gimmekeef wrote on Jun 27^th, 2017 at 1:50pm:



Pretty much true until early-2009 when the ruling party got their hands on the wheel and took a hard left turn into the ditch.
After eight years of that, middle America (you know that big swath of land between New York and California) finally had enough of losing what they worked for and made the 2016 election a referendum.

This ain't your daddy's Democratic party anymore, ya'll!
What you have now are a group of squatters that have moved into your basement.
Eventually, they get tired of that basement and they want more.
They want more of what you have, and they want more of you.

I'm looking forward to the day when the Dem's leaders finally realize that stubbornly pushing harder to the far-left does nothing to bring the electorate together, because it does take two parties to run this country.   

sirmoonie wrote on Jun 27^th, 2017 at 4:00pm:



I feel ya Sir Moonie . President Trump ( ' Dear Leader ! ' ) is still very new to this Politics Thing  . Give him Time to channel his ' Inner LBJ !  '

Edith Grove wrote on Jun 27^th, 2017 at 4:08pm:


Edith, I don't disagree at all with your post. My frustration is that as a person who is slightly left of center and has zero allegiance to any party I'm tired of liberal bashing. Being inferred liberals have ruined the country and are not patriots or out to ruin the country. There is too much alienation and name calling. You're right it does take 2 to get anything done. The same can be said for folks who call Trump supporters deplorable or uneducated or racist. I guess I just feel stranded in the middle  with no light at the end of the tunnel.

gimmekeef wrote on Jun 28^th, 2017 at 7:13am:

MrPleasant wrote on Jun 28^th, 2017 at 12:46pm:


**************************

What  ..... ?!   ... !!!!!!!!!   :


Low Ratings  ............ ?!  ... !!!!!!



LOW RATINGS   ......... ?!  ....... !!!!!!!!!!  :






Low Friggin Ratings Me Arse !!!!!


The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was Number # 1 in the Nielsen Ratings for Thirty Consecutive Years with an average nightly viewership of twenty million people  . At his peak in the late 1970's and early 1980's the NBC Television Network was earning 45 Percent of its revenue from Carson's Tonight Show ALONE !!!!


..... not to mention the fact Johnny had the Number #1 rated Daytime television program " Who Do You Trust " from 1957 - 1962  .
That is Thirty - Five Straight Years of being Number # 1 in the ratings .


" Talk About Winning , Ronnie !!!!!!!!!!!! "






" I LOVE YOU ALL !!!!  "

Joey Carson ™®©

sirmoonie wrote on Jun 28^th, 2017 at 3:30pm:


most of us would trade anything to have no Trump. Guy's a lying ass.

< ---------- Some Guy   ..... ?!   ..... !!!!!!!!! :




https://www.wsj.com/articles/should-trump-abandon-the-gop-1498688524



" Should Trump Abandon the GOP?  "

" Donald Trump may separate himself from a party disabled by a permanent blocking minority. "



By Daniel Henninger



" In 2016, Donald Trump stood on debate stages and ran against a half-dozen Republicans in the party’s presidential primaries. He won. With his presidential victory came Republican control of the House and Senate, in part because of his coattails.

After Senate Republicans this week failed to move a bill to repeal and replace Obama Care, Mr. Trump must be asking himself: Why do I need these people?

Just now, that’s a good question.

If the congressional Republicans can’t do ObamaCare reform after years of chanting they would, what chance is there they’ll pull off the heavier lift of tax reform?

Mr. Trump has to be wondering whether he would be better off with his version of the Obama presidential model: govern by pen-and-phone executive order through the agencies he controls.

Barack Obama rendered Congress moribund with little outcry from voters. The Obama error was his predictable left-wing overreach with extralegal decrees like the Clean Power Plan, which failed a court challenge before the D.C. Circuit.


To succeed as president, Mr. Trump has to show he can govern, and it looks like that may require separating himself from a Republican Party disabled by a permanent blocking minority with no interest in governing.


At the level of domestic politics, successful presidential governing means not much more than enabling and attaching oneself to an improving economy, as the impeached but popular Bill Clinton proved possible.

The economy is already strengthening, and Mr. Trump can direct Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House economics chief Gary Cohn to accelerate their deregulation of financial and energy markets.

Before the Republicans lose seats and maybe control of the House in 2018, Mr. Trump can still extract a few things helpful to himself. Desperate incumbents, such as Nevada’s ObamaCare reform opponent Sen. Dean Heller, will be looking for a legislative life raft. Mr. Trump no doubt could get a modest tax-cut bill passed this year. That will support slow but steady upward growth unless he retards even that with a regime of steel tariffs and myriad trade uncertainties.

Real tax reform would liberate the U.S.’s ocean of pent-up capital and produce an economic boom, assuring continued GOP control of Congress. But Republicans like West Virginia’s Sen. Shelley Moore Capito see their reason for being as protecting the Medicaid status quo.

Some may say Mr. Trump and the Republicans will now take political ownership of the steady collapse of the ObamaCare exchanges. But he didn’t create these things; Congress did, and when voters elected a Congress to reform ObamaCare, it failed.

The press will dump full responsibility for this political nonfeasance on congressional Republicans, and voters will take it out on them in 2018. Health and Human Services can tinker with the failing ObamaCare exchanges, as it would have under Hillary Clinton anyway, and Mr. Trump can blame Congress for the residual mess.

As to Mr. Trump’s low approval rating, the danger there was always that it would scare away Republicans from his agenda. That looks moot now. The Republicans’ approval rating is no doubt already plummeting. Mr. Trump’s approval will rise as the economy improves and if he modulates himself by about half, as he’s done recently.

Most intriguing of all is the longer term future of Mr. Trump’s formal relationship with the Republican Party. After voters in 2018 reorder Congress, Mr. Trump can consolidate his base with a big infrastructure bill co-designed by Democrats and likely approved by independent voters. By then, the Republican opposition that tanked ObamaCare reform will be irrelevant.

And please, hold the faux shock when Mr. Trump, a nonideological pragmatist, entertains Chuck Schumer’s Medicare-for-all as the final health-care fix. In Mr. Trump’s world, subcontractors come and go. The GOP shouldn’t bother trying to collect for work done.

This disorder could surface the possibility that dare not speak its name until now: a more centrist Trumpian political party of the sort favored by Ivanka Trump. No one thought Emmanuel Macron’s party bolt in France could go so far.

Look who’s out front undermining Mr. Trump’s health-care reform: Ted Cruz, Rob Portman, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The nominal reasons each has given for opposing the reform don’t add up. What makes sense is compulsively ambitious Republican politicians positioning themselves to emerge from the rubble and run in 2020 against what they think will be a wounded president. They may end up with nothing but the rubble.

Reasons abound for the GOP’s rump opposition to spend the July 4 holiday rethinking what it is doing. But the biggest of all is this: After eight years of rule by progressive presidential decree, they are putting in motion four more years of centralizing power by a Republican president. The opposition may alter American government forever, but this couldn’t be further from what they intended. "

gimmekeef wrote on Jun 28^th, 2017 at 3:40pm:

He's a fucking pig.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/29/politics/trump-mika-analysis/index.html?sr=fbpol06...

<  ----------- Edith  .... ?!   ... !!!!! :




https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-simplicity-of-a-health-deal-1498776293


" The Simplicity of a Health Deal  "

" The GOP must realize protection for pre-existing conditions is here to stay.  "


By Kimberley A. Strassel



" As Washington continues to boggle the nation with the complex minutiae of health-care reform, the contours of an actual deal aren’t nearly so mystifying. The success of the GOP effort comes down to one simple question: Will the most conservative members of Congress accept that the politics of health care have changed?

Or more simply yet: Will they acknowledge that any reform must include continued protections for pre-existing medical conditions?

It’s that easy. Yes, the media analysis is correct that there are two camps of defectors from the Senate’s reform bill. One consists of Republican moderates— Rob Portman, Dean Heller, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski —who claim the bill is too mean to poor and sick people. Cue mind-numbing media stories about Medicaid formulas and per capita spending caps and medical inflation, all of which make a compromise sound nigh impossible.

Hardly. Here’s a tip: When a politician claims a bill “cuts too much,” that’s an invitation to be bought off. There’s a reason several senators who had been largely mum on the GOP bill (Jerry Moran of Kansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia) came out against it only after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delayed a vote. They saw the other holdouts were about to get payola, and they wanted theirs.


And there is cash to be had. With the stakes this high, the Senate leadership will gladly shuffle some money toward opioid treatment, rural health-care providers or Medicaid. So getting the “moderates” on board is simple and transactional. They name a price, they get pork, they vote yes.

The conservatives are the sticking point, precisely because they have principles. Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have been clear from the start that any bill must lower premiums, which involves getting rid of costly ObamaCare mandates. And there is no question that among the most expensive mandates are those designed to protect individuals with pre-existing conditions—in particular “community rating,” which requires insurers to charge the same prices regardless of health status.

The House Freedom Caucus was so intent on getting rid of community rating that it nearly derailed the bill. Only after the conference added an amendment allowing states to apply for waivers from community rating did the most conservative members finally came on board.

Even so, it was always clear that provision was never going to fly in the Senate—and for a simple reason. Freedom Caucus members tend to hail from inordinately conservative (and safe) congressional districts, whereas senators represent entire statewide populations. And a sizable majority of the public strongly supports retaining protections for pre-existing conditions.

This is the true legacy of the Republican presidential loss in 2008, and the health-care law that resulted. Few Americans ever understood the stunningly complex means by which ObamaCare screwed up the individual insurance market, or the wider economy. To this day, most Americans haven’t intimately interacted with the law, as they receive their health care from an employer or Medicare.

But every American remembers two particular provisions of the law—pre-existing conditions and coverage for children up to 26. These policies are simple and sound good. And they have become over the years a new standard in most people’s minds. A February poll from YouGov showed 77% support for protections for consumers with pre-existing conditions.

Principles matter, but so does public will. Conservatives will argue their side just needs to do a better job explaining how these mandates drive up costs for everyone, or lower the quality of care. These are valid points, but they’ll count for little in the face of 2018 Democratic campaign ads that flash GOP names next to a graphic of a kid in a wheelchair with cancer who can’t get care. Republicans lost this argument nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Obama won. More than 90% of Senate Republicans understand this.

Which is another way of saying that protections for pre-existing conditions are here to stay, and conservatives face a choice. They can work with their colleagues to minimize the costs of the mandates (there are innovative ways to do this) and build in different free-market reforms to lower premiums. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the current Senate bill will reduce premiums by about 30%, and the GOP can and should build on this.

Or they can kill the bill, and get no premium reductions at all, no deficit reduction, no Medicaid reform, no tax cuts, and no economic boost. Oh, and the protections for pre-existing conditions would remain. Plus, electoral disaster would loom.

It’s a binary choice, rooted in blunt political reality, which ought to make it an easy call. The question is whether conservatives will be savvy enough to forge a face-saving compromise and seek victories elsewhere in the bill. The health-care debate has changed over the past decade, and Republicans can’t reverse it on a dime. But they can pass a bill that starts the walk back to freer health-care markets.  "

We maintain our prediction that Trump is fucking up.