TomCat?
Happy B-Day from All of Us!
(Hope I’m not stealing anyone’s thunder. No doubt another Birthday Post would be fine.)
If ever there was an absolutely ridiculous question, here it is. Do you want Medicare to help pay for health care for people, who paid into the system all their working lives, or do you want Trump’s Wall that he promised Mexico would pay for? In his new budget, the Tangerine Terrorist plans record deficits. He intends to cut $845 billion from Medicare. He wants over $8 billion for his wall.
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The budget released by the White House on Monday also calls for a sizable reduction for Medicare, the federal insurance for older Americans that President Trump has consistently promised to protect. Most of the trims relate to changing payments to doctors and hospitals and renewing efforts to ferret out fraud and wasteful billing — oft-cited targets by presidents of both parties….
…The spending plan calls for a cut of nearly $1.5 trillion in Medicaid over 10 years and for $1.2 trillion to be added for the block grants or per-person caps that would start in 2021. Under the new arrangement, states would gain far more freedom to set their own rules about how to cover the poor….
…The Trump budget also proposes to slow spending on Medicare, the federal program that gives health insurance to older Americans, by $845 billion over the next 10 years, in part by limiting fraud and abuse and payments to hospitals. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said he would not cut Medicare or Social Security, the retirement program for the elderly, but his budget last year also included a proposed cut of more than $550 billion to the program.
This year’s proposed budget would reduce the growth of various Medicare provider payments, including for care after hospitalizations, graduate medical education and hospital-owned physician clinics, according to Marc Goldwein, budget expert at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. He said that with some of the Medicare “reductions” simply being moved to other parts of the budget, the cuts could be construed as between $500 billion and $600 billion.
The increasingly ambitious cuts to Medicare come at a time when many Democrats have embraced plans for expansions of Medicare, including a Medicare-for-all system that would increase federal spending on the program by as much as $30 trillion but that backers say would insure more people and reduce overall health costs….
Inserted from <Washington Post>
The major news sources are just starting to cover this, so no video from my usual sources is available yet, but I found an individual YouTube broadcaster that made a video worth watching.
Here is the Republican Party plan for senior citizens.

It’s a crappy day here in the CatBox, because I’m fighting off a case of Republicosis. I had a cavity come out of one of my three remaining teeth. I’ll be scarce next week, because I have to get the tooth fixed on Monday, and I have a routine appointment on Wednesday.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:27 (average 4:43). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From YouTube (Robert Reich Channel): Robert Reich: The Yuge Republican Lie About the Deficit
Of course the Reich on the left, Robert Reich, is right! The Reich on the right, the Republican Reich, offer Russian Hooker economics: tinkle down. Sick of getting peed on? Vote Blue! RESIST!!
From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Chris Discusses Exclusive New Audio Of Fox News Host Tucker Carlson
Carlson is not the Republican exception. He’s the Republican rule. RESIST!!
From The New Yorker: Donald J. Trump’s $4.7-trillion budget raised eyebrows on Monday when government-watchdog groups discovered that it contained twenty million dollars for bail.
The line item for a “bail fund” was buried in the fine print of the published budget, along with a footnote specifying that the money could be used only to bail out Trump and members of his immediate family.
Dang Andy! Do you think that will be enough? RESIST!!
Cartoon:


Here is the one hundred fifty-second article in our Republicans on Parade series, featuring individuals who personify what the Republican Party has become. Today’s winner is a Republican Massage Parlor Madam Li “Cindy” Yang. She is so honored for using human trafficking to provide tug jobs and blowjobs to Trump’s cronies and for selling her customers access to Trump.
If the President of the United States is letting a Chinese madam sell access at Mar-a-Lago to Chinese business people while his friends are getting serviced at businesses she started, he is making himself and the country vulnerable to massive blackmail risk. It is a textbook story of how foreign actors gain leverage over senior officials…
…Set aside the gut-wrenchingly horrific details of the sex trafficking that is at the heart of this story for a moment, and you might even see a choice irony in a madam who moved on from selling hand jobs to selling grip-and-grins with a president who himself has made pimping out his high office a signature part of his job. But don’t shrug it off. And don’t let the crazy details of the story lead you to speculate wildly about what else might be going on with Cindy Yang, Donald Trump, the Orchids of Asia massage parlor or Yang’s other venture, GY US Investments. Just take what we know now, thanks to the great reporting of the Miami Herald and Mother Jones, both of which have broken a series of important stories about this tangled web of creeps trying to make a buck in the worst ways possible:
Cindy Yang founded a chain of massage parlors. One of those was busted by Florida police. Robert Kraft, owner of the perennial Super Bowl champions New England Patriots was arrested for what he allegedly did at that spa, as were other prominent men according to several reports.
The spa allegedly was engaged in trafficking young women from China, turning them into sex slaves locked into horrendous lives of serial rape and squalor. While Cindy Yang sold the massage parlor in question, she continued to own others that were suspected of also doing a brisk business in sexual services.
But Yang also founded a business with her husband in 2017 called “GY US Investments” which offered itself, according to the Mother Jones account, as an “international business consulting firm that provides public relations services to assist business in America to establish and expand their brand image in the modern Chinese marketplace.”
While that sounds like typical consulting firm gobbledygook, the rest of the site makes it clear that what the company did was promise access to the President of the United States, his family and his resort Mar-a-Lago as a way of helping Chinese businesses establish themselves in the U.S. and worldwide….
Inserted from <Daily Beast>
I strongly suspect that Cindy equipped her girls with tug tweezers, because their hands are too big for Tiny Trump. I also suspect that he took De-robed Judge Roy Brown [correction: Judge Roy Moore] and Injustice Pervert Kava-Nazi as his guests.
Seriously, Sam Seder did a video on this crime.
This one of the Fuhrer’s sleaziest scandals. His partner in human trafficking and influence peddling certainly deserves a parade!
It’s another busy day here at the CatBox. I have a representative of the senior agency that pays about 15% of WWWendy making her annual evaluation this morning. That will tie me up for at least an hour. I probably won’t recover from sproinging for at least a couple more days.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s tool me 2:48 (average 4:31). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From YouTube (Vox Channel): Why you still don’t understand the Green New Deal
I agree. Use this link for substance. RESIST!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal
From Alternet: Despite all of the disproved narratives about the “white working class,” it has been repeatedly and conclusively shown that Donald Trump in fact won the White House because of racism and nativism. But sexism was a key element in Trump’s victory as well. These values, beliefs, and behaviors interact with one another. New research by University of Kansas sociologists David Smith and Eric Hanley demonstrates how a socially combustible mix of racism and sexism, in combination with anger and bullying, put the United States on a path to authoritarianism.
Writing in “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?”, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Critical Sociology, Smith and Hanley summarize their new research:
We find that Trump’s supporters voted for him mainly because they share his prejudices, not because they’re financially stressed. It’s true, as exit polls showed, that voters without four-year college degrees were likelier than average to support Trump. But millions of these voters — who are often stereotyped as “the white working class” — opposed Trump because they oppose his prejudices.
The Republican Reich was not hoodwinked or economically motivated. They love Trump, because they share his evil hatred. RESIST!!
From NY Times: Democrats filed into the House chamber on Thursday — depleted and punch drunk — to vote for an overstuffed resolution condemning prejudice — and end, or so they hoped, a week of infighting that vividly illustrated the perils of policing their own speech.
“I hope this puts an end to all of this,” said Representative Robin Kelly, Democrat of Illinois, moments before the measure, which condemned anti-Semitism and virtually every other form of bigotry, passed with unanimous Democratic support.
It almost certainly will not. The measure, which began as a rebuke to Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and a freshman lawmaker, and ended as a catchall declaration of tolerance that did not mention her by name, seemed to satisfy no one. Ultimately, the wrenching intraparty fight left unanswered a question that transcends partisan politics: In an era of shouting and provocation, how should Congress respond when its members say hateful or hurtful things?
We need to be careful here. Serious discussion in search of solutions may seem hurtful to some, but they are a necessary step toward progress. On the other hand, discussions intended only to hurt members of a group are hate speech. Hurtful need not be hateful, but hateful is wrong. RESIST!!
Cartoon:

It’s a very busy day here in the CatBox, and I’m one hour more tired than I should be. WWWendy is due shortly.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 2:28 (average 4:36). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From YouTube (SNL Channel): Weekend Update: Paul Manafort Sentenced to Prison
It’s pretty bad when it’s hard to differentiate SNL from actual news. RESIST!!
From The New Yorker: God has offered to give the people of Alabama brand new Bibles to replace the ones that Donald J. Trump signed during his visit to the state on Friday.
In a rare public statement from the famously mysterious deity, God said that He was furious at Trump “for defacing My book,” calling Trump’s signature “a wanton act of vandalism.”
“Where was Mike Pence in all of this?” God asked. “These people can’t do anything right.”
God added that He was “dumbfounded” that Trump had taken it upon himself to sign his name on a book to which he had “no relationship whatsoever.”
Amen, Andy! Amen, God! RESIST!!
From NY Times: The sharp left turn in the Democratic Party and the rise of progressive presidential candidates are unnerving moderate Democrats who increasingly fear that the party could fritter away its chances of beating President Trump in 2020 by careening over a liberal cliff.
Two months into the presidential campaign, the leading Democratic contenders have largely broken with consensus-driven politics and embraced leftist ideas on health care, taxes, the environment and Middle East policy that would fundamentally alter the economy, elements of foreign policy and ultimately remake American life.
Hillary demonstrated that a “moderate” (corporate centrist) nominee could allow Republicans to get close enough to steal the White House again. We need someone more progressive. RESIST!!
Cartoon:

It’s that time of week again, so here are four excellent video clips from Bill’s show last night. Enjoy!
Monologue: An Otherwise Blameless Life
“Bill Shine is moving to Trump’s campaign headquarters in Moscow.” Love it!
That CPUKE SOB has his head so far up his ass that he can see his own eyeballs from behind. I’m, glad Bill called him out on his BS.
Trump: Live and Unscripted at CPAC
Barf Bag Alert!!
Hitler loved 2+ hour speeches too.
New Rule: Modern-Day King Cyrus
Bill is wrong. If Trump went into a confessional booth, he’d have to come out early. The experience would kill the priest long before Trump finished.
This was one of his better shows!