Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Ryan Cooper writes about how the rotted- out Republican Party is determined to take health insurance away from millions of Americans:

... If Trump wins reelection, he will very likely be able to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the Supreme Court, and that will almost certainly spell doom for the law (with this lawsuit or another one). If that happens, something like 20 million people will lose their insurance immediately — as Medicaid is drastically rolled back, the exchanges are shut down, and anybody between 18 and 25 who is still on their parents' coverage is kicked off. Protections for people with preexisting conditions would be removed, and private insurers could once again place annual and lifetime coverage limits on their policies.

The slow-motion collapse of the private health insurance system would accelerate as well, as cost-control policies designed to slow the cancerous cost bloat that is eating the American economy from the inside would be deleted. More broadly, there would be spectacular chaos within the health care system, which was totally overhauled to accommodate ObamaCare changes — and this time there will be no guiding hand from Congress.

So while there is a never-ending parade of war crimes, corruption, and general insanity from the Trump regime to distract us, let's not forget that Republicans are also gunning for your health insurance. If they can't take it away, by God they'll make it as crummy and expensive as possible.

Preserving affordable health insurance will be a key defining issue in 2020, as it was in the 2018 mid- term blue wave elections. 

Frida Ghitis thinks 2019 was a turning point in the battle for democracy in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.  But:

The pivotal contest is taking place in the United States, the country whose deep democratic roots make it well-equipped to defy the authoritarian trend. The United States remains a vigorous democracy, but it, too, is one of the nations where democracy, according to Freedom House, “has weakened significantly,” thanks in part to a president who launches incessant attacks “on the rule of law, fact-based journalism, and other principles and norms of democracy." This year, that president, Donald Trump, was impeached in a historic vote. Although the chance that legislators will remove him from office remains almost nonexistent, impeachment signaled that many Americans strongly reject his assault on democratic norms. The 2020 election will determine whether the nation that has been an icon of global freedom will shift to a democratic path or continue on the rutted road to authoritarianism, which would have ominous implications for freedom around the world.

The 2016 election was the most important election in American history in at least 80 years;  2020 will be even more important.  If affordable health insurance is a key issue, Trump's and Republicans' assault on American democracy will be the key theme.

American agriculture is experiencing a one- two punch from nitwit Donald "Rump" Trump's trade wars and climate change:

US farmers have taken a particularly harsh beating this year from a one-two punch of nasty flooding exacerbated by climate change and a trade war with China.

Severe floods spurred by record rainfall soaked the southeast and the Midwest this summer, delaying plantings of corn and soy crops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the 12-month period ending in May of this year was the wettest 12 months on record in the United States. (NOAA’s full climate and weather assessment for 2019 will be available in January.) Flooding on the Mississippi River this year also set records for how long it lasted in several locations.

In August, the US Department of Agriculture reported that farmers weren’t able to plant more than 19.4 million acres of cropland in 2019, the most since reporting began in 2007. Most of this area was spread across 12 states in the Midwest and Great Plains.

The late planting pushed back harvests, leaving the crops still standing vulnerable to freezing. Historic autumn rainfall then further drenched the region, leading farmers in states like Minnesota and North Dakota to abandon tens of thousands of acres of crops, including potatoes and sugar beets.

The ongoing trade war with China has also hammered crop sales. Chinese imports of US agriculture products fell by nearly 20 percent, and the Trump administration has responded with close to $28 billion in aid for farmers hurt by foreign tariffs. (The Environmental Working Group found that big, industrial-scale farms, rather than family farms, are getting the majority of those funds.)

A lot of the farmers who voted for Trump will still vote for him because he hates the same people they do;  but don't be surprised if the added chaos Trump brings to the table doesn't peel off a not- insignificant number of them.

For a more comprehensive reading list, we recommend Infidel 753's link round- up (which is where we found the story on struggles in American agriculture, above).  Always worth the visit, both for the round- up and for his other posts.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., discusses the impeachment inquiry testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, specifically his belief that speaking the truth because "right matters" is an American virtue:

... His words were a veritable balm in Gilead for a nation sickened to its soul by the orgy of lies and alibis that now passes for leadership. And it hardly seemed worth it (indeed, would have been beside the point) to bring up all the times right has not mattered in America, to subpoena the ghosts of genocide, enslavement, exploitation and imprisonment haunting our history and ask them to testify against Vindman’s evocation of national virtue.

Because what he invoked was not America the actual, but America the aspiration — the more perfect union. And give us credit. If it’s true this is a country that has frequently betrayed its noblest ideals, it’s also true this is a country that had noble ideals to betray in the first place. It was to that America, that dream of America, that Vindman referred.
But even it has seen better days. Even the dream of who we are has been ransacked by the president and his defenders, men and women who would rather walk through fire in gasoline-soaked underwear than admit the truth of his malfeasance.

(We quoted Paul Krugman at length yesterday on the utter corruption of the Republican Party, and would suggest reading his full op/ ed again as a companion to Pitts's op/ ed.)

To no one's surprise, the servile rats in the regime of nitwit crime family boss Donald "Donnie Little Hands" Trump were working overtime to concoct a reason for the withholding of military aid to Ukraine (other than the true reason, that it was extortion/ bribery for Ukraine manufacturing dirt on the Bidens):

A confidential White House review of President Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal, according to three people familiar with the records.

The research by the White House Counsel’s Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email exchanges between acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House budget officials seeking to provide an explanation for withholding the funds after the president had already ordered a hold in mid-July on the nearly $400 million in security assistance, according to the three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House deliberations. [snip]

In the early August email exchanges, Mulvaney asked acting OMB director Russell Vought for an update on the legal rationale for withholding the aid and how much longer it could be delayed. Trump had made the decision the prior month without an assessment of the reasoning or legal justification, according to two White House officials. Emails show Vought and OMB staffers arguing that withholding aid was legal, while officials at the National Security Council and State Department protested. OMB lawyers said that it was legal to withhold the aid, as long as they deemed it a “temporary” hold, according to people familiar with the review.

Is Chief of Rats Mick Mulvaney lawyered up?  You better believe he is (he's got Russian spy Maria Butina's lawyer representing him -- you can't make this stuff up)!  And, it doesn't help that Mulvaney works in a back- stabbing, CYA snakepit:

Cipollone, who wants Mulvaney’s job, launches review that finds Mulvaney up to his neck in Ukraine scandal, and the results leak. The WH is not a fun place to work right now. https://t.co/xlufItHBRe

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) November 24, 2019

Adam Serwer writes about Trump's (and his rotted out party's) conspiracy against democracy, and how the Ukraine scandal fits a pattern:

The Republican Party has responded to the increasing diversity of the electorate with an accelerating intolerance for ethnic and religious minorities, and with elaborate schemes to disenfranchise rival constituencies and rig election rules to its advantage. Crucial to this effort is its conviction that the Republican electorate is the only one that can confer legitimacy on elected officials, and that the party’s political opponents are no longer wrong but fundamentally illegitimate, faithless usurpers with no right to determine the direction of the country. This has manifested in the quasi-religious dogma that Trump represents the will of Real America, and therefore defiance of his will is itself a form of treason.

Believing that Republican officials will be convinced by the evidence proffered by Trump’s own staff and political appointees is a mistake, because the underlying facts are not genuinely in dispute. Trumpists are not operating from an ethical framework that even allows acknowledgment that the president is capable of being guilty. Trump is the nation, and the nation cannot commit treason against itself. On the contrary, it is Joe Biden who is guilty of betrayal, defying the tribune of the people by seeking to run against him, and it is Trump’s treacherous staff who convict themselves of treason with every statement that implicates the president. The more evidence of Trump’s misdeeds the Democrats uncover, the more they reveal themselves as traitors. For Trumpists, there is no higher patriotism than bending to Trump’s will, and no more base corruption than defying it.

 The most recent example of the latter being the sacking of Navy Secretary Spencer.

As always, we close by highly recommending you check out Infidel 753's link round-up (and bookmark his blog, by the way), for the most comprehensive array of "various interesting stuff" that he's found searching the Internet.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article237674689.html#storylink=cpy

 

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.  Today, a few longer reads.

Will Bunch has a must- read on the assault on democracy by dimwit demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump and his rotted out Republican Party (with a healthy assist from a supine media):

Do you smell something? That’s the stench of freedom dying, and it’s coming from America’s southern border, where refugee children seeking U.S. asylum as they flee murder, rape and degrading conditions in Central America have instead been tossed into a growing gulag of squalid concentration camps, created by an administration desperate to cling to four more years of power.

Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University tasked with monitoring government compliance with a court order on how long migrant kids can be held in detention, said not only is Trump’s Border Patrol not complying, but attorneys are shocked at what they found at a Clint, Texas, facility where hundreds of youths have been sent: Children sleeping on frigid concrete floors, covered in filth, unable to shower for days, and taking care of one another because the authorities are looking the other way. [snip]

Here’s the big picture, and it’s as alarming as it can get. Phase I of Trump’s assault on democracy is over. The public and to some degree the press has grown numb to thousands of lies and to outrageous and even allegedly criminal behavior by the 45th president. The Democratic House that was elected in 2018 to hold Trump in check has had nearly six months to prove that it’s remarkably ineffective at doing its one job — by allowing the White House to walk all over them in defying subpoenas, in following the law or even providing basic information. [snip]

So Phase 2 is now here, and it’s as bad as your worst fears about a Trump presidency. To rally his base and get the anger that he needs out of his opponents, that means moving from rhetoric to roundups on immigrants, which will not shrink but swell the population of America’s concentration camps. It’s no surprise that Trump’s immigration-crackdown plan coincided with both his own reelection launch and this week’s Democratic debates, because he wants his opponents playing defense. And if Trump’s tough talk and his utter disdain for smart diplomacy triggers war in Iran or North Korea or somewhere else, he will challenge the electorate to dare oppose “a war president.”

Speaking of stench, this report from ABC News describes how fast America has been de-sensitized to the creeping fascism playing out on our southern border:

From sleeping on concrete floors with the lights on 24 hours a day to no access to soap or basic hygiene, migrant children in at least two U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities face conditions one doctor described as comparable to "torture facilities."

The disturbing, first-hand account of the conditions were observed by lawyers and a board-certified physician in visits last week to border patrol holding facilities in Clint, Texas, and McAllen, a city in the southern part of the state. [snip]

After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including "extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food."

All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being "tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease." [snip]

Conditions for infants were even more appalling, according to the medical declaration. Many teen mothers in custody described not having the ability to wash their children’s bottle.

And children who were older than 6 months were not provided age-appropriate meal options, including no pureed foods necessary for a child's development, Lucio Sevier reported.

Always keep in mind, the cruelty IS the policy with these fuckers.

The Salt Lake Tribune, in deep red Utah, isn't mincing words:

Yes, we do have concentration camps.

They are not work camps. They are not death camps. At least, not on purpose. Our government is not building massive gas chambers and industrial crematoria. It is not conducting sick medical experiments on members of an unfavored class.

But that does not mean that the places into which we are herding tens of thousands of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers are not properly called concentration camps. Because that is precisely what they are. [snip]

When some in the public eye dare to tell that truth, as the media-savvy Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did the other day, enablers of the administration’s cruel policies cry foul. They say that using correct terms such as “concentration camps" — or, worse, invoking the term “Never again” — unfairly equates what is going on now at our southern border with the Nazis’ “Final Solution” — the deliberate murder of millions of people.

It is true that we are not doing that. We are doing this. The two are not morally equivalent. And we probably don’t have reason to fear that this is necessarily going to become that.

But, then, we never do.

Because that starts as this. Some of the people who study, and some of the people who survived or are descended from survivors of the Holocaust, are pointing out that that crime against humanity did not arrive overnight.

It worked its way up, from nasty political speeches (check) to politicians seeking and gaining power with promises to protect the purity of the nation from foreign invasion (check) to denying basic human rights and decency to people of an unfavored class (check).

Too bad so many national media types =cough= Chuck "Not My Job" Todd =cough= don't have the same sense and moral clarity (unlike colleague Jose Diaz-Balart on =sigh= Telemundo, who fact- checked the dimwit demagogue in real time).

(You can use this navigator to check out organizations that provide relief to refugees at the southern border, if it's in your heart to give.)

Speaking of conservative Mormon Utah, guess what its residents Google most?  Hahaha. (For our home state, it's =wince= David Hasselhoff, for some unfathomable reason.)

That last tidbit was found via Infidel 753's always worthwhile link round-up.  See what you're missing if you don't check it out?