Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin indicated Sunday night that he did not want offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva to stand for the national anthem, instead of sitting it out with the rest of his teammates...Free speech is all well and good, as long as there is 100% participation.
Tomlin said in a post-game press conference that he was looking for “100 percent participation” in whatever course of action the team took during the national anthem.
I believe it's one of the most serious attacks we've had on our country in recent years. And the president doesn't seem interested in it either. Mr. Comey testified he had nine interactions with him before he was fired. In none of those did the president say, "What did the Russians do? How did they do it? How do you know they did it? And what can we do about it?" This is serious stuff. And all of this Trump, Comey, and obstruction of justice is sort of obscuring the underlying, what I think is really the big story.
Do you believe that lack of curiosity is circumstantial evidence in and of itself?
Much has been written about how The New York Times used its first editorial after a horrific mass assassination attempt on Republican lawmakers to absolve the shooter of agency over his own actions, and then to blame Republicans and “the gun lobby” for empowering the “deranged” progressive activist to murder them in the first place. Not content with peddling just one Big Lie, the esteemed NYT editorial board loaded its rhetorical shotgun with Big Lie buckshot and spread as many lies over as large an area as possible. Taking a cue from “Hamilton,” the paper of record didn’t want to throw away its shot.
It wasn’t enough for NYT to just recycle the lie — famously spread by the NYT six years ago, natch — that the shooter who tried to kill Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in 2011, Jared Lee Loughner, was driven to act by Sarah Palin. It wasn’t enough for the editorial board to claim without evidence that the shooter in Alexandria was “deranged” in order to relieve him of responsibility for his own actions and avoid examining why he chose to walk into a public park and open fire on his declared enemies.
For the most part – and please stay with me here – what we, the public, know is what the media has reported, that unnamed former and current government officials have told them what the Russians said to each other about what happened in meetings with Trump associates. That is not a sourcing chain in which I would put a great deal of confidence.
By the way, I do think that there are four broad areas that need to be investigated with regard to Trump and the Russians. I hope Bob Mueller, the new Special Counsel, is looking at all of these issues....
Second, did Russian organized crime launder money through the Trump Organization? If so, was anyone in the Trump Organization aware of that? If so, was Trump himself aware? And, if so, was the soft approach to Russian during the campaign and the transition a quid pro quo? If the money laundering occurred and the Trump Organization was not aware, should they have been? In other words, did the Trump Organization do the due diligence that is required of them by law to have an understanding of where foreign money is coming from?
You know when Hugo Chavez was first elected President in Venezuela in 1998, there was no political opposition of which to speak. The opposition was in disarray. There was no opposition leader to stand up and provide an alternative vision to that being pursued by Chavez. In its place, the Venezuelan media became the political opposition. And, in so doing, the media lost its credibility with the Venezuelan people. It was a huge loss for Venezuela.
That is a risk right here in America, right now. I believe that objective, fact-based journalism has never been as important as it is today to the future of our democracy. But, in order to be effective, journalists cannot take sides or even appear to take sides.
This bill, the Healthy California Act, would create the Healthy California program to provide comprehensive universal single-payer health care coverage and a health care cost control system for the benefit of all residents of the state.The bill analysis was published recently:
The projected costs and revenue needs for the proposed Program are as follows. For a discussion of the underlying assumptions, see Staff Comments below.
- Total annual costs of about $400 billion per year, including all covered health care services and administrative costs, at full enrollment.
- Existing federal, state, and local funding of about $200 billion could be available to offset a portion of the total program cost.
- About $200 billion in additional tax revenues would be needed to pay for the remainder of the total program cost. Assuming that this cost was raised through a new payroll tax (with no cap on wages subject to the tax), the additional payroll tax rate would be about 15% of earned income.
It is important to note that the overall cost of those new tax revenues would be offset to a large degree by reduced spending on health care coverage by employers and employees. Although precise estimates of total spending for employer sponsored health insurance are not available, the best available information indicates that existing spending is between $100 and $150 billion per year. Therefore, total new spending required under the bill would be between $50 and $100 billion per year.
With the support of the Trump administration, the Senate took a swipe at Russia on Tuesday by voting to let one of Europe’s smallest countries into NATO.But wait. Isn't Trump a puppet for the Russians. Didn't the Russians hack the election and install Trump as President? What kind of puppet supports a policy that takes a "swipe" and "defiant jab" at its master?
It won't work.And he doesn't get nicer.
The House Republicans are also proposing an individual health insurance market scheme that may even be worse than Obamacare itself.
As bad as the Obamacare individual mandate was for consumers––and as ineffective as it was for insurers––it did cause those not buying health insurance some pain. The Republicans now want to create a scheme that doesn't require anyone to sign up. But when they get sick enough that they need insurance, they will be able to quickly do so by paying a paltry 12-month 30% premium surcharge.
For example, a person paying $5,000 for health insurance would pay a one-time total $1,500 penalty! A family paying $10,000 in annual premium would pay only a $3,000 penalty for any late enrollment!
Obamacare is so poorly constructed it is literally an anti-selection machine. The Republican proposal is worse.
What the market needs to be viable are not subsidies but a market that works efficiently in the first place.
The Republicans are trying to create something they can sell to enough Republicans to pass it.The amazing thing to me about Obamacare, (and pretty much every other government mandate), is the refusal to acknowledge there is a group called consumers that will, mostly, rationally evaluate their health care choices, and since they refuse to acknowledge this they create a Rube Goldberg contraption that ultimately collapses and needs to be replaced. Unfortunately the politicians fixing the collapsed machinery build on the ruined remains of the last bad plan.
What they need to create is a program that they can sell to enough consumers to make it financially viable and that will meet the needs of a consensus of voters to make it politically viable.
A growing number of Democrats are openly questioning President Trump’s mental health.Better yet,
Thirty-five psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers also signed a letter to The New York Times saying that “the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.”
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she would “not be deterred” after protesters briefly blocked her from entering a Washington public school on Friday
Any policy that loosens the ironclad relationship between location-location-location and school-school-school would eliminate the need for parents to pay an inflated price for a home just because it happens to lie within the boundaries of a desirable school district...I'm with her!
Short of buying a new home, parents currently have only one way to escape a failing public school: Send the kids to private school. But there is another alternative, one that would keep much-needed tax dollars inside the public school system while still reaping the advantages offered by a voucher program. Local governments could enact meaningful reform by enabling parents to choose from among all the public schools in a locale, with no presumptive assignment based on neighborhood. Under a public school voucher program, parents, not bureaucrats, would have the power to pick schools for their children—and to choose which schools would get their children’s vouchers.
As The Washington Post points out, however, McConnell probably gave Warren’s 2020 presidential aspirations a huge “in-kind contribution” by forcing her to follow rules of decorum. It’s possible, I suppose, that the GOP is playing the same 3D chess mastered by Donald Trump. Maybe shutting down Warren was a surreptitious means of making her the de facto voice of the Democratic Party and #TheResistance (formerly known as “unprecedented obstructionism”). Maybe it was just good luck.
Warren as the voice of the Left might be the best-case scenario for Republicans. For one thing, Warren is no Barack Obama on the charisma front. For another, Warren saves conservatives the trouble of going after socialist strawmen. They’ll have a real one.
Many Americans got "please wait" messages Tuesday when they tried to start shopping for health coverage on the federal government's new health insurance website, healthcare.gov. A series of technological glitches, delays and crashes kept people from getting to several of the 16 state exchanges, too.But I'm sure ideology had nothing to do with that incompetence. (nor the VA, nor the decimation of the Democratic Party over the past 8 years).
Across the United States, federal and state law enforcement agencies are sweeping up cell phone and location data from American citizens using a device colloquially referred to as a “stingray.” Stingray surveillance devices are cellular site simulators—they mimic the signal of a cell phone tower in order to force cell phones in the area to connect. Once a phone connects, the officer can download information from the phone or track its location.Pretty cool technology. US Armed Forces have used it in hostile areas, but unfortunately law enforcement domestic typically gets their hands on military gear when wars wind down. MRAPs, for instance.
U.S. Marshals literally raided the Sarasota Police Department and seized stingray documentation in order to prevent the department from complying with a state-level freedom of information request. The Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had recently secured an order requiring the Sarasota police to turn over documents pertaining to stingray use. To prevent that information from being turned over to the ACLU and the public, the U.S. Marshals Service launched a pre-dawn raid on the police department to take possession of the information. The federal government has also urged local law enforcement agencies to deceive state judges, and continues to exert pressure in favor of secrecy rather than public disclosure and oversight.Think of that: a police department is the target of a raid in order to stop the department from complying with a Court order.
