A heavy workload indeed

Considering the number and magnitude of promises “the Donald” made during the campaign and continues making since being selected by the Electoral College, it is obvious there is a huge legislative agenda awaiting action by the new administration. Huge! But there is so much “spy stuff” and chairman Nunes’ shenanigans hogging the headlines it leaves the administration playing whack-a-mole and desperately searching for a way to change the subject. Aha! What have the Republicans been warning us about since 2008? What has been the object of a concentrated, organized, heavily-financed hate campaign designed to create the perception of a clear and present danger to be vigorously fought at every opportunity? (And, by the way, what can the administration do to divert attention from all these distractions?) The answer: find a real demon that “the Donald” can smack all by himself with presidential orders. and there it is, Obama! Obama, a bottomless reservoir of targets for the Donald’s tweets.Trump can cash in on all the built-up hate and fear that true Republicans must still feel after all the work they put in to make Obama a genuine bogeyman. Look for more and more Obama bashing whenever the Donald gets caught in one of his little exaggerations or “alternate facts”.

Health insurance

The Society of Actuaries has helpfully shined a light on the ignorance-based provision for interstate sale of health insurance, which the Republicans keep touting as an advantage of the A H A C. In the words of the actuaries, such a provision would create “a race to the bottom.” The idea was to introduce price competition into the health insurance market. Surprise! There is already substantial price competition in the insurance market. There is also already competition among interstate insurers, but with one key condition which the ignorant GOP wanted desperately to eliminate. That condition requires that any insurance contract must be approved in advance by each state where it is to be sold. Every state has its own Insurance Commissioner, none of whom are beholden to Washington DC. It is doubtful that very many of these independent commissioners would approve any of the junk insurance policies that would be dumped on the market if the Republicans got their way.

Who can we call?

Say it isn’t so! Please don’t tell me there is no one in the Republican party who can see through this whole Trump charade. Surely, there are thinking Republicans who recognize the importance of government controls on unfettered capitalists such as the Robert-Rubin-type that triggered the housing meltdown. Who but the federal government can regulate the extraction industry dumping of toxic waste in our waterways? And Republicans should know as well as anyone why each state has an Insurance Commissioner whose function it is to control the sale of junk insurance policies: auto, home, and health. You have no idea what kind of stuff that gets approved in some states that should never be allowed to go national. But uninformed Republicans seem to think interstate sale of insurance policies would solve some kind of pricing problem. It would not. It would only create a race to the bottom. People would buy insurance policies thinking they were covered, and only find out otherwise when they were forced to read the fine print.

Mandate?

Paul Ryan says “Republicans just earned a mandate. We are going to hit the ground running.” The mandate part is simply baloney. The Donald was shoehorned into the White House by the quirkiness of the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote by almost three million. That is really a mandate for Clinton. Trump and Ryan and all the others that cannot resist the opportunity to gloat should be reminded of this fact every time they use the Trump victory as justification for one of their antisocial moves. As far as “hitting the ground running”, it’s beginning to look more like “spinning wheels” in Ryan’s case.

Why Obama?

Of all the presidents America has elected over the past couple of hundred years, why was this one, this president Barack Obama, subjected to the kind of aggressive opposition of a type and degree that would apply to the worst kind of pariah? The official Republican position was established on the very day of Obama’s election. “We do not want you as president and we will do everything in our power to destroy your presidency.” It cannot be described any other way. Every action, every utterance of the Republican Party has followed that policy to this very day, even after he has left office. As for the total effect on the country as a whole produced by this mysteriously hateful attitude, that is beyond our ability to measure. The Republican strategy worked. The Obama presidency was effectively negated. We will never know how much better off the country would be today were it not for the party of NO, people who call themselves “Republicans”. But why? The easiest answer would be his race. But surely, surely we have moved beyond that as a nation and as humans. Or have we ?

A perfect fit

Has there ever been a politician that so closely duplicates the way Republicans think and act? Republicans have always been misogynistic. That is Trump to a “T”. Money, since the Reagan revolution, has been the Republicans’ primary metric for judging a person’s worth. Ditto the Donald: racial bigotry; opposition to social progress; indifference to the damage caused by pollution; the hierarchy of corporations over people; all these are well-recognized Republican characteristics. However, as yet the Donald has not embraced extreme gerrymandering or draconian voter suppression tactics to maintain control, but “the night is young” as they say.