By David Futrelle
Hey everyone, I’m still lost in headache-land (see my last post for details) but this is REALLY REALLY important for all WHTM readers in the US.
Senate Republicans have scheduled a vote after lunch TODAY on a “motion to proceed” that will pave the way for a final vote on their bill that will take away healthcare from tens of millions of Americans (including me, and probably a lot of you).
Tell them NO.
You can get the numbers of your Senators (and more info) at 5Calls.org Moveon.org, or on the Senate website or by calling the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.
Here’s what MoveOn suggests you tell them (roughly):
Tell Republicans: “Please oppose any bill that takes away health care from tens of millions of Americans.”
If you’re one of those Americans, definitely tell them that.
Tell Democrats: “Thank you for doing everything you can to fight Trumpcare. Please use every tactic at your disposal to slow and stop this bill, including the filibuster-by-amendment (which means: slowing down the bill with a high number of amendments when the bill does come to a vote). Please DO NOT vote for ANY amendments that will make it easier for Republicans pass Trumpcare.”
If any of the Republicans listed below are your Senators it’s ESPECIALLY important to call; Collins is a “no” vote; the others are (as I write this post) on the fence.
https://twitter.com/rsegbers/status/889595637469245440
@ dreemr
If the Republicans want a “let’s get rid of something despite not having a fucking clue as to what to do instead”, we’ve got a Brexit we can sell them.
Drumpf has done this for two reasons – the first, as we all know, is as a distraction, from both the Special Counsel’s investigation into Russia/Trump campaign, and to also distract from his attempts to harass Sessions into resigning.
The second that I’ve seen floated is that this was done on Pence’s urging, to accomplish what @ChimericMind say – to reinvigorate the Culture Wars. It’s plain pandering to the base.
It accomplishes a few of Drumpf’s goals – it fires up his base so he gets that narcissistic reward he craves as well as distracts (a bit) from all the failures his administration is mired in.
ETA: the vote to Repeal without Replace for 2 years has failed. McCain voted against this, while voting FOR Repeal & Replace (with the shitty tax bill disguised as healthcare).
My own Senator Hoeven, like the toady he is, voted yes to both.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/25/us/politics/senate-votes-repeal-obamacare.html
It’s a distraction, an Art of the Deal goal post move, and pandering to the more extreme white evangelical voters (the types who wouldn’t mind sending all LGBT people to an island and bombing it).
Oh no, poor Caitlin Jenner. My heart melts for her. Whatever will she do? It’s almost as if she – you know what, fuck her, I’m not going to finish this sarcasm. I don’t have the energy to hate someone like her. Another rich white person tried to throw people under the bus and is now shocked that she’s still an outsider. Yawn.
Meanwhile, rumour has it that Trump is considering replacing Jeff Sessions with Ted Cruz. Has anyone heard something reliable on this?
First time I’ve ever “Live-blogged” C-Span, but they’re now voting on a Democratic motion to send it to committee to remove the medicaid language (whatever that means, this is all amending HR 1628 and stuff, and since it’s a D moving for it, it’s probably a good thing.). Failed, so they’ll keep fiddling with it on the floor. Next motion is to send it to the Senate Finance Committee to make changes (within 3 days) to make sure people covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act won’t be harmed by any changes to Medicaid. I expect there will now be several of these attempts to send it to a committee, and hopefully one of them works.
This is not a fun way to learn how US Government really works, there’s too much at stake.
I’m honestly amazed that his career managed to survive Jon Stewart’s masterful takedown. As indifferent as I am to Paul Begala, I’ve barely seen him in the public discourse, yet somehow Tucker Carlson and his smug face seem to keep popping up. I guess with Swanson TV Dinner money, he can keep The Daily Caller going and buy his way onto Bill O’Reilly’s old chair.
The US government works? I don’t think I’ve seen any evidence of that for at least the last 6 to 8 years. Your last president seemed to get a few things done initially, at least until the gears in the governmental machine kept getting jammed.
This is what made me believe (or at least hope) that all the vitriol spewed towards McCain and Sanders about their “vote to debate” was premature and overblown. The debate is now happening, and he’s voted against the terrible bullshit. That doesn’t redeem McCain, but it doesn’t make him a monster, either– he wants to have this discussion while he’s still alive and he has surprisingly taken a positive stand. Sanders has also moved things along while voting against the various bad ideas. Saying that they were horrible people simply because “yay to debate” can ultimately lead to it passing seems to mistake people having a different idea on strategy with people who have unquestionably ill intent. Confusing the two is false equivalence, and leads to the same bullshit about turning allies (or potential allies) with a different strategy into enemies because of Insufficient Purity to the One True Path.
@Ohlmann:
Probably not, but he may yet surprise us. He wanted the Navy to stop using their magnetic aircraft catapults and go back to steam, because STEAM GOOD and MAGNETS HOW DO THEY WORK.
@Gussie Jives
One could argue that Trump is to Boyle as Putin is to Kane, but I think that’s unfair to Kane. I served with Kane. I knew Kane. Kane was a good friend of mind. Putin is no Kane. He also doesn’t have laser shooting obelisks, though there was that time they tried putting one in space.
Given recent events, I would also like to disagree with Samuel Johnson: Patriotism is almost always the first refuge of a scoundrel. What faster way is there to make worthless opinions seem reasonable than to couch them in cheap sentiment taken out of a Hallmark card? The more people tend to scream loudly about, “supports the troops”, the more insincere they are in reality. This is doubly true when they claim to do such and contradict themselves within the same breath. Gay? Well, gays are icky and we can’t have them making our men uncomfortable! Transgender? Lulz they’re just playing pretend and should go home! Muslim? They’re terrorists! It’s all just bald disrespectful hypocrisy; sort of like how Trump said he supported LGBT rights and ended up not supporting them in practice. Though I suppose anyone surprised by that particular chain of events would also be surprised to learn that Darth Vader was in fact Luke’s father.
@Falconer
Magnets operate on the same sorcery that makes electricity work. Clearly this means we should also replace all those diesel engines! Heaven forbid he learn there are nuclear powered vessels and where they are. I mean, this is the same person that actually said, “Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out.”
Alan:
I think Trump’s America could do one better than Brexit. There’s already a political fringe of people who think United Nations is some jewious plot to undermine US independence. Get the US out of UN and make it great again!
Seen on Twitter:
@Scolar Visari
My father was an electrician, and to this day electricity frightens and confuses me. To me it basically is magic.
Tucker Carlson always looks like he is perplexed at where the odor of his own flatulence came from, but there’s no dog to blame it on.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-transgender-military-trump-ban-1.4222787
Trump’s take on nuclear vessels:
“Excuse me, I’m a nuclear weasel. Let’s talk about carriers’ effects on sealions.”
An interesting bit (to me) about nuclear powered ships. They’re actually heat-powered, that gets used create steam to turn generators, then that electricity powers everything else on the ships.. except the steam catapults, which use the steam more directly. So instead of having electrical lines that fail relatively safe when damaged, you have high pressure steam pipes to that fail “nearby humans get cooked or worse”.
@ChimericMind
Partly correct. He voted against the “repeal with no replace” option. After voting yes on the MTP, and then immediately voting yes on the BCRA including Cruz’s amendment to allow insurers to sell crap plans.
Just because he was only willing to kick 23 million people off of their insurance (plus whatever Cruz’s plan would do) instead of 32 million doesn’t make criticism of McCain invalid. He’s still an awful person, and it’s not “false equivalence” to point out that his first two yes votes showed he equated the motion to proceed and the bill itself.
Nor does it render him any less of a hypocrite for voting “yes” on the MTP, then subsequently criticizing how the BCRA was created and calling for greater decorum and bipartisanship (when a simple “no” would have sunk the bill and required Republicans to undertake that bipartisanship). The fact that he also lied through his teeth trying to pull the “both sides do it” card on the ACA and BCRA is icing on the cake.
@dreemr
It gets even stranger when you reduce the electrical resistance of something to, “zero“. You get levitation and stuff that would make Doc Brown freak. Of course, I also think chemistry is just a degenerate form of alchemy.
“Valence electrons? Atomic numbers!? Bah! Now hand me my vial of quicksilver, apprentice, I’m going to make this lead into gold! What do you mean that’s physics? What is this, “physics” you speak of?”
@JS
All we’ve really done is just replace the oil and coal burning parts with the magic of nuclear energy. It yet amuses me to no end to realize that, if nuclear fusion power plants ever end up being a thing, they’ll almost certainly be used to boil water with angry neutrons to make electricity. You want something else? Well, good luck getting those pesky helium-3 and deuterium isotopes to fuse!
Honorable mention to the Kirov-class battlecruisers, which have both nuclear and oil heated boilers. Because Kirk wanted more warp speed, I suppose.
Hi again, I’m from Italy, so he really, said and done, banned trans people from military and he could do thaytat the snap of hand with no kind of intermediate voting process?
Hope he couldn’t for those who came out too. Such an arbitrary decision without having to prove how are they not fit beyond what the training would be supposed to prove by itself, I mean if one is fit or not for the army. Why an a-priory based on gender identity? I know the don’t ask don’t is a notorious long lasting unresolved issue, at least implicitly, but going explicitly for it, wouldn’t it be unlawful as explicit discrimination? Or does it feed on the concept of mental illness?
Evangelicalism in the US is basically a scheme to allow de facto for-profit businesses to avoid complying with civil rights laws or paying taxes. It has little to do with anyone’s actual religious or spiritual beliefs, except for a relatively small group of people who are more apolitical and don’t have any power. Religious schools can avoid state laws that prohibit discrimination or laws that regulate when a school has governmental approval to grant degrees. The “ministerial exception” has even been interpreted to allow people who’ve bought this certificate to use the title “Doctor” where you’d normally need a legitimate doctorate.
There’s less of a “religious right” in Europe largely because religious groups need to put significant money or volunteer work into a “public good” before they can get tax exemption (i.e., they don’t pay taxes because they’re tangibly helping society as part of the welfare state). Many countries have free public universities, so something like Liberty University is a harder sell.
Now that sounds like an concept North America should copy!
Caitlyn Jenner promoted a leopard whose main campaign plank was eating people’s faces, and is now surprised that the leopard is eating her face. I read down some of the responses on that tweet, and most of the threads started with some variation on YOU VOTED FOR HIM FOOL.
Of course, this ban doesn’t affect Jenner personally or anything, so I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if she limits her activism on this topic to twitter and keeps on defending Trump on other topics.
Scolar Visari – I still remember how disappointed I was to learn that nuclear power was just a new way to boil water.
The military in the US is part of the executive branch. While the legislative branch (the Congress) can pass laws etc. that affect military operations, the Commander in Chief generally has wide latitude to implement military policy unilaterally.
An “intermediate voting process” is undesirable in this context.
The excuse given is that medical support for transgender military personnel would be too expensive, which is pretty much bullshit.
Gender identity is not a protected classification in US case law, the way race is protected. Not yet, anyway. There is some movement toward considering discrimination on the basis of gender identity as being a form of sex discrimination, which is a protected classification, but the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in and that question won’t be answered until that happens. For now, discrimination on the basis of gender identity is A-OK.
Prior to Obama’s executive order stopping it, transgender service members were immediately discharged on medical grounds when they were discovered to be trans. I expect this system will be reinstated. That’s not as bad as the dishonorable discharge that gay service members got back in the day, but it’s still pretty fucking terrible.
@Scolar Visari
For many years, I joked that I failed CHEM 101 in college not once, but twice. (I graduated waaay back 25 years ago)
Imagine my chagrin when I checked my transcripts a few years ago and found that I flunked CHEM 101 not once, not twice but three dang times.
Now, in my defense, the reason I flunked it was because it was a 1-credit course that took place entirely in the computer lab, and it was just omigaw so borrring I can’t manage to goooooo.
I was forced to finally deal with it this past year though when my son had chemistry!