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WaPo Columnist: McCain Colleagues Need to Push Back

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John McCain at a town hall in Phoenix, Arizona.

As part of a eulogy for the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who passed away on Saturday after battling brain cancer, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post called on some of McCain’s colleagues to push back against Trump the way McCain did before his passing.

According to Max Boot, who has become a vociferous critic of Trump, “McCain was the rare celebrity who was even more impressive in person than on television. I remember on a flight to the Munich Security Conference wandering to the front of the Air Force executive jet to find McCain engrossed in a lengthy historical tome. Imagine that — a politician who spent his spare time reading history. Or anything at all.”

“A good deal of his political appeal lay in his ability to avoid sounding like a politician — perhaps the only thing he and President Trump have in common,” Boot continued. “Unlike Trump, however, McCain did not establish his authenticity with ignorant or deranged statements. McCain could be politically incorrect (I remember how hard he laughed watching ‘Borat’ on one flight) but he was never cruel or bigoted.”

The conservative pointed out that he worked with McCain as a policy adviser, saying the late senator — unlike the current president — had a clear-eyed view of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, once remarking, “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters–a K, a G, and B.”

“McCain will be remembered, above all, for his character and courage. While other privileged young men were discovering ailments such as ‘bone spurs’ to avoid the Vietnam War, McCain requested a combat assignment and spent more than five hellish years in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ POW camp,” Boot wrote in a direct shot at Trump.

He then challenged GOP lawmakers to step up and do the job McCain was doing from the Senate floor.

“McCain’s passing, tragic at any time, is all the sadder now,” he wrote. “His dedication to America’s global leadership, advocacy for human rights, steadfast opposition to despots, devotion to bipartisanship, willingness to break with his own party, insistence on putting the nation’s interest above self-interest, and, above all, his unwavering sense of right and wrong — all are desperately needed at a time when his party has embraced an amoral, narcissistic demagogue who fawns over tyrants and flirts with isolationism and protectionism and white nationalism.”

“Trump hated McCain and insulted him at every turn because McCain was everything Trump is not — and everything that we need in our politics today but tragically lack,” he concluded.

You can read the whole piece here.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

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Mark Robinson Scandal Could Bring Trump Down in ‘Reverse Coattails’ Effect: Expert

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September 19, 2024

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Thursday’s bombshell revelations about North Carolina Republican Mark Robinson could not only doom his gubernatorial candidacy, but Donald Trump’s campaign as well, according to one of the most respected political experts.

According to CNN, Robinson, the current Lt. Governor who is the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee, “made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a ‘black NAZI!’ and expressed support for reinstating slavery.”

CNN’s KFile also reveals that Robinson, a far-right Christian nationalist who has targeted the LGBTQ community, “said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a ‘perv.'”

On the website Nude Africa, “Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.”

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“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote, according to CNN. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

The article also notes that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”

Professor of politics Larry Sabato, the highly-respected political scientist and political analyst and founder and director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Sabato’s Crystal Ball says his team has held an “emergency session” to review the report and is moving its prediction for governor of North Carolina from “Lean Democratic” to “Likely Democratic”:

“The Crystal Ball team has just met in emergency session, and in the fastest rating change in our history, we are moving NC GOVERNOR from Lean D to LIKELY D.”

READ MORE: Donald Trump Just Made One of His Most Racist Attacks Yet – and the Media Is Ignoring It

Sabato adds, “Our Crystal Ball rating for NC Governor has been Lean D. Mark Robinson (R) was going to lose even before this new story. The question is whether Robinson brings down the top of the ticket (Donald Trump) with him. Those 16 electoral votes could be the whole election.”

Asked on social media, “What kind of drag can the Gov race have on the Presidential race in NC?” Sabato replied: “Reverse coattails. It happens from time to time. Can dampen a party’s turnout.”

Trump also vociferously and enthusiastically endorsed Robinson. The Harris campaign was quick to post video of that endorsement after the scandal broke.

Political analysts have been saying North Carolina is a critical state given the current Electoral map.

“There are really only three states that will decide the presidential election: Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia,” Politico reported Thursday morning. “If Vice President Kamala Harris can’t carry Pennsylvania, her only hope is on a Southern strategy. Harris must win either Georgia or North Carolina. She has no other path to the White House.”

And if Trump “wins the East Coast trio of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, he will go back to the White House,” Politico added.

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: Yes, Republicans Are Lying — and They’re Not Going to Stop: ‘Enjoy It’

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Vance Demands Fact-Check on ‘Pet-Eating’ Lie Despite Knowing Truth Pre-Debate

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1 day ago

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September 18, 2024

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Ohio’s freshman Republican U.S. Senator JD Vance knew his claim “20,000” Haitian “migrants” were stealing the cats and dogs of Springfield residents and eating them was a lie before Donald Trump spread it to tens of millions of Americans in last week’s widely-watched September 10 presidential debate. Despite that knowledge, the vice-presidential nominee is now demanding reporters “fact-check” the falsehood.

“City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield,” The Wall Street Journal reports Wednesday.

“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the staffer. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

“By then,” WSJ noted, “Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.”

READ MORE: New GOP Strategy: Skyrocket the Cost of Health Insurance and Prescription Drugs

A day-and-a-half after the Trump campaign knew the racist and dangerous allegations were a lie, Donald Trump stood on stage and told 67 million Americans, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there.”

As of Monday, Springfield, Ohio had already received 33 bomb threats. Among the targets: elementary schools and hospitals. Those threats forced the evacuation, search, and closure of at least 22 government facilities.

“Over the summer,” The Journal adds, “outside neo-Nazi groups—which specialize in exploiting local controversy to foment outrage about migrants—had seized on a local controversy and fanned the narrative of pet-eating Haitians.”

“Then the Trump campaign blasted those rumors to the world—and kept pushing them even after they were exposed as lies. The Trump campaign continues to run hard at the controversy. Trump last Friday said he planned “large deportations” from Springfield—whose Haitian community is overwhelmingly in the country legally. Trump campaign surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy plans to host a town hall in Springfield this Thursday. Vance said on Tuesday that Trump would like to visit Springfield, too, at some point. ”

READ MORE: ‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

On Sunday, Senator Vance told CNN he was willing to “create stories” to advance his and Trump’s agenda, a boast his opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz ran with Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, Vance dug in his heels. At an Eau Claire, Wisconsin rally, Vance said it was the responsibility of the media, and not him, to “fact-check” his claims.

The Guardian reports Vance’s Sunday comments to CNN, “in which he appeared to say that politicians can brazenly lie, drew immediate rebuke. But during his rally, Vance defended them and claimed that numerous constituents had told him ‘they’d seen something in Springfield’.”

“On top of it, if there are certain people who refuse to listen to them, who refuse to take their concerns seriously,” he said, “that’s when it’s my job as United States senator to listen to my constituents.”

But those claims from Vance’s constituents have been debunked and proven false.

Among them, most recently, as The Independent reported, “Vance used a police report about a stolen cat to justify pet-eating rumors. ‘Miss Sassy’ was hiding in the basement.”

The woman who filed the police report apologized to her Haitian neighbors. Senator Vance has not.

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

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New GOP Strategy: Skyrocket the Cost of Health Insurance and Prescription Drugs

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1 day ago

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September 18, 2024

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House and Senate Republicans and the Trump campaign are looking to repeal parts of President Joe Biden’s highly-successful Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and President Barack Obama’s highly-successful Affordable Care Act (ACA), with a sharp focus on the provisions that protect access to health insurance and have lowered health care costs and prescription drug costs for millions of Americans – and will do so even more next year.

Republicans this week have been discussing plans to repeal the protections that require private insurance companies to provide the same coverage, and at the same cost, to people with pre-existing conditions as it does for those without them. They are also looking to repeal the hard-fought right the federal government now has to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, turned 14 this year. Some Americans, especially those who came of age after it was enacted, may not be aware that before the ACA, insurance companies could and often did deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions.” ObamaCare made that practice illegal.

“GOP healthcare plans, per the last 24 hours,” reports DC journalist Todd Zwillich, include “repeal pre-existing conditions protections in private insurance,” and “repeal Medicare’s negotiating power for Rx drugs.”

U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) called the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that allow the federal government to negotiate prices for Medicare drugs, “the worst legislation I’ve ever witnessed in 10 years in Congress and 10 years in the state legislature.” He said he “absolutely” wants to repeal them, according to Axios. “No congressional Republicans asked by Axios argued for keeping the IRA drug pricing talks.”

READ MORE: ‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

“Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he ‘100%’ wants to repeal the negotiation provisions, while other drug pricing sections of the law would need to be evaluated based on whether they have ‘a positive impact on business.'”

Axios also reports that “multiple high-ranking Republicans told Axios they want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug price negotiations next year if they prevail in the elections.”

“This isn’t some wild accusation or scare tactic,” remarked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “Republicans are admitting they would side with Big Pharma and gut the Biden-Harris law that lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, if they win. They are literally, openly, for higher drug prices.”

During last week’s presidential debate Donald Trump admitted that after years of vowing to “repeal and replace” Obamacare and after numerous promises he would release his healthcare plan soon, often in “two weeks,” all he actually has are the “concepts of a plan.”

Trump’s running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) on Sunday revealed what some of those concepts are.

Journalist Brian Beutler highlighted Vance’s remarks on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” where the GOP vice-presidential nominee said, “we want to make sure everybody is covered. But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

Pointing to Vance’s interview (above), Beutler writes: “When Vance here says he wants to put the healthy and sick in different risk pools he’s saying he wants to make pre-existing conditions protections impossible. His claim to want to maintain them is a lie.”

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

“One of the ‘concepts’ of the Trump-Vance plan is to screw over people with pre-existing conditions, specifically,” he adds, pointing to his “Off Message” Substack. “Step one of the plan is to lie about it—say it covers pre-existing conditions. Step two is to kick out the regulatory tentpoles that make covering pre-existing conditions possible.”

Journalist Heather Parton Digby writes that Vance’s plan “would take us back to the time when I was denied health insurance because I had periodontal disease. (I’m not kidding.) When I finally found a health insurer who would cover me ( I was otherwise completely healthy) it cost well over a thousand dollars a month and it had a gigantic deductible. That’s the market we were living in if we didn’t have employer or government insurance. Vance wants to take us back to that and people really should know that.”

If Republicans are successful in eliminating protections, insurance companies could be able to determine what a pre-existing condition is, and whether they want to deny a policy to any individual who has a pre-existing condition, or to deny coverage for that condition and any related issues.

Up to 50 percent of all non-elderly Americans – up to 129 million Americans – have a pre-existing condition, according to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“A medical illness or injury that you have before you start a new health care plan may be considered a pre-existing condition. Conditions like diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, and sleep apnea, may be examples of pre-existing health conditions. They tend to be chronic or long-term,” according to Cigna, a healthcare and insurance company. “The ACA made it illegal for health insurance companies to deny you medical coverage or raise rates due to a pre-existing condition.”

The list of what could be considered a pre-existing condition is long, but after the coronavirus pandemic, it has grown longer and encompasses more Americans: An estimated 43 million Americans have had long COVID, and about 17 million Americans currently do still.

Near the end of the Trump administration, in 2020, KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation published a report: “Mental Illnesses May Soon Be the Most Common Pre-Existing Conditions.”

Also in 2020, House Democrats published a massive 197-page report: “Shortchanged: How the Trump Administration’s Expansion of Junk Short-Term Health Insurance Plans is Putting Americans at Risk.” It concluded these plans “present a significant threat to the health and financial well-being of American families. STLDI plans include limited protection for both catastrophic medical costs and routine medical care, and it is unclear what kind of value consumers are getting for their premium dollars, other than a false sense of security.”

Democratic former U.S. Congressman and Obama State Dept. official Tom Malinowski weighed in earlier this week:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Remigration’: Trump Continues Attacks on Immigrants With New Vow of Forced Deportations

 

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