstered by another poll, a CNBC survey from June, which found that 49 percent of working American adults-- a plurality of all the people polled-- said they do not have more take-home pay because of the law.

How about the president’s aggressive focus on border security? Again, a majority in the Fox poll said they disapprove. Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration policy.

And when it comes to the Republican president’s handling of race relations, 58 percent in the Fox poll said they disapproved.

So, to recap: The lives of over 300 million Americans are being affected by policies foisted on them by a Senate “majority” that represents less than one-fifth of them and a president who was elected with three million fewer votes than his opponent.

Meanwhile, even as daily controversy, including federal convictions of his associates, surrounds Trump, the 18 percent represented by the GOP majority in the Senate protects the president from impeachment.

What is wrong with this picture?

...Trump has normalized many horrible things in our politics: racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption.

Future historians may look back and conclude one of the most corrosive things he normalized was minority-posing-as-majority tyranny that cheats the majority of the American people out of their democracy.

Long Before Trump Took Over The Party, The FlimFlam Man Was Turning The GOP Into The FlimFlam Party

Juan Williams betrays himself with his extreme Beltway perspective by asserting in a Hill OpEd Monday, that "Ryan has squandered his stellar reputation as a smart, conservative visionary" by turning himself into a Trump enabler. Yes, Ryan is a Trump enabler. No, Ryan has never had a stellar reputation as a smart, conservative visionary, except among Beltway imbeciles who bought into the carefully propagated narrative paid for by the corporate money men behind Ryan from when they thought this particular well-spoken empty suit could carry their austerity message. Krugman caught on early and warned everyone. Juan Williams, apparently, wasn't paying attention when Krugman explained what a flam-flam man is. Williams sounds like he just woke up from a decades long sleep to discover that "By excusing President Trump’s bad behavior, [Ryan] has made it clear his only priorities are that Trump put conservatives on the Supreme Court and sign tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporations." It's been over a decade that that was clear to everyone Outside the Beltway who pays even a little attention. But that wasn't the end of Williams waking up saga:

And what happened to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)?

McConnell once took pride in defying Trump by having his Republican majority pass a law last year to punish Russia by imposing sanctions on countries buying military equipment from that nation. The penalties were intended to penalize Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and stop its ongoing meddling in American politics.

But McConnell had little to say when the Trump administration said in late January that it would not impose Congress’s sanctions.

Ryan, Corker and McConnell are leading GOP lights who have ceded their party’s moral center in service to protecting Trump.

Until Trump came along, the party stood for cutting federal spending. It was the pro-immigration party. And after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Republicans backed the secret surveillance provisions of the Patriot Act to protect against spies and terrorists.

Now it is a different party.

Currently, congressional Republicans make excuses for refusing to put checks and balances on the excesses of Trump’s executive branch.

Today’s GOP offers political cover for a man with no history in the party as he denigrates, degrades, and destroys vital American institutions, including law enforcement, the free press and the GOP.

Ryan is the biggest disappointment.

Even if you disagree with him, Ryan has a history of standing up for what he thinks is right.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, a fearless Ryan said Trump, then the leading candidate for the GOP nomination, was wrong to attack an Indiana judge because the judge had Mexican ancestry. Ryan pulled no punches in calling out Trump for making “the textbook definition of a racist statement.”

Now Ryan is looking the other way on far more damaging Trump behavior.

He ignored pleadings from the Justice Department and the FBI to stop the release of a classified memo-- written by Republicans-- that purportedly showed wrongdoing by law enforcement in obtaining a warrant to conduct surveillance of a known friend to Russian intelligence, the Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Ryan said the memo had nothing to do with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign. It was about misconduct by some agents, he said.

But once it was out, Trump tweeted that the memo “totally vindicates” him, even though it said nothing about collusion or obstruction of justice, the focus of Mueller’s work.

When Ryan was asked about this, he mumbled and walked away from reporters.

He had no explanation for allowing his credibility to be used by Trump.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, a Trump supporter, said on the basis of the memo that the Mueller probe ought to be disbanded-- and that charges brought against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn should be dropped.

Ryan opened the door to this nonsense.

“I have been a consistent defender of his good intentions,” conservative columnist Michael Gerson wrote of Ryan recently in the Washington Post. “But after the 17th time saying he ‘knows better,’ it dawns that he may not. By his recent actions, the Speaker has provided political cover for a weakening of the constitutional order. He has been used as a tool while loudly insisting he is not a tool.”

“I believe Ryan to be a good person,” Gerson continued. “But the greatest source of cynicism is not the existence of corrupt people in politics; it is good people who lose their way.”

It has been said that corruption is worst when it happens to the best.

The GOP used to be one of the two great American political parties. It gave the country some of the best statesmen of the last hundred years: Jacob Javits, Everett Dirksen, Edward Brooke, Howard Baker, Bob Dole and John McCain.

But in the age of Trump, there are no more GOP profiles in courage-- only profiles in cowardice.

It’s time for all Republicans to speak out against Trump’s corruption. If not, their party will be forever damaged by the time this Trump horror show fades to black.

Williams forgot to mention Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I'm not so sure about Dole and McCain, but Jacob Javits served in the Senate from 1957 to 1980 and was succeeded by Al D'Amato, Dirksen from 1951 to 1968, Ed Brooke from 1967 to 1978 and-- if you want to count him-- Howard Baker from 1967 to 1984. Ryan was a physical fitness trainer with the brain of a parrot, an empty cup who was happy to be filled with anything that reminded him of the only two books he apparently read when he was a teenager, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.



I wanted to ask a couple of congressmembers who have worked with Ryan. I've noticed that there aren't any Democrats-- excluding perhaps a couple of Blue Dogs from time to time-- who share the Beltway perspective Juan Williams was propagating again. "The fundamental problem with Paul Ryan," Alan Grayson told me this morning, "has nothing to do with his unrequited love for Donald Trump, or his shallow knee-jerk libertarianism. It has to do with core responsibility as Speaker of the House. He has perpetuated Boehner’s policy of keeping the House on lock-down. The House is passing nothing but right-wing 'message' bills, with no Democratic input, that have no chance of passing the Senate.  Say whatever you want about Pelosi, but her Obamacare bill contained more than 100 GOP amendments, and everything was decided on the merits. Ryan, in contrast, is perfectly willing to do absolutely nothing to address the needs of ordinary Americans, or even to fund the government in a timely manner, as the House of Representatives hurtles toward complete irrelevance."

Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Caucus, has the district right next door to Ryan's. He's been following Ryan before most of us knew who he was. This morning, he told me that "Since being elected to Congress in 1998, Speaker Ryan has spent the last 20 years fighting for the same misguided policies. And while he has long championed legislation for corporations and the wealthy, rather than the American middle class, his rise to the Speaker of the House, coupled with President Trump’s election, has further shown his true colors. Rather than stand up to the President and act as a check on the Executive Branch, Speaker Ryan acts like a junior member of the White House staff. This should come as no surprise, as Speaker Ryan has always failed to take the moral stance on issues, and tax cuts for GOP donors must come at any cost."

Ro Khanna is serving in the House now. He told me that when he was in high school a number of his friends were "drawn to the simple black and white view of the Ayn Rand novels Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Then they went to college and developed some intellectual humility. They realized that Rand is terrible literature. They realized that life is more complex, that human beings aren’t cardboard cutouts, and that worst of all, Rand is a B list thinker who wrote novels based on a cliff notes version of Neitzsche’s philosophy of the Superman." He continued along those lines:

Paul Ryan never had that evolution in thinking. So we have running our nation's economy policy-- let there be no doubt that Trump has outsourced policy to Ryan-- someone who is stuck in a high school intellectual framework.

Is it any wonder that he would push through a tax plan that will exacerbate income inequality when economists know that the biggest impediment to economic growth is inequality as it restricts consumer demand. In a world on automation, where we know that the rich will do well, our biggest task a a country is to have sufficient consumer spending given job loss and displacement. Totally oblivious to facts, totally oblivious to the software revolution we are living in, Ryan has passed policies that are based on an outdated Randian framework and will hurt the economic growth of the U.S. It just doesn’t hurt working people. Rand’s free market absolutism is undermining the very policies that made America an economic superpower-- namely support for a strong middle class that would buy things and fuel growth!

The Best Laid Plans Of Mice And... Paul Ryan

McCain got a lot of ink over the weekend for his trip to the security meeting in Munich, ink that was primarily centered on his sharp criticism of Trump and Trumpism. He appeared on Meet the Press Sunday saying that he worries Trump doesn't understand the important issues confronting the country nor how to run an operation like the White House, which he pointed out is now mired in chaos. Miss McConnell, of course, is far more circumspect in his criticism of Trump, but it doesn't take much reading between the lines to see how frightened he is that Trump is going to drag the Republican Party into the toilet with him. He told the Weekly Standard that the president’s approval numbers would be "10 to 15 points higher if he allowed himself to stay on message... What [Trump’s] saying makes everything harder."

Juan Williams asserted in an Op-Ed for The Hill Monday that If a White House scandal begins to damage the GOP brand, the political dynamic will shift [and McConnell and the Senate Republicans will head for the hills]. The 2018 midterm elections defined by Trump scandals will threaten Republican control of the Senate-- not the Trump White House. If Republicans in Congress look to be covering up a national scandal, they open the door to a 'change election' that pushes them out of power."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has already pledged to investigate the Russian controversy. But that is not enough for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who argues that the GOP majority on that panel could lead to a cover-up.

“Republicans need to look in the mirror and do a gut check,” she told the New York Times. She wants an open, public investigation in the form of a select committee.

Top Senate Republicans are resisting a select committee so far.

But the counter-threat for Republicans is the prospect of a catastrophic 2018 election.

...Already, Senate Republicans are open to writing a law requiring Congress to sign off on any changes in the current sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration.

It is a different story in the House, where fear of blowback from Trump supporters has the leadership playing defense for the president.

The House Intelligence Committee is chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican who served with Gen. Flynn on Trump’s presidential transition team at a time when some of the illicit communication between Trump’s team and Russia apparently was going on.

Does this mean that Nunes is investigating himself, along with his House colleagues who also served on the transition team?

In addition, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said last week his committee would not be investigating the Flynn scandal.

"I think that situation has taken care of itself,” Chaffetz said. “I know that the Intel committee is looking into the hacking issue.”

Chaffetz had no problem asserting his committee’s broad jurisdiction over matters of national security when they were looking into Benghazi.

Chaffetz did call for an investigation by the Department of Justice on the Russian issue--  but not into Flynn, only into who leaked the transcripts to reporters.

That is consistent with Trump’s complaint that the real story is media bias against him, as well as leaks from the intelligence agencies intended to do political damage.

Senate Republicans have fully accepted that there needs to be some form of investigation.

“I don’t think we need to go through setting up a special committee,” McConnell said. “But we are going to look at Russian involvement in the U.S. elections. It’s a significant issue.”

The contrast between how Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) House Republicans and McConnell’s Senate Republications handle Flynn is instructive.

Just as Ryan mishandled Trump’s candidacy during the campaign, he is mishandling Trump’s presidency. Ryan did chide Trump over the Muslim ban and his slander of Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s integrity on the basis of his ethnicity. But Ryan still backed him on the basis of party unity.

McConnell, on the other hand, kept his mouth shut and never took the bait when asked to respond to a Trump tweet or rude remark, instead focusing on preserving his Senate majority.

As last week showed, McConnell is a much shrewder political operator than his party colleagues in the House.

He is putting daylight between Trump and the fate of the Senate GOP majority.

This growing chasm-- and lack of cohesion-- inside the Republican Party is, naturally enough, impacting the party's ability to get anything done. Over all, that's extremely lucky for the American public. Remember when they were promising to repeal Obamacare on day one? Trump's incompetent and chaotic regime is also making it impossible for the Republicans to move any of their agenda-- other than setting Wall Street free to rape and pillage again, and that because they have unwavering support for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (the Wall Street-financed New Dems and Blue Dogs).



Sunday, on Face the Nation (just before the 4 minutes mark on the tape above), Lindsey Graham noted that "the Congress is stumbling. Republicans in the Congress... we’re all tied up in knots. The House is talking about a tax plan that won’t get 10 votes in the Senate. So it's not just the administration that's got problems. Republicans in the House and the Senate have problems and I hope that we will get out act together." He also said that a free press and independent judiciary-- both of which have beens severey attacked by Trump-- are "worth fighting and dying for. The bottom line here," he warned Trump, "is America is not becoming a dictatorship."

So why won't Ryan's tax plan-- raising taxes on the middle class and giving massive breaks to the very wealthy-- get even votes in the Senate? Ryan and his brain surgeon who heads the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Texas extremist Kevin Brady, came up with this outrageous Trump-inspired 20% across-the-board tax increase on imports to finance tax cuts for the very rich (i.e., the political donor class which underwrites the politicians' sleazy, disgusting careers). David Perdue (R-GA), points out that Ryan's plan is both "regressive"-- which is actually pretty standard for GOP tax plans-- and that it "hammer consumers." Republicans don't like that label, especially before an election.

Cory Gardner, a Republican from swing-state Colorado, is another Republican who wants Ryan to shove his tax plan up his ass. Last week, on the Senate floor he noted that "If you were to go to a farmer and say what does a border adjustment tax mean to you, they might try to sell the farm right then." He quoted the Wall Street Journal article from February 8, ,The Next American Farm Bust Is Upon Us.

The Farm Belt is hurtling toward a milestone: Soon there will be fewer than two million farms in America for the first time since pioneers moved westward after the Louisiana Purchase. Across the heartland, a multiyear slump in prices for corn, wheat and other farm commodities brought on by a glut of grain world-wide is pushing many farmers further into debt. Some are shutting down, raising concerns that the next few years could bring the biggest wave of farm closures since the 1980s."

Today, The Hill published an OpEd by Ro Khanna (D-CA) making a cohesive case against Ryan's idiotic border adjustment tax, which Khanna points out is "reverse redistribution... It is taking money out of the pockets of middle-class families to pay for a $1 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest individuals and corporations. The entire GOP plan hinges on the assumption that these increased costs will be offset by a stronger dollar. There is a good chance this will not happen. For example, if other countries implement their own tariffs and taxes in response to this U.S. policy, the dollar will not appreciate. Japan implemented a similar policy a couple decades ago and the Yen did not appreciate as expected. Also, most economists believe it could take up to five years for any meaningful appreciation to come about. Middle class families cannot take the risk and pay more for everyday items for five years in the hopes that this financial experiment will eventually work. Do we need a reminder about the last time we took a risk on a 20 percent tax on imported goods? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which President Reagan often cited as the main culprit for the Great Depression."

Paul Ryan Fully Embraces Trump's Style Of Post-Factual Governance

Alan Grayson will be out of Congress in two weeks, but he’s not stopping. He just filed a bill that makes president’s tax returns releasable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). His bill is H.R. 6507 ands Paul Ryan will make sure it’s never voted on while he’s Speaker of the House, something we plan to end after the 2018 congressional elections. Grayson explained to his constituents why he feels his new bill is necessary. “Donald Trump,” he wrote, “is the first major-party Presidential candidate in modern times who refused to release his tax returns. During the campaign, the Faker-in-Chief’s first cover story was that he couldn’t release his tax returns because he was being audited. The IRS refuted that. The Liar-in-Chief’s second cover story was that he would release his returns when Hillary Clinton released her e-mails. Until it was pointed out that she had released her e-mails. (In the immortal words of our new Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, “oops!”) The Cheater-in-Chief’s third story was that he paid lots of income taxes, an amazing amount of income taxes, a bigly amount, a terrible and yet super-classy amount. Until the NY Times actually released a couple of his items, showing him paying nothing. Because, as Trump says, he’s ‘smart.’ Enough. We all deserve to see just how bigly a bigly liar Trump really is. Hence my bill H.R. 6507. Will my bill pass the House tomorrow? Nope, we’re out of session – but it will remind people about just how dishonest ‘Dishonest Donald’ has been, and that’s worth doing. Will my bill pass the House next year, or the year after? Nope, not with the GOP in charge. But if we keep fighting against ‘Deceiving Donald’ for the next two years, and we elect a Democratic House and Senate, then we just may have the pleasure of seeing this Grayson Truth bill pass the House and pass the Senate. Then ‘Deceiving Donald’ would have to take out his veto pen, just to cover up his own deceit. Sweet. I’m out of Congress in two weeks. But I’m going to keep fighting. So should you.”

Without Grayson in Congress, there will be a lot the Republicans are going to be able to get away with that they shouldn’t. But I was gratified over the weekend to see PolitiFact Wisconsin call out one of the worst of that state’s most calculated liars, the shady Congressman from Janesville, Paul Ryan. They awarded his latest Big Lie a “pants on fire!”

Tom Kertscher took on Ryan’s latest fear-mongering about Obamacare impoverishing Medicare— as he prepares to gut both programs and blame everyone but the unhinged GOP. A couple of days after Hillary got nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, Ryan was on Fox News, looking into the camera and lying his ass off: "What people don’t realize is, because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke." Yes, people don’t realize it because it isn’t true. “[H]is claim about the law flies in the face of evidence that it actually helps shore up Medicare.”

Here’s how Marc Goldwein, senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, lays it out:

On one side of the ledger, Obamacare slowed the growth of Medicare spending by, among other things, reducing increases in payments made to nearly all health care providers.

On the other side of the ledger, the law included a surtax on high-income earners that brings more money into Medicare.

Two health care policy experts further told us that the combination of spending curbs and revenue increases for Medicare Part A-- which covers hospital, nursing home and home care services, and is financed mainly through payroll taxes-- has extended the solvency of Medicare.

(Medicare Part B, which is voluntary, covers doctor visits and some medical care.)

Paul Ginsburg, a professor of the practice of health policy and management at the University of Southern California, pointed us to an October 2016 report from the nonprofit Congressional Research Service.

The report noted that in 2010, the Medicare trustees projected that Obamacare’s spending curbs and revenue increases would mean Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, which finances Part A, would remain solvent until 2029.

That’s 12 years later than had been projected a year before the Affordable Care Actd became law.

(The projection has since been revised to 2028.)

Michael Sparer, a professor health policy and management at Columbia University in New York, put it this way, financially speaking:

If Obamacare were repealed completely, "it would put Medicare in worse shape, not better shape."

Finally, it’s worth noting that both Factcheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker also concluded that Ryan’s claim is wrong. They both also noted that, even if the Part A trust fund did become depleted in 2028, the program wouldn’t be broke, in that it is still set up to cover an estimated 87 percent of expenses.

FactCheck.org’s rating was false and the Fact Checker gave Ryan its worst rating, four Pinnocchios, which is for statements deemed to be "whoppers."

Ryan’s office opted not to provide us any information to support his claim.

Our rating

Ryan said: "Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke."

Financially, Medicare isn’t entirely in the clear, given that actuaries project that a key reserve fund will run out of money in 2028.

But the Medicare trustees themselves, along with a host of experts, say the Affordable Care Act’s changes to Medicare-- including holding the line on spending and raising taxes-- actually puts Medicare in better shape than before the law was adopted. That’s a long way from making Medicare go broke.

We rate Ryan’s statement Pants on Fire.

This morning, Juan Williams penned an OpEd for The Hill, The Dangerous Erosion Of Facts, expressing his frustration, shared by so many people, that the severely brainwashed have overturned the old dictum that one if entitled to one’s own opinions, but not to one’s own facts. After years of Fox News and Hate Talk Radio and the recent machinations out of Russia, facts are just a matter of opinion for a majority of Republicans. Ergo: look what’s peacefully taken over the government. “The facts of political life,” he wrote, “are now subject to partisan interpretation. Despite an unprecedented wealth of news gushing from hundreds of cable networks, radio stations, newspapers, Facebook feeds and websites, Americans increasingly live in separate realities when it comes to the facts of our common political lives.”

The core threat to democracy is not that news sites are lying or telling people what to think. The danger is that they are presenting a narrow slate of what to think about.

That means that Trump supporters hear more about charges of voter fraud than Clinton’s victory in the popular vote — and that leads them to think such fraud must be real, giving them an excuse to ignore the factual vote count.

Similarly, they hear less about President Obama’s success in pulling the U.S. out of a deep recession than they hear speculation about the number of people who stopped searching for jobs.

There is no way to overstate that this is a challenge to democracy — a system that is, after all, based on the consent of voters who are fully informed.

Scottie Nell Hughes, the conservative CNN commentator and staunch Trump supporter, recently told radio host Diane Rehm: “There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”

Hughes continued: “And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts — they're not really facts…. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth,” Hughes explained.

The distressing impact of a world free of facts is clearly on Obama’s mind in his final weeks in office. He recently tied the trouble American voters have agreeing on facts to the impact of Russian efforts to influence the presidential race.

“Our political dialogue is such that everybody’s under suspicion, everybody’s corrupt, everybody’s doing things for partisan reasons…,” Obama told reporters last week. He said “talk radio” style news is breaking apart the sense of common destiny among Americans and opening the door to external interference.

“If we want to really reduce foreign influence on our elections, then we better think about how to make sure that our political process, our political dialogue, is stronger than it’s been,” Obama concluded.

Americans, both conservative and liberal, seem to agree with the president that something is haywire when the news media fail to give everyone a common set of facts as the basis for vigorous, partisan debate.

Even before the election, a Gallup September poll found the share of Americans with a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the mass media has hit rock bottom, at just 32 percent — a drop of 15 points since 2007.

The crisis is prompting change.

Facebook, now the nation’s top news source, recently announced steps to label and combat what it considers to be “fake news.” They will have a consortium of independent fact-checking journalists, including people from the Associated Press and FactCheck.org, review articles posted on their social media platform.

Facebook can check for fake stories and false information. But what happens when fact-challenged statements come from politicians and especially the President-elect?

And what happens when Trump is being fed fact-free conspiracy theories by his advisers?

Consider the possibility that Trump acts on “facts” as he hears them from his National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn (ret.). The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency is infamous for disseminating so-called “Flynn Facts,” or dubious assertions.

Some “Flynn Facts” became public on Twitter, including a few with inaccuracies, some taken from fake news sites, and others containing what critics judged to be anti-Muslim sentiments.

A Fox News poll released last week found 25 percent of voters expect Trump to be an “above average” president. Only 11 percent say he’ll be one of the “greatest.” Thirty-one percent of voters say he’ll be “one of the worst.”

In a fact-free world, how does the press report on President Trump? Who will believe them anyway?

Outlandish American Fascists Making The World Safe For Obama's Conservatism

I missed the Republican debate in Iowa. I hear I didn't miss much. Instead I was at a gathering of future progressive leaders (Young People For). It was very inspiring to meet some of these idealistic young men and women who were taking part in a week-long training conducted by People For the American Way but to hear the inspiration of the organization's founding generation-- talks by Norman Lear and Dolores Huerta-- being handed down to future leaders. Meanwhile all I needed to know about the Iowa debate was, oddly enough, on the Fox website in the form of a post by Juan Williams, Debate Shows GOP Is Out of Step With Realities of Today's America.

Last night's debate put on display a Republican Party that still looks like a 1950s Oldsmobile as they prepare to run against one of the hip, new hybrids coming out the multi-national car companies that now run Detroit.

Despite his troubles, President Obama looks sleek, fast and so very hip as compared the Republicans on view in Iowa. The President remains the mixed-race, son-of-an immigrant, in touch with the under 30 crowd that makes up about half of 2011 America.

It was not just the absence of dynamic people of color and women at the GOP debate that rankle young Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, working women, and immigrants. The answers coming from the candidates felt like the voice of your grandfather's GOP.

It is hearing the only woman on the stage talking about being "submissive," and "obedient."

One of the most astounding parts of the debate for me was when the moderators polled the candidates and asked if they would oppose a deficit reduction package that included government spending cuts to tax increases by a ratio of 10:1. Every single candidate on the stage raised their hand in opposition. No tax increases under any circumstances.

This puts the candidates out of step with the realities of America today, and American public opinion. As a CBS/New York Times poll from last week showed, a majority of Americans - in both political parties-- want to see tax increases on the wealthiest Americans in addition to spending cuts. By taking the no-new-taxes-pledge the candidates are even in disagreement majority of the Republicans-- the very people who will choose the nominee. 

A review of the GOP ideas debated last night for improving on President Obama's disappointing first term reveals a patchwork of proposals that led to economic problems, antagonism towards immigrants, especially Hispanics, and indifference to the poor and seniors.

On immigration reform the candidates offered only knee-jerk, talk radio sound bites about building even bigger walls, complete with electrified barb wire-- oh, that was supposed to be a joke. Do these candidates think only the most hateful, anti-immigrant bullies are listening?

Where are serious proposals about how to deal with 12 million illegal immigrants who add economic vitality, youthful energy, and transformative culture to America? What about the oppressive laws passed in Arizona to allow harassment of people who look Hispanic? How about the talented people who can’t get into this country because the immigration system is broken? Not one serious answer from the Republicans on stage last night.

These "Back to the Future" Republicans also called for supporting privatization of Medicare and Social Security. They support banning abortion and-- with the exception of Ron Paul-- doing nothing to reduce spending on the military-industrial complex.

One of the few substantive contributions of the evening came from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich who declared, to wild applause: "Congress should come back Monday. They should repeal the Dodd-Frank bill. They should repeal Sarbanes Oxley."

Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley were arguably the two most important pieces of legislation in recent years to regulate Wall Street and punish the kind of mass fraud that tanked the world economy in 2008.

A Harris Interactive Poll from earlier this summer showed an overwhelming majority of Americans-- 83% to 14% - believe recent events have shown "Wall Street should be subject to tougher regulation." The same poll found 64% of adults do not believe that what is good for Wall Street is good for the country. 31% take the opposite view.

Hours before the debate, GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney was heckled by left-wing protesters at a rally in Iowa. He was tripped up over the question about taxing corporations and he shot back at the questioner: "Corporations are people, my friend."

I cannot believe the GOP wants to be seen as the reactionary party whose devotion to the failed economic theories of the past benefit the wealthy, at the expense of everyone else.

In 2012, 2016 and beyond, the electorate will be younger, more racially diverse and increasingly supportive of higher taxes on the wealthy-- and tougher regulation of Wall Street.

While it is still early and there are other potential entrants to the race, I do not see how any Republican candidate pushback against the Democrats and President Obama while solely dedicated to bringing back an America that is half a century in the past.

Ah, yes, "other potential entrants to the race." That would refer to Rove's pick to knock Bachmann out of the race so the superficially mainstreamish candidate, the weird Mitt Romney, has a clear shot at Obama without the GOP baggage of being a party essentially even right of the kind of fascism America mobilized to defeat 7 decades ago-- Rick Perry, the Texas governor who makes George W. Bush seem almost coherent and bright. In Perry-world everything post-Civil War is unconstitutional-- from clean air laws to public education and, now, Social Security and Medicare, which he calls a "Ponzi scheme," something the far right has been yelling since the 1930's when most Americans were fighting fascism but the GOP was actively helping Hitler as the standard-bearer for the kind of world they have always wanted.

I challenge anybody to stand up and defend the Social Security program that we have today-- and particularly defend it to a 27-year-old young man who’s just gotten married and is trying to get his life headed in the right direction economically. I happen to think that the Progressive movement was the beginning of the deterioration of our Constitution from the standpoint of it being abused and misused to do things that Congress wanted to do, and/or the Supreme Court wanted to implement. The New Deal was the launching pad for the Washington largesse as we know it today. And I think we should have a legitimate, honest, national discussion about Washington’s continuing to spend money we don’t have on programs that we don’t need. 

...I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.

People are very disappointed with what Obama has been able to accomplish. Many of us have come to see that he's not a liberal or a progressive but a mainstream conservative in a world where the GOP has moved the conversation so far to the right, by transforming themselves into a reactionary or even fascist party, that Obama seems, as Williams put it for Fox above, "sleek, fast and so very hip as compared the Republicans." This morning he delivered his Saturday address to the nation about new ideas, creativity and innovation, while the Republicans argue among themselves about Bronze Age fairy tales and long bankrupt Gilded Age ideology. Obama:

On Thursday, I visited a new, high-tech factory in Michigan where workers are helping America lead the way in a growing clean energy industry. 
 
They were proud of their work, and they should be. They’re not just showing us a path out of the worst recession in generations-- they’re proving that this is still a country where we make things; where new ideas take root and grow; where the best universities, most creative entrepreneurs, and most dynamic businesses in the world call home. They’re proving that even in difficult times, there’s not a country on Earth that wouldn’t trade places with us. 
 
That doesn’t mean we don’t face some very tough economic challenges. Many Americans are hurting badly right now. Many have been unemployed for too long. Putting these men and women back to work, and growing wages for everyone, has got to be our top priority.
 
But lately, the response from Washington has been partisanship and gridlock that’s only undermined public confidence and hindered our efforts to grow the economy.
 
So while there’s nothing wrong with our country, there is something wrong with our politics, and that’s what we’ve got to fix. Because we know there are things Congress can do, right now, to get more money back in your pockets, get this economy growing faster, and get our friends and neighbors back to work. 
 
The payroll tax cut that put $1,000 back in the average family’s pocket this year? Let’s extend it.  Construction workers who’ve been jobless since the housing boom went bust? Let’s put them back to work rebuilding America. Let’s cut red tape in the patent process so entrepreneurs can get good ideas to market more quickly. Let’s finish trade deals so we can sell more American-made goods around the world. Let’s connect the hundreds of thousands of brave Americans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to businesses that need their incredible skills and talents.
 
These are all things we can do right now. So let’s do them. And over the coming weeks, I’ll put forward more proposals to help our businesses hire and create jobs, and won’t stop until every American who wants a job can find one.
 
But we can no longer let partisan brinksmanship get in our way-- the idea that making it through the next election is more important than making things right. That’s what’s holding us back-- the fact that some in Congress would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.
 
So you’ve got a right to be frustrated. I am. Because you deserve better. And I don’t think it’s too much for you to expect that the people you send to this town start delivering.
 
Members of Congress are at home in their districts right now.  And if you agree with me – whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or not much of a fan of either-- let them know.
 
If you’ve had it with gridlock, and you want them to pass stalled bills that will help our economy right now-- let them know. 
 
If you refuse to settle for a politics where scoring points is more important than solving problems; if you believe it’s time to put country before party and the interests of our children before our own – let them know. 
 
And maybe they’ll get back to Washington ready to compromise, ready to create jobs, ready to get our fiscal house in order-- ready to do what you sent them to do.
 
Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go to get to where we need to be. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and it’s going to take time to get out of it. That’s a hard truth-- but it’s no excuse for inaction. After all, America voted for divided government, not dysfunctional government, and we’ve got work to do. And when we come together and find common ground, there’s no stopping this country. There’s no stopping our people. There’s no holding us back. And there is every reason to believe we’ll get through this storm to a brighter day.

See why Rove and Fox are worried?

"In Gitmo Opinion, Two Versions of Reality": The Obama DoJ screws up (and I heard about it on public radio)

Ideological hack Juan Williams has no reason to complain about his sacking by NPR. Now he's got his cushy $2 million from the Fox Noise propaganda shop, where he fits right in.

by Ken

Isn't it amazing that the Right-Wing Noise Machine can literally make a federal case of NPR's firing of ideologicay whackjob and nitwit Juan Williams? Now NPR is under fire from the usual suspects, spearheaded as always by Fox Noise, in its never-ending crusade to masquerade unmitigated right-wing propaganda as "fair and balanced." (ThinkProgress's Progress Report did a fine recap today, "Beneath Juan Williams' Reality.")

The real complaint to be made about NPR is how centristically milquetoast-y it tends to be. The thing to remember about Juan Williams is that the network had to force him to relinquish his wildly inappropriate "senior national correspondent" status in favor of "analyst" status, though the newer moniker isn't any more accurate. He doesn't "analyze" anything; he just upchucks his cretinous prejudices. Now, of course, he was able to leap into the $2 million embrace of Fox Noise, where his puke is regarded as fancy eatin'. Meanwhile the political arm of the movement beats up on NPR, and while public radio isn't in immediate jeopardy, don't kid yourself, this will hurt, not just at the national level but, perhaps more ominously, at the local fund-raising level.

Or maybe it will inspire more local listeners who are in favor of actual use of the human brain to rally to their stations' support. For once I can breathe easy, having only recently done my renewal -- after the first notification! -- to my local public radio station, WNYC, New York, just ahead of the fall pledge drive, so for once I haven't had to sweat that either.

I mention this because for a week and a half now I've been pushing back from day to day writing about story I happened to hear one day while I was home with the radio on, and WNYC's Brian Lehrer had ProPublica reporter Dafna Linzer as a guest to talk about her new piece, "In Gitmo Opinion, Two Versions of Reality, describing an apparently unprecedented redaction of a federal District Court judge's decision, under pressure from the Obama Justice Department, without any trace left of the original decision by Judge Harry Kennedy Jr. of the D.C. District, leaving a final version that in significant ways substantially misrepresents the facts -- and without any indication that there was an earlier decision, or any indication (contrary to standard practice) of where redactions for national-security purposes occurred.

Former Washington Post national security reporter Dafna Linzer, now a senior reporter for ProPublica, talks to WNYC's Brian Lehrer on Oct. 8 about two startlingly different versions of a judicial decision that ordered the release of a Gitmo detainee.

The case involved the habeas corpus application of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, "a Yemeni held without charges for nearly eight years," "accused by two U.S. administrations of being an al-Qaida fighter and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden." Uthman "is among 48 detainees the Obama administration has deemed too dangerous to release but 'not feasible for prosecution.'"

A day after his March 16 order was filed on the court's electronic docket, Kennedy's opinion vanished. Weeks later, a new ruling appeared in its place. While it reached the same conclusion, eight pages of material had been removed, including key passages in which Kennedy dismantled the government's case against Uthman.

In his first opinion, Kennedy wrote that one government witness against Uthman had been diagnosed by military doctors as "psychotic" with a mental condition that made his allegations against other detainees "unreliable." But the opinion the public sees makes no mention of the man's health and discounts his testimony only because of its inconsistencies.

The alterations are extensive. Sentences were rewritten. Footnotes that described disputes and discrepancies in the government's case were deleted. Even the date and circumstances of Uthman's arrest were changed. In the first version, the judge said Uthman was detained on Dec. 15, 2001, in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities. Rewritten, Kennedy said in the public opinion that Uthman admitted being captured "in late 2001 in the general vicinity of Tora Bora," the cave complex where bin Laden was thought to be hiding at that time.

As Linzer subsequently explains, the geographical and chronological blurring seems clearly designed to make it seem as if it's possible that Uthman could have been involved in the Tora Bora fighting, whereas the actual facts make it essentially impossible, meaning that the government never had any kind of case, and knew it essentially from the beginning.

There seems general disagreement that DoJ screwed up the clearance of the original decision, which was submitted by the judge in accordance with normal procedure and held for three weeks, then returned with hardly any redaction. But then, as Linzer points out, "The judges themselves have very little insight into the process and no sway over what is redacted." Once Judge Kennedy's clerk received the processed decision, he added it to the court's electronic file, again in accordance with normal procedure.

Twenty-five hours later, the security office sent out urgent notices to attorneys and the judge that the opinion had not been ready for release and needed additional deletions. The decision was promptly removed from the public docket.

In a closed hearing in his courtroom four days later, Kennedy lashed out at the government for releasing classified information. He and Justice Department attorneys then argued over what to do, according to three sources familiar with the discussion.

Kennedy insisted that the reasoning behind his first habeas ruling be made public. But the Justice Department resisted releasing it in redacted form, arguing that blacked out portions would call attention to the exact material the government wanted to conceal.

Nobody disputes the government's right to withhold information on legitimate national-security grounds, the evidence of careful comparison of the two documents (ProPublica had a copy of the briefly posted but since disappeared first version) as well as the combined evidence of Linzer's sources (four, apparently) seem pretty conclusive that national security had little or nothing to do with what happened in this case. There seems rather to have been a whole lot of butt-covering.

The butts being covered were primarily from the previous administration's bungling, but the legal (or illegal) obfuscation was almost entirely the work of the Obama DoJ, for the simple reason that it wasn't until the Supreme Court's June 2008 ruling that the Gitmo detainees's right to habeas corpus was established. Then-candidate Barack Obama --

issued a statement calling the ruling "an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy."

Even the seemingly simple and perhaps justifiable expedient of deleting witness's names can have a seriously falsifying effect.

To justify Uthman's incarceration, the government relied on statements from five current or former detainees who were previously discredited by judges in other cases, questioned by internal Obama administration assessments or found unreliable by military psychiatrists because they were mendacious, mentally ill or subjected to torture.

Kennedy's first opinion reveals that some of the government's evidence came from a detainee who committed suicide at Guantánamo three years ago after months of hunger strikes. In the second opinion, the detainee's name is concealed, making it impossible for the public to know he is dead.

I can't begin to do justice to the ins and outs of the case, which of course at every step is shrouded in a secrecy that Linzer reports is sometimes is applied as randomly as it is obsessively. The judicial experts she consulted seem pretty appalled by the government's behavior. For example:

Classification experts could not recall another case in which a second decision was secretly created.

"Reconstituting and replacing a judicial opinion without public notice is active deception," said Steven Aftergood, a classification expert with the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. "There is a role for classification and there are things that need to be redacted, but there is never a justification for deception in the judicial process and that's what this is," Aftergood said, after reviewing both versions of Kennedy's ruling in the Uthman case.

It's a nasty story. I heard about it on public radio. I wonder whether Fox Noise has covered it.

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If you look up "irony" in the dictionary, you will find a picture of . . . well, of WHOM? Yes, ladies and germs, it's another famous DWT News Quiz!

Kudos to Steve Benen for nailing this one on his Carpetbagger Report ("Juan Williams defines 'journalist'").

Steve notes that NPR's Juan Williams--a former Fox Noise "analyst," you may recall--had a powerfully negative response to Newsweek's announcement that Markos Moulitsas, creator of Daily Kos, will be contributing commentary on the 2008 presidential election to both the magazine and its website (naturally he'll be "balanced" by a rabidly conservative voice to be named later):

[T]he fact is that he’s not a journalist in terms of someone who knows how to do reporting, someone who reflects balance in what he portrays. To the contrary, he engages in the kind of hyperbole and extreme statements that’s represented by that crass and, I think, offensive statement he made about those dead people.

But you know what? I think that’s just what’s going on in journalism. I think that, you know, there’s more and more opinion, less and less people who know how to do the job. All you’ve got to do is shout, say something on the blog that offends and attacks the other side, and suddenly, you have the credentials, and you’re said to be a journalist. I think it’s a great lie.

Now, this is pretty dopey in its own right, and Steve picks it apart well, but only after pausing to relish the irony of it all. Said irony has to do with the circumstances in which "Scoop" Williams made these remarks. And that, to me, has "news quiz" written all over it. So let's make this an impromptu DWT "Nerds in the News" Quiz:

To whom and where did Juan Williams deliver this manifesto on journalism?

(a) To Bill Moyers [right] in an interview on his PBS Moyers Report

(b) To CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, who was in Washington for a pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(c) To Sean Hannity in an interview on Fox Noise

(d) To Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as the justice was autographing a copy of his vitriolic new tell-little-of-consequence memoir, Confronting the Future, at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(e) To FEMA Acting Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson [left], the guy who had that supposed "press conference" where the softball-lobbing questioners were all FEMA employees, whom he addressed by their first names [hey, did you see Al Kamen's hilarious recap of this priceless imbroglio in yesterday's Washington Post "In the Loop" column?]

(f) To former New York Times diplomatic affairs correspondent Judy Miller, his charades partner at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house, after they lost a round to the team of syndicated columnist Robert Novak and former vice presidential enforcer Irving "Lewis" Libby



AND THE ANSWER IS . . .

Of course, it's the loudest and dumbest mouth in the whole of the Right-Wing Noise Machine:

Sean "Nuclear-Waste Mouth" Hannity!


SCORING

If you picked (c), you have a perfect score of 100.

However, if you picked (b), (d), or (f), you're alarmingly out of the loop--the Beltway loop, that is. "A pot-luck supper at David Broder's house"? Come on, puh-leeze! What ever would Sally Quinn say about that?

You're going to need to read a few hundred Broder columns in quick succession. Don't try this on an empty stomach, though--or on a full one either, come to think of it.


BREAKING NEWS--NEWSWEEK NAMES MARKOS'S RIGHT-WING COMMENTATING COUNTERPART, AND IT IS . . .

Howard Kurtz has the story.

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