Time for another Trump open thread because holy crap. I assume you’re all up on the recent news but in case you missed the important developments with regard to the ice cream:
No, this is real. From Time magazine.
Discuss this, discuss anything. I’ve got lots of fun Trump stuff on my Twitters.
NO TROLLS NO TROLLS NO TROLLS.
For a non-Trump open thread, go here!
For an open thread for personal stuff, go here!
Heck, my payroll deduction isn’t even $15 a pop. It’s a reasonable amount, but I wish it was only $15 per paycheck.
My employer pays about $700 per month each for 3 of us to have fairly good health coverage. It is not a family plan. It doesn’t cover vision or dental. We’re a very small business (3 full-time employees, 1 part-time, plus the owner).
$15/month isn’t even close, even with the best possible configuration. Maybe he’s thinking of term life insurance, but I seriously, seriously doubt it.
It’s like groceries – I’m sure Drumpf has no idea of the cost of a gallon of milk or a 4-pack of toilet paper or a loaf of bread.
I read this this morning about that scenario:
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/11/15624544/fbi-trump-comey-war
I’m very much looking forward to the FBI vs Trump, because he’s bringing a spork to an AK-47 fight.
President Trump on Friday warned James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director he fired this week, against leaking anything negative about the president and warned the news media that he may cancel all future White House briefings.
In a series of early-morning Twitter posts, Mr. Trump even seemed to suggest that there may be secret tapes of his conversations with Mr. Comey that could be used to counter the former F.B.I. director if necessary. It was not immediately clear whether he meant that literally or simply hoped to intimidate Mr. Comey into silence.
“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.
The article
Do you want to be compared to Nixon? Because this is how you get compared to Nixon.
Re: Trump and insurance:
He seems to have been watching too many commercials for life insurance, and he has mixed that shit up.
The more I read about him in interviews, the more horrified and deeply, deeply ashamed that this is the man who is our President.
And his handlers do nothing.
Re: Melania and Barron:
I understand the reasons she stayed in NYC, and I agree with not wanting to yank Barron out of school mid-year. It’s what I, as a mom myself, would do.
However, now that the school year is nearly over, I will be watching to see if she actually does move to the WH, or if we’ll see some really inventive reasons why she doesn’t.
All of the snark aside, I feel sorry for them both. It must be like living constantly with medieval Medici palace intrigue.
RE: Trump and $15 health insurance; unless I read that article wrong, Trump is saying that health insurance should cost $15 a month, not that it actually does.
Which I actually find far, far scarier. Saying that health insurance costs $15/month will get him instantly mocked by anyone with 2 brain cells, but saying that health insurance would cost $15
if only the Democrats weren’t cockblocking and allowed Trump to use his amazing negotiating skillswill gain him millions of struggling fans that will blame Obamacare and the Democrats for their inability to afford healthcare.Of course Trump would never be able to come through on $15/month health insurance, mostly because shit like THIS goes on in America;
“On May 2, the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly raised the prices of its insulin medications, Humalog and Humulin, by 7.8 percent, according to newly obtained records from CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. And Lilly is not acting alone: Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, the only two other companies that manufacture insulin in the US, have been jacking up insulin prices recently too.
Patients can now expect to pay upward of $400 per month for the century-old drug. Drug companies use the “cost of innovation” argument to justify the price increases, but critics don’t buy their reasoning, and diabetics who depend on the daily lifesaving medication are livid.
In January, patients filed a class action lawsuit accusing the three companies of price fixing. The American Diabetes Association’s board of directors has also asked Congress to investigate insulin price increases.
While the US represents only 15 percent of the global insulin market, it generates almost half of the pharmaceutical industry’s insulin revenue. According to a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine, in the 1990s Medicaid paid between $2.36 and $4.43 per unit of insulin; by 2014, those prices more than tripled, depending on the formulation.”
“The doctors and researchers who study insulin say it is yet another example, along with EpiPens and decades-old generic drugs, of companies raising the cost of their products because of the lax regulatory environment around drug pricing in the US. “They are doing it because they can,” said Jing Luo, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, “and it’s scary because it happens in all kinds of different drugs and drug classes.”
BUT REMEMBER, REGULATIONS ARE BUSINESS-KILLING GUYZZZ. IF DRUGS ARE PRICED TOO HIGH, THEN THE POOR SHOULD CHOOSE TO DIE INSTEAD OF TAKING THEIR MEDS SO THAT DRUG PRICES WILL BE REDUCED FOR EVERYONE ELSE! /capitalism
(And /sarcasm, just in case that’s not 1,000% clear).
Disclaimer for above copypasta; If there’s any grammatical mistakes in the above quotes it’s because the formatting got all screwed up when I copied and pasted. Don’t know why, and I’m not 100% certain that I managed to get everything right before my time ran out.
lkeke35:
If this were fiction about a dysfunctional presidency, half the things which are actually happening would be dismissed as too ridiculous. And Spicer hiding in the bushes would be among them. Can’t wait to see what Melissa McCarthy does with that.
I don’t know how Trump’s presidency will end, but it feels like the punchline ought to be “The Aristocrats!”
I have my doubts that it’d happen even with a Democratic majority. All but two or three of ’em seem perfectly happy to grandstand it up on Twitter then go back to scratching their arses and rubber-stamping whatever Trump wants as soon as we’re not looking.
She did this, and it was glorious.
Get your very own garden Spicer. Now you too can have the White House press secretary hiding among your bushes.
God, I fucking love Melissa Spicer.
Sean Spicer Chia Pets are the next logical step.
Let’s say we’re spending on average 5% of our income on health care. That’s substantially less than any developed country, and less than a third of what the US currently spends, but for the sake of argument let’s say it’s what the country “should” be paying in an ideal system.
If health care is a flat $15/month to cover everything, that means the average person makes $3600.
The median income is about 78% of the average income (because the Bills Gates and Reges Tillerson and Formerly-Known-As-Princes[pbuh] of the world make a lot more than the median). So he’s expecting that the median person makes $2800 per year before tax.
In a standard roughly 2000-hour work year, that means about $1.40 per hour.
No wonder he thinks we need to make America great again!
He’s basically an unholy combination of all the worst aspects of Nixon and Reagan.
@ PeeVee
That is a work of genius.
LindsayIrene, wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. As usual, the net gets it right, again.
It is wonderful, isn’t it?
You can sort of tell where Nixon ends and Trump begins by looking at the line of spray-tan.
It says something about Trump, that his most immediately recognisable facial feature is his false tan.
For anyone who is interested in a commentary on Trump and the Catapult Issue: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55060/trump-steam-power-ships/
@SFHC
We’ve got the heaviest rain. Fills up storm drains in seconds. No country has heavier rain or bigger storm drains. America invented origami.
I’ve said so here before, I think. But as a Scandinavian watching from afar, a number of things going on in the US are truly baffling.
Scariest is the idea that the much-touted checks and balances don’t seem to apply in reality. Blatant abuses of power are going on, in plain sight, and nobody’s doing anything about it. As a resident of a constitutional monarchy, I was always promised that if the monarch used their still enshrined powers to mingle in politics, they’d swiftly be removed. What if they weren’t? What if all that’s holding together democracy is tradition, and what if it’s possible, even easy, to erode that tradition? Trump seems a demonstration of that.
Also, the healthcare debacle is interesting. Seems America is built on a few principles that seem outmoded and bizarre to a European. Like, the idea is that to be truly free, you must be free to both succeed and to fail. To become a billionaire or be crippled from easily treated diseases.
This principle, that each person is the author of their own destiny, seems to hold sway even in the face of easily demonstrated facts (health care in the US is more expensive and worse than any comparable system, blatant racism, sexism and classism put up hindrances to the sacred individual).
Oh, and everyone’s entitled to carry deadly weapons about.
A lot of us over here are as baffled as you were at our song contest last night, is my point.
@Simon N
That’s not entirely fair; there’s been a lot of push back on the muslim ban from the judiciary. But the sheer power of the US president, a sort of elected monary, effectively, weirdly distorts the whole political landscape there.
Plenty of democratically elected governments have been toppled, often with the generous assistance of the US, and plenty have turned into a totalitarian state with no term limits and no meaningful elections (only until the current emergency is over though, of course). That’s kinda tha way people are, unfortunately.
Two things though. Firstly, you want to be looking at someone like erdogan, not trump, if you want an example of things going horribly wrong. Secondly, trump is just the orangey head on the top of the huge supperating abcess that is US politics; the whole thing has been festering for decades and he’s just the latest symptom. He’s no strong-man dictator, and his position is relatively precarious and dependent entirely on the good will of the republican party which he is slowly eroding.
Potentially enormous news (it hasn’t been 100% confirmed yet, but all the sources reporting on it have been proven correct about abso-fucking-lutely everything else so far):
Trump and his top cronies may have just been indicted.