CNBC's Jake Novak says Trump finally came to his senses with Obamacare "clean" repeal tweet

Here:

[I]n a tweet Friday morning, President Trump strongly suggested the Republicans just repeal Obamacare and worry about the replacement later. Thank you for finally coming to your senses, Mr. President!

Dan Bongino for Sean Hannity brings on Mark Meadows to talk about Obamacare repeal, and do they discuss Trump's clean repeal tweet?

No. Zip, zero, nada, bupkis.

Unbelievable.

Worthless.

This is talk radio malpractice.

OK, we're basically 0-5: Neither Michael Savage nor Dan Bongino on Hannity are leading with Obamacare repeal

We'll see about Levin in three hours.

It's pretty disappointing that conservative talk radio can't follow President Trump's talking points even when he spells them out on Twitter.

Trump has made a YUGE move to the right and everybody's just shrugging their shoulders today.

Gallup: Middle-class self-identification normalizes at 62%, same as in 2003 after bottoming out at 50% under Obama

Here.

Mark Belling turns to Trump Obamacare repeal tweet

Finally. Right now.

We didn't elect a king to worship like Obama's slaves worship him, we elected a fighter

Update 5/13/25: This post isn't holding up too well now is it?

Not to be outdone by P. J. O'Rourke, libertarian Mark Perry also genuflects toward the hypocritical French today

Namely toward Frederic Bastiat, here, who wrote against "legal plunder", never once mentioning that the estate off of which Bastiat derived his living had been stolen from the aristocracy during the French Revolution.

Mark Perry is not just a one-off, either. Bastiat is a hero to libertarians generally. For example, to Rep. Justin Amash, who not coincidentally owes his fortune to the family business in tools, which are manufactured in China, not the united States.

Protestations against legal plunder, my foot.

And Mark Belling also wastes our time defending Trump in L'Affaire Joe Mangina

Filling in for Rush Limbaugh today.

Trump hands off the rhetorical baton on repeal of Obamacare, and so far today 3 talk radio hosts have dropped it.

Trump moves far right on Obamacare, morning talk radio gives us crickets

Both Laura Ingraham and Chris Plante had more important things to talk about today than President Donald Trump expressing willingness to forego Obamacare replacement for simple repeal.

Idiots.

P. J. O'Rourke discovers the limits of individualism, gets wet for (French) state capitalism

Arianespace.

Here.

When regular capitalism won't do, there's always the comparatively smaller French state capitalism:

"An individual could not build a rocket like these, no matter what his wealth or how much time he was allotted." 

Hey, P. J., would it be too much to ask you at least to admire our own?

Yes, it would be from a frog-licker.

Justin "Might as well be a Democrat" Amash also voted against "No Sanctuary for Criminals Act"

Amash and six other Republicans (Curbelo of FL, Diaz-Balart, Donovan, King of NY, Reichert, Ros Lehtinen) went down to defeat with 188 Democrats.

HR 3003.

Here.

Republicans Chaffetz, Gosar, Long, Mark Meadows, Nunes, Scalise, Smith (NJ) and Stivers did not vote.

Defeated Leader of the Party of Street Violence and Abortion Death calls the kettle black

Laura Ingraham is ripping Justin Amash as an embarrassment right now, the only Republican to vote against Kate's Law

HR 3004.

Here.

If you're a big fan of John Locke, you're not a conservative

Read What is Conservatism? to understand why.

FINALLY: Trump tweets support for full repeal of Obamacare without "replace"

Here.

Send him HR 3762, stat.

Laugh of the Day: Traitor Joe is bleeding from his mangina

Seen here, in the comments section.

"Sorry mom"!

The servile Kim Strassel has no fight in her, thinks the Senate healthcare bill simply comes down to pre-existing conditions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the story here, where Strassel counsels bowing to federal mandates, which means bowing to the left-wing extremist who bankrupted America:

Republicans lost this argument nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Obama won. More than 90% of Senate Republicans understand this.

Which is another way of saying that protections for pre-existing conditions are here to stay, and conservatives face a choice. They can work with their colleagues to minimize the costs of the mandates (there are innovative ways to do this) and build in different free-market reforms to lower premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the current Senate bill will reduce premiums by about 30%, and the GOP can and should build on this.

Yes, the simple solution is always to bow, to submit, whether to the king, or to Allah.

Real Americans don't settle for easy.

Elmo says Syrian children like to learn just like Elmo, learns how to submit to Allah in prayer

Story here.

Walmart bathrooms evidently don't get a very thorough daily cleaning

Your fair share in taxes in 2015 was 21.3%: Did you pay it?

Obama expanded Medicaid on the backs of taxpayers who also buy health insurance, making them pay twice

Betsy McCaughey, here:

Who's picking up the tab for this vast Medicaid expansion? You. Worse, you pay twice -- once as a taxpayer, and then again as an insurance consumer. Families with private insurance pay $1,500 to $2,000 or more in added premiums yearly already to keep Medicaid afloat. The more Medicaid expands, the higher their premiums will go. That's because Medicaid shortchanges hospitals and doctors, paying less than the actual cost of care. They make up for it by shifting the costs onto privately insured patients. Ouch.

For some unknown reason The American Conservative decided to remind us today about the crack-up of Bruce Bartlett

They reran his 2012 piece detailing his several intellectual crises, in which the libertarian finally gave up and became the liberal, although he denies it.

Nostalgia on the editors part, no doubt, for wound-licking in defeat.

Day 159

Obama October 2016: The idea the election is rigged "happens to be based on no facts"

Imagine that. No facts! Even though his intelligence community says there are facts! So sure was he that Hillary would win.

Here (the provided transcript occasionally fails to represent exactly what Obama actually said):

"I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place. It is unprecedented. It happens to be based on no fact. Every expert regardless of political party... who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found. Keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials."

Just words, no doubt.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Obama said no serious person would suggest you could rig America's elections

Except for Trump, after which Hillary took the bait, as did the DNC, and then the Obama intelligence community and the entire establishment media, all blaming Russia for interfering and causing Hillary to lose in the process.

Here, in the Rose Garden three weeks before Election 2016:

Obama echoed those sentiments Tuesday, saying there's "no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America's elections." ... "It doesn't really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you'd want out of a president. You start whining before the game's even over? If whenever things are going badly for you and you lose you start blaming somebody else? Then you don't have what it takes to be in this job," Obama said. 

You said it, buddy.

How to reform Medicaid before Obamacare is even repealed and save $48.3 billion: Kick out all the illegal aliens

We don't need no stinkin' Medicaid

CIS estimates that 51% of illegal aliens are enrolled in Medicaid, here.

That's 6.12 million illegals receiving Medicaid out of 70 million total receiving Medicaid in 2015.

Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion, or $7,886 each. 

Bernie Sanders says his wife Jane is the most honest person he knows

Here.

Hm, does that include Hillary?

Laugh of the Day: The S&P 500 since CNBC's Jim Cramer's panicked "sell" on NBC on October 6, 2008

The French are building a wall . . . around the Eiffel Tower

And you thought no one had their priorities straight.

Supreme Court to hear Trump travel ban case in October, lifts injunctions giving Trump a big victory

From the story here, nineteen lines in:

The action by the court is a victory for President Trump in the biggest legal controversy of his presidency so far.

There's no way Republicans will take away Medicaid from 25 million people, 11 million or whatever

Just a fact, not a statement of approval.

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal

If Trump wants to win on Obamacare, he should propose a Medicaid tax in exchange for repeal of Obamacare's individual and corporate mandates instead of the stinker bill now being proposed by the Republicans in the Senate.

That way those of us who can obtain real insurance like we did before will obtain it again but at a cheaper cost than now, and those who can't will still have Medicaid, but funded by dead certain payrolls instead of the hodge podge of state and federal funding now.

Because of Obamacare, those who have insurance are subsidizing at enormous expense to themselves those who have become covered since 2009 under the plan, mostly under Medicaid. Medicaid alone has swelled by 25 million people thanks to Obamacare. It's a massive income redistribution scheme from those who have insurance to those who don't, which is manifestly unfair. There are easily 48 million people in this country making less than $15,000 a year who have no skin in this game yet qualify for Medicaid.

The answer, short of returning to the status quo ante where millions are kicked off of Medicaid, is to make more people pay their fair share. This means taxing every dollar of compensation with a Medicaid tax, just like we do with Medicare. The burden should be born by everyone, including those now receiving Medicaid.

Currently we have about 55.5 million enrolled in Medicare, supported by a 1.45% payroll tax. It isn't enough support, but there it is.

Medicaid on the other hand has exploded under Obamacare to coverage of 75 million, but state budgets, like individuals' budgets under Obamacare's outrageously expensive health insurance, are breaking badly under the burden. 33 will fall short of revenue targets in the current fiscal year.

The proportional Medicaid payroll tax rate implied by 75 million program participants is at least 1.95%.

This is Trump's opportunity to put Medicaid on a sounder footing.

Republicans won't like this plan because it involves a new tax, even though many people are already paying this tax to one degree or another depending on their tax obligation in their state of residence. The revenues, insufficient as they are, are already collected at the state level, but variably.

So it's not really a new tax. It's a new collector.

Democrats ought to love this idea, for the obvious reason. It codifies the nation's "obligation" to the poor's healthcare in the form of a tax, just as Medicare codifies the nation's obligation to the elderly's healthcare. With it they can claim Obamacare is still the law of the land in some form.

Pelosi and the House Democrats are well positioned to deliver this in the form of a bill to send to the more evenly divided Senate because Paul Ryan and a coalition of 75 or so liberal Republicans could get it over the goal line, just like they did so many times before in league with the Democrats, making an end run around the House conservatives.

The Senate would go for the bill because it is simply more liberal all around. Democrats there would vote for this, along with liberal Republicans.

Trump needs to get this done and off the table.

We've been arguing about it now in earnest for 8 years already and are just plain sick of it.

Enough already!

Repeal Obamacare root and branch, and institute a Medicaid tax.

Modern economists are unfamiliar with the Christian, his horse, plow, ax and box of dynamite

California, home of the 9th Circuit which shot down Trump's travel ban, bans travel to 8 states

From the story here:

California is restricting publicly funded travel to four more states because of recent laws that leaders here view as discriminatory against gay and transgender people. All totaled, California now bans most state-funded travel to eight states. The new additions to California’s restricted travel list are Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota. They join Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee as states already subjected to the ban.

Wind energy turbines kill 368,000 birds annually, but kitties kill far more

Reported here in early 2015:

Now, federal wildlife officials are cracking down on wind farms caught killing bats and birds. A peer-reviewed study issued last summer estimated turbines kill as many as 368,000 birds annually. ... House cats kill at least 1.4 billion birds annually, and possibly up to 3.7 billion birds, according to a 2013 federal study. And a single natural-gas flare at a liquid natural gas plant in Canada killed an estimated 7,500 birds in a single night.

38% of Americans shun crowds in 2017, up from 23% in 2006

Gallup poll, here.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Karen Handel wins by nearly 4 points in Georgia, Rachel Madcow blames the weather

Story here.

Laugh of the Day: Mueller to investigate whether Republican winner in Georgia last night colluded with Russia

63% of Hispanic immigrants are illiterate in English, 41% of all immigrants are

Story here.

Democrats and Republicans look set to agree on something: A ban on travel to North Korea

Story here.

Uh oh, Trump gives up on China doing anything about North Korea after just two months

Trump met with Xi Jinping in April, here, after which he expressed the hope that China would lean on Fatboy.

Didn't work, but he sure didn't give it very long now did he?

Tucker Carlson skewers the libertarianism of Bret Stephens, who thinks you are nothing but a widget in the machine of global capitalism

Here:

He also shows little care for Americans as anything besides units of economic productivity, widgets to fuel the machine of global capitalism that pays Bret Stephens many thousands a year to write mediocre opinion columns in a dying newspaper. 

Finally somebody at National Review gives libertarianism the what-for and really, truly gets it

Here:

The alliance that has united conservatives and libertarians in common cause against bureaucratic bloat and its soft despotism is crumbling; indeed, it could never be maintained. The identity confusion that manifested as the splintering of the Right into neo-conservatives, paleo-conservatives, crunchy conservatives, tea-partiers, Trumpists, and all the rest is, in large part, the tension between the conservative and the libertarian minds. The individualism and myopia of the libertarian vision of society — atomized individuals self-defined and free from every native context in a world where everything is earned and nature mastered — is at fundamental odds with the conservative reverence for ties to family, place, and history, with its hope for nature in harmony, man’s with himself and the rest of creation. ... the fissure widens and the semantic gap between “liberal” and “libertarian” shrinks . . ..

SECDEF Mad Dog Mattis is mad as a hatter: Imposes mandatory transgender training on the US Army

From the story here:

As part of the Pentagon’s attempt to create an accepting environment for transgenders, the Army held a session Tuesday teaching officers and others how to implement existing military policy, particularly how to “assist soldiers who have a medical diagnosis indicating that gender transition is medically necessary through the gender transition process,” USA Today reports. ...

Conservative leaders have asked Secretary of Defense James Mattis to rescind directives allowing transgenders to serve, as “costly and distracting social engineering” that is standing in the way of combat effectiveness and readiness.

Pat Buchanan remembers a score of violent leftist attacks in America, and more

Here:

The campus violence and urban riots of the decade, from Harlem to Watts to Newark and Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and 100 cities after Dr. King’s death, were not the work of the Goldwater right.

F. H. Buckley doesn't have a clue how to kill the administrative state

Here. And I won't bore you with any of the impotent suggestions.

The only way to kill the administrative state is to cut off its food supply, which is taxes in quantity. That's why it took so long to get to the administrative state: The constitution effectively outlawed taxes in quantity by outlawing any taxation save for direct taxation and excises and tariffs.

We could start by abolishing withholding, on our way to abolishing the income tax. But frankly, this will require a revolution, including in thinking. And you won't find anything revolutionary from F. H. Buckley.

Real conservatives know that without the income tax there would be no administrative state to speak of. Fake conservatives pretend that we can have limited government short of abolishing it.

The Big Picture of the stock market funk

But nobody tells you that, either.

The Big Picture of the full-time jobs funk

Is that clear enough for ya?

Flashback: The New York Times Jan. 9, 2011, updated for today

Here, updated for today, but not by The New York Times:

It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans Democrats or Tea Party members Bernie Sanders' most devoted supporters. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans Democrats and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats actual incidents of violence against peacefully assembling Republicans, setting the nation on edge. Many on the right left have exploited the arguments of division, reaping political power by demonizing immigrants cops, or welfare recipients white people, or bureaucrats small business owners. They seem to have persuaded many Americans that the government Republican Party is not just misguided, but the enemy of the people.

41% want Comey prosecuted, 66% of Republicans (but probably not Justin Amash)

Rasmussen, here.