I’m going to give Donald Trump credit for having made this sage observation last year:
I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.
The man had the measure of his supporters: nothing he said or did in the course of the campaign stopped them from voting for him, and nothing he’s said or done in the past six weeks has shaken their confidence in the least.
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Ezra Klein is usually pretty astute, but he seems almost willfully naïve when he says “The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve.” It’s really not that hard to understand: the “American Health Care Act” is an attempt to get Republicans off the hook for having promised, again and again, to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill has nothing to do with actually fixing anything that’s wrong with Obamacare or with improving the healthcare system generally; it’s a political document and should be read that way, including its generous tax cuts for the wealthy.
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Ben Carson’s talents are being wasted as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Based on what he recently told HUD employees, he should be named America’s first Neurosurgeon General, or perhaps put in charge of interrogation at Guantanamo:
“[Your brain] remembers everything you’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve ever heard. I could take the oldest person here, make a little hole right here on the side of the head,” Carson said, circling his left temple with a finger, “and put some depth electrodes into their hippocampus and stimulate. And they would be able to recite back to you, verbatim, a book they read 60 years ago. It’s all there. It doesn’t go away. You just have to learn how to recall it.”
Terrorists will yield their dastardly secrets, no matter how deeply buried in their subconscious, to Dr. Ben’s depth electrodes! Of course, other scientists say that Dr. Ben is off-base here, but I say there’s only way to find out: launch the depth electrodes!
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Donald Trump called his friend Bibi over in Israel the other day. This report speaks for itself:
According to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, the phone call came in the middle of a police questioning of Netanyahu at his home in Jerusalem, related to suspicions of corruption. Netanyahu left investigators for 30 minutes to talk to Trump, before returning to continue the questioning, Haaretz reported.
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The Tweeter-in-Chief issued yet another fact-free assault on his predecessor:
“122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”
It turns out that 113 of those vicious prisoners were released before Barack Obama took office, which means that only 9 of the 122 were released by the Obama administration. At the risk of seeming disrespectful: our so-called “President” is as ignorant as he is dishonest.
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Finally, Senator Jason Chaffetz (Republican from the great state of Deseret!) informs us that freedom and healthcare both involve trade-offs:
In an interview with CNN’s New Day, Chaffetz explained that the GOP’s new bill would guarantee “access” to health insurance for all Americans. Of course, all Americans enjoy “access” to their nearest Mercedes-Benz dealership — but few can afford to buy their wares.
After this was pointed out to the congressman, he replied, “You know what, Americans have choices … So maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love — and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on — maybe they invest it in their own health care. They’ve gotta make those decisions themselves.”
Let them pay for their emergency surgery with their precious new iPhone, okay? Just don’t ask the taxpayers to foot the bill, because choices.
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