Politics Plus

The Senate Democrats announced their leadership team yesterday and I consider them a mixed bag that's moving in the right direction, but only in part.  I'm somewhat slow to condemn, because I realize that the Senate is one of the most tradition bound institutions in government, where seniority takes precedence.

After Senator Charles Schumer of New York was elected as the new leader of the Senate Democrats earlier on Wednesday, he gave both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren leadership roles in the upcoming first Congress under President-elect Donald Trump.

Their roles are less meaningful than those of others on the leadership team, but their appointments are a sign that Democrats recognize and are responding to the progressive tilt in their party. Schumer had faced pressure to add the senators; earlier this week, dozens of protesters staged a sit-in outside of his office. Some liberals are skeptical of Schumer’s ties to Wall Street, while both Sanders and Warren are high-profile critics of big banks.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, faced off against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. Even after it became clear she would win the nomination, he held on to his presidential bid and resisted endorsing Clinton. During that time he won major concessions while pushing the Democratic Party into approving the most progressive platform in its history, including seeking a $15 federal minimum wage and a carbon pricing regime to combat climate change.

Schumer had hoped to become Senate majority leader under a Clinton administration. But with Trump’s stunning victory last week, he will have to deal with a Republican in the White House and both houses of Congress under Republican control. Schumer will replace Harry Reid, who is retiring at the end of this year.

Senator Dick Durbin will continue in his role as party whip—the second-ranking Democrat—and Senator Patty Murray will assume the new title of assistant Democratic leader and be the third-ranking party member. Schumer’s team also includes Senator Tammy Baldwin, the first lesbian senator to hold a leadership role, and Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate…

From <Newsweek>

I'm not pleased with Schumer, but he was in line for the job.  While OK on most issues, he's too cozy with Wall Street Banksters and Vulture Capitalists.  According to GovTrack Durbin is better and ranks as 6th most progressive member of the Senate.  Patty Murray is 13th. Tammy Baldwin is 7th.  Joe Manchin, a horrid DINO, is 46th.  He should NOT have a leadership role.  Of course, my favorites are Bernie, who ranked 4th and Liz, who ranked 1st.

While Democrats are trying to move toward single payer health care (not quickly enough), and planned to allow people to join Medicare at 55 and add a public option to Obamacare, Republicans have their own series of health plans, known as RepubliCare.  The primary feature of RepubliCare is the RepubliCare Death Benefit.  If you can’t pay for health care, you get to die, at no additional charge.  Lyin’ Ryan (R-WI) plans to implement RepubliCare for seniors.

There’s a lot that you should know about the Republican Medicare plan, a plan that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) hopes to enact shortly after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, but the entirety of it can be summarized in just one sentence.

Republicans want to charge seniors a lot more for inferior health coverage.

Over the last half-decade, Ryan has proposed several different versions of the Republican plan to charge seniors a lot more for inferior health care. There are important differences among these versions. Some would phase out Medicare entirely over the course of many years, while others would merely make the system more inefficient and drive out-of-pocket costs for seniors much higher. The most recent version is impossible to fully evaluate because it lacks important details — like numbers.

As Jonathan Cohn and Jeffrey Young quipped about the GOP’s overall health care package, “Speaker Paul Ryan wants to replace 20 million people’s health insurance with 37 pages of talking points.”

Republicans want to charge seniors a lot more for inferior health coverage.

Despite the differences, however, all of Ryan’s proposals would impose basically the same structure. Republicans hope to repeal Medicare — the single-payer system that most seniors rely on to cover their health costs — and replace it with a voucher. This voucher will cover some of the cost of inferior coverage that will leave seniors with higher out-of-pocket costs than they would have paid under traditional Medicare. As a bonus, the total cost of paying for an individual senior’s care — that is, the government’s share of the costs plus the individual’s share — could rise as much as 40 percent.

Inferior coverage at a higher price — that’s the Republican health plan. And it will become law unless three of the 52 Republican senators who will come to Washington in January decide to stop it…

From <Think Progress>

Please click through for the rest of the article.  Frankly, if he gets his way, there is a strong possibility that it will kill me, so I have a special reason to want it stopped.

The Republican Reich is moving at full speed to consolidate power as the Fuhrer makes appointees to its cabinet.  I’ve covered Bannon’s Nazi views before, but there a lot more you ought to know about him.  The position he will be occupying is the same one held by the infamous Karl Rove in the GW Bush Reich.  OMG!  I’m going to miss Rove Rat!

Anyone holding out hope that Donald Trump would govern as a uniter — that the racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and nativism of his campaign were just poses to pick up votes — should think again.

In an ominous sign of what the Trump presidency will actually look like, the president-elect on Sunday appointed Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, an enormously influential post.

Many if not most Americans had never heard of Mr. Bannon before this weekend, and for good reason: He has kept a low profile, even after taking over Mr. Trump’s campaign in August. Before that, he worked as the executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, parent company of the far-right website Breitbart News [Breitfart delinked], which under Mr. Bannon became what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a “white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.”

Mr. Bannon himself seems fine with that description, telling Mother Jones last summer that Breitbart was now “the platform for the alt-right,” a loosely organized group of mostly young men who believe in white supremacy; oppose immigration, feminism and multiculturalism; and delight in harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media…

From <NY Times>

The Gray Lady as barely scratched the surface.  Rachel Maddow dissects his hateful background for us in horrifying detail!

I have only one word sufficiently vile for me to describe this evil monster.  Bannon is a Republican.

We have all seen how Vladimir Putin (R-RU) used his propaganda network, RT, to disseminate propaganda against Hillary Clinton, which was echoed by the seditious Jill Stein, the Republican Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, and eventually, the MSM, to influence the election.  We have documented that the Russian government not only admits, but crows about, their regular contacts with and assistance to the Trump campaign.  However, the coming Republican Reich also was aided through even more foreign interference.

It’s an eight-year-old story by now, but it bears repeating.  Many ignorant and profoundly naïve Americans actually thought racism was expunged from the population because a majority of the people elected an African American man to be their President in 2008. By now everyone except the conservatives on the Supreme Court realize that President Obama’s election brought the raging racial animus toward all people of color out in the open and gave white supremacist hate groups a newfound raisin  d’être; and a priceless recruitment tool to grow their ranks quickly.

After nearly eight years, those white supremacists found they had a racist champion running for the presidency and after 56-million other dirty white supremacists helped groups like the Ku Klux Klan put the man of their dreams in the White House there is an inspired, emboldened and grateful group of racists celebrating and thanking the people that contributed to America’s march toward repeating the atrocities of 1930’s Germany. And no, this column knows better than to make a comparison between the fascist American racists just voted for and the fascist responsible for World War II. It is never too late to begin conditioning oneself for the impending abolition of the 1st Amendment’s freedom of speech or the press.

It was not too surprising that the Ku Klux Klan is planning to celebrate the election of a racist as president by organizing a victory parade. A well-publicized parade is a newsworthy public form of gratitude to the American people who collectively took an important first step towards transforming the United States into an Aryan Christian paradise. What was slightly surprising was who first person an avowed racist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK thanked after losing his bid for the United States Senate.

Whatever disappointment he experienced at being rejected by voters, because David Duke is a dirty racist and white supremacist, was overshadowed by the ultimate thrill of learning that a fellow racist, white supremacist, and fascist had won the election for the White House. However, as reported by Snopes,  the first person David Duke expressed heartfelt gratitude to was not his fellow racists in the Klan or the so-called “alt-right Nazis” for their hard work and valuable assistance during the long Trump campaign, or the official KKK newspaper for a ringing endorsement for the racist Republicans chose to best represent the Party and the American people’s character. No, the first person David Duke thanked was a foreigner (Australian)…  that racist Duke supported and Assange helped install in the White House.

David Duke thanked Julian Assange for his hard work for the Trump campaign, but he stopped short of extending any gratitude to Russian Vladimir Putin… [emphasis added]

From <PoliticusUSA>

Now that we know about the close association between Assange and the Republican Reich, we must take everything from Wikileaks  with a grain of salt, and everything from Assange with a ton of shit.  Frankly, I hope the Ecuador, infamous for harboring Nazi criminals, has their London embassy turn him over to the Swedish authorities.