Lord, what a farce! The collapse of “repeal and replace”, the GOP’s single biggest campaign/fund raising promise was even more chaotic and Looney Tune-ish than anyone could have ever imagined. After the “Freedom” Caucuses’ debt ceiling government shut down a couple years ago I didn’t think it possible for the inmates to have more control over the asylum.
But as usual, I was wrong. There is no depth of absurdity this crowd can’t sink to.
But yeah, I grossly underestimated the ability of 2017’s “Party of Lincoln” to be even more detached from reality, even more indifferent to the day-to-day miseries of their irredeemably ill-informed base and even less embarrassed to be caught out in public fully de-pantsed, ethically and intellectually. Good god! Whatever happened to a concern for personal dignity?
After six and a half years of shrieking and howling and vowing and promising, after 60+ time-sucking votes and an election that handed the red-faced, spittle-flecked repeal-istas control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they still screwed this up.
This country needs a better class of fools.
Trump, the master deal maker, put less effort into this than his weekend golf trips to Mar-a-Lago. A couple rallies in Hillybilly Elegy Holler, a few phone calls and … wow! … a trip all the up to Capitol Hill to make a few veiled threats to the Tri-Corner Hat Caucus. The boy’ll need a long rest after all that exertion. But we’ve already established that Trump is too easily distracted and lazy to do even minimal homework on policy details … even on a plan to flip 20% of the American economy on its head. So his lack of preparation and effort is not too surprising.
But, come on! Paul Ryan!? WTF?
Because he’s the latest Republican example of … what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like … I assumed that he at least, after seven goddam years, had come up with a plan that papered over the hostilities (and stupidity) within his own party. I mean, what kind of an imbecile slaps his face and reputation on something as colossally under-negotiated as the thing he whipped out 36 days ago? (BTW. Obamacare: 383 days of negotiating/legislating after literally decades of smart people fussing over minute details. TrumpRyanCare: 36 days and quite obviously little-to-no-effort wrestling the Rubik’s Cube of conflicting issues into stasis.)
This would be a joke if it weren’t so sick. After all, this crowd is now “running” everything. And now comes “tax reform.”
Trump’s Red Hat Brigade, hootin’ and hollerin’ at basketball arenas in coal country will continue to believe anything he tells them, as long as he says he’s sticking it to the terrorists and everybody who is getting gubmint services … other than them. But Ryan, a guy who has spent his entire adult life on gubmint payrolls (sweet pension, dude) and arrived in Congress thanks largely to cash from insurance companies, (Northwestern Mutual being Exhibit A) and the financial “services” industry, (and oh yeah, and this trucking dude) has some serious ‘splainin’ to do.
Everyone who can accurately spell “Make America Great Again” knows this Trump/RyanCare health care shtick had almost nothing to do with improving the quality of care Americans get and lowering prices, and everything to do with clawing back the $100 billion a year in taxes Obamacare was sucking out of our valiant job creators/major campaign donors.
Pundits are squalling about how “stupid” it was to “go after health care first”, instead of “tax reform” and “regulatory reform”. (Those last two are hoary code-language for more unfettered profit-taking with much less “redistribution” of wealth.)
But as Ryan very well knows, getting “tax reform”, by which we mean a new round of epic, deficit-blowing George W. Bush-style tax cuts for the plutocrats who keep Ryan in office, is a hell of a lot harder to do without being able to balance things out — marketing-wise — with the $1 trillion (over ten years) in Obamacare “savings.” The numbers just get too ugly too fast.
No doubt Ryan will try, because … well, because he has no other choice. “Tax reform” is, and always is, Issue #1, for “principled conservatives.” The Kochs and the Mercers and everyone else buffing their yachts for cruising season have paid good money to keep Ryan in office and he had damned well better deliver, no matter how ridiculous he sounds explaining the exploding deficit.
He of course has the benefit of the rubes writing rubber checks for breakfast at Denny’s, because that crowd always thinks Republicans are talking about them when they hear “tax cuts”. But Ryan has to be calculating the fired-up Trump resistance, which is far more energized then it was back in George W.’s day and is smelling blood with this farcically garish “repeal and replace” defeat. Expect a lot of loud, ugly noise about deficits and who gets how much when the “reform” act starts to play.
Also, Trump’s Russia problems are going to get worse, not better, making him of almost no use to Ryan on “tax reform.” Likewise, the big money kids have to be assessing the reality that Trump is proving to be such a lazy and incompetent fool, so compromised by whatever the hell he was doing with the Russians and in so far over his head dealing with professional politicians and bureaucrats, that he can’t be factored as an asset to this coming tax scam.
If I were Ryan I’d be hitting the P90X workout several times a day. He’s going to need every endorphin he can squeeze up to survive the next farce.
Hell, if I were him I’d just hide in the gym.
But the gas tax is becoming obsolete. Here’s why: Between 2008 and 2014, the average fuel efficiency of new cars 
But in the stodgy world of transportation finance, old habits die hard. Charging based on distance requires a very different type of revenue collection system, and such a change is proving to be mind-bending for many policymakers.
Among (quite a few) guilty pleasures is “Morning Joe”, MSNBC’s daily pundit Woodstock. Yeah, Joe Scarborough is a putz and a blowhard, and since it’s his name on the show, guests who are actually expert in serious things have to pretend to tolerate his stem-winding rants. But when Scarborough is modulated or (praise lord!) off on vacation, checking in with what “The Circus” boys, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, “legendary” ex-newspaperman Mike Barnicle, etc. is a far better use of my super valuable morning time than the brain gelatinizing insipidness of “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America.”
There were a lot of problems with that tweet. Coach Claeys presumably didn’t have all the facts, yet, by making the “better world,” comment, he seemed to be siding with the accused over the accuser. He was publicly crossing his bosses, University Athletic Director Mark Coyle and President Eric Kaler, who did have the facts. Importantly, he expressed no concern about the seriousness of an extremely disturbing allegation.
These ratings would need to be very simple, so readers, viewers and listeners people could get a quick, at-a-glance verdict, with more details readily available for the relatively few who want them. For example, a news organization that is found to be using all journalistic best practices might be labeled something like “Four Star Journalism, Most Trustworthy,” while an organization using almost no best practices might be labeled “One Star Journalism, Least Trustworthy.” An organization that is not using any journalistic standards might be labeled something like “Zero Stars, Not Trustworthy Journalism.”
Now that my blood pressure has settled back into the “Only Occasionally Fatal” zone I’m prepared to make several predictions about the coming Age of Donald.