Under the Hammer: March 16, 2017

The proposed healthcare plan now working its way through Congress looks like a good start toward the repeal of Obamacare.

The huge difference to me – which doesn’t seem to get reported on much – is that Americans won’t be required to buy health insurance. I disagreed with the US Supreme Court on that one, which is my right as an American regardless of whether I have a law degree or not.

I don’t see any way the federal government has the right to force Americans to purchase a product that they don’t want. Another point that the mainstream media don’t seem willing to report is that, even with the penalties, millions of Americans chose not to buy health insurance under Obamacare.

From what I’ve read, the bill does need some changes. People should have more freedom in what kind of health insurance they can buy, and if a person wants to simply have catastrophic healthcare insurance, there shouldn’t be any impediments to that.

One of the plethora of problems with Obamacare was that it couldn’t be amended. Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate – so much for the Democrats wanting to be bipartisan. By the time Obamacare passed, Obama had lost one seat in the Senate, and since Obama had pushed the Republicans completely aside to get the bill passed, the Republicans were not inclined to help him make adjustments.

Not forcing Americans to buy something they don’t want and in many cases don’t need gets America back on track to being the land of the free and the home of the brave.

But this is early in the legislative process. It would be shocking if the bill didn’t go through some changes before it passes, if it ever does pass. People act like this is the final bill that can’t be amended, but it seems to make more sense to look at it as a starting point.

Unlike with Obamacare, there is no reason to think if the current repeal passes that it cannot later be amended.

*****

The Republicans in Washington could learn some valuable lessons from President Donald John Trump, if they would stop staring at themselves in the mirror and pay attention.

The Republican rank-and-file elected official in Washington is terrified of getting bad press. What they need to learn from Trump is how to handle the press.

For instance, you have to accept that it makes no difference how you vote, or what you say; if you have an R by your name you will be brutally and unfairly attacked. It’s the way the game is played and Trump figured that out about two minutes after he announced he was going to run for president. Trump also realized that despite the fact that they weren’t going to write anything nice about him, he could still use the mainstream media for his own purposes.

Some Republicans who have been in Congress for 20 years haven’t figured it out yet. They keep thinking that if they could just hold their mouths right, or if they could just work in the right combination in a speech of icebergs melting, saving baby whales and killing baby humans, that the media would flock to support them.

It’s really sad. It’s like the dorky guy who keeps asking his hot classmate out and really believes that if there is ever a night when she isn’t washing her hair, or cleaning out her neighbor’s fish tank, that she will go out with him. The truth is that she is never going out with the dorky guy and the mainstream media are never going to support conservative Republicans.

What the Republicans in Congress need to do is get behind their president and attack the mainstream media relentlessly. When Trump attacks the press now and a reporter asks a congressman or senator about it, the best response is “a tepid understanding of where Trump is coming from.” The worst – which will come from either Sen. John McCain or Sen. Lindsey Graham – will be a call for a special prosecutor.

What the response should be is overwhelming support in his attack. These guys know how to mince words. They don’t have to say Trump is 100 percent right, but rather that his attack on the press is 100 percent right.

McCain and Graham will never come around because they are sore losers. Both think they should be president and can’t believe the people of the United States elected Trump when they, in their own minds, are far superior.

McCain practically had the White House handed to him in 2008. He was running against a virtual unknown with a funny name who was far to the left of the American people. All McCain had to do was run a moderately competent campaign and he would have won. Instead he ran a campaign that was so bad it looked like his staffers were doing everything in their power to make certain that he lost.

If it was incompetence, it was incompetence of the highest order. I suspect that many on his campaign staff decided they didn’t want McCain to be president. To me that makes a lot more sense than having people who consistently made the worst choice possible for the candidate.

It’s not Trump’s fault that McCain will never make it to the White House; it’s McCain’s fault. But he blames Trump and will continue to do everything in his power to cause problems for Trump and the Republican Party that didn’t put him in the White House.

*****

According to the Financial Times, Trump’s budget will cut US funding to the United Nations by 50 percent. This is great news. It isn’t enough, but it’s a good start.

The United Nations is supposed to be a worldwide organization. Why in that wide world is the US the one picking up the tab?

It’s a lot like NATO, a much needed military alliance. But simply because it’s needed doesn’t mean the US should pay for it. One of the reasons the US is getting left behind as far as infrastructure goes is because we give so much money away there isn’t enough left to do what needs to be done in the US.

If the US is going to be the major funding source for the UN, then we should get more votes than anyone else, and that’s not going to happen.

Congress doesn’t have the courage of its convictions like Trump does, so Congress is going to be left in this wasteland – either it can defy the president or it can defy the UN. The decision by Congress will be purely political. Numbers will be crunched to see which will cost the members of Congress the most votes – defying the president or defying the UN.

Let’s hope defying the UN costs fewer votes because it is in need of massive renovation. If the members of the UN had to actually pay the freight on UN decisions, it would be a very different organization.

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Trump is also asking that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) be defunded. This is something that the Republicans should have done a long time ago.

One argument against defunding CPB is that the budget is less than $500 million, which is a pittance in the federal government budget of over $4 trillion.

The federal budget didn’t rise to its absurd level of over $4 trillion by adding programs that cost $1 trillion or $2 trillion. It got there by adding thousands of programs that cost millions and billions. You can’t reduce the federal budget by only eliminating programs that cost $500 billion or more, but you can reduce the federal budget by getting the federal government out of areas where it doesn’t belong, whatever the cost.

The federal government doesn’t belong in the news and documentary business. There are more than enough private news organizations without the federal government having its own.

That’s a good reason to eliminate CPB, but even a better reason in my book is the far left political leanings of National Public Radio (NPR). It broadcasts liberal propaganda every day. The Republicans in Congress have no business funding an organization that denigrates everything they do.

Can you imagine if the federal government funded Rush Limbaugh and the Democrats took control of the government, how long Limbaugh would keep his job? I think the time period could be measured in nanoseconds. To most people even the idea of the federal government funding Limbaugh is absurd. But I’ve listened to both and I don’t think Limbaugh is any further right than NPR is left.

We have all grown so accustomed to hearing the far left liberal agenda on news shows that we don’t notice it. What we do notice is that when a moderate news organization like Fox News comes along.

Fox is considered radical because it is so different. It’s not so much that Fox is conservative but that it isn’t liberal, and that makes it stand out.

The attacks by NPR on President Trump are unrelenting. If Trump cured cancer tomorrow, NPR would criticize him for not doing it sooner and have interviews with people who recently lost loved ones to cancer asking them if they thought Trump had acted swiftly enough to find a cure.

I find it embarrassing and appalling that my tax dollars go to fund a left-wing propaganda organization. When former President Barack Obama was in the White House, NPR was a cheerleader for just about everything he did. The so-called reporters had difficulty even imagining that anything he did could be questioned. With Trump it is the exact opposite.

If Congress can’t find the political courage to defund CPB then it won’t be able to find the courage to cut the budget at all.

Fortunately, the ace in the hole in getting government out of businesses where it doesn’t belong is Trump.

Trump didn’t run against the Democrats when he was out campaigning, he ran against Washington. Republicans need to take a look at how successful he was and how unsuccessful the last couple of presidential candidates backed by the mainstream Republican Party were.

Most of the country thinks that Washington is totally corrupt and that it doesn’t matter which party the elected officials are in, they are looking out for themselves first and their buddies in DC second and everyone else in the country is a distant third.

By getting the federal government out of businesses that it doesn’t belong in, the Republicans in Washington could go a long way toward convincing the American people that they are going to help Trump drain the swamp. If they don’t then the next time around the American people might just decide to let the Democrats have another crack at running the country.

Trump is correct; it’s not really a Democratic or Republican problem, it is a Washington problem.

Trump may be able to do it. If he can’t then the federal government is lost.

Proof that Washington is the problem is the fact that four of the 10 richest counties in the country are suburbs of Washington, DC. The wealth of our nation is being taken away from the people in the 50 states in the form of taxes and sent to Washington where it is handed out to friends and acquaintances. This has to stop.

*****

The mainstream media reveal their true colors nearly every day.

Take the fact that Attorney General Jeff Sessions laid off 46 US attorneys. This, according to the mainstream media, was a bloodbath. But when former President Bill Clinton’s third or fourth choice for attorney general, Janet Reno, took office she laid off 93 US attorneys.

It’s simply par for the course in the Department of Justice. The US attorneys all know that if the opposing party wins the presidential election they will be removed from office. It’s not even really news.

It is akin to making a big deal out of the fact that former President Obama’s entire cabinet is being replaced. What is rare is to keep a cabinet member appointed by the president of the opposing party.

When Obama took office in 2009, the big news was that he kept Defense Secretary Bob Gates, not that he fired everyone else.

Trump’s beliefs and policies are entirely different from Obama’s on so many issues it would be insane for him to have a bunch of US attorneys working against his policies and for Obama’s policies.

What is news is that it took the Senate so long to confirm Sessions that a bunch of US attorneys got another month on the government payroll. The reason Sessions only laid off 46 is that most of the rest had already resigned.

Now what Trump should have his cabinet secretaries do is get rid of every Obama appointee in their departments and hopefully not replace a bunch of them.

*****

It’s an oddity in politics that few people realize, but an elected official is most powerful right after being sworn into office. This is true for city councilmembers, state legislators and presidents. A lot of the time the newly elected don’t know how to use that power and by the time they do it has started to dwindle.

The reason is simple: When a president takes office he theoretically has four years to accomplish his goals. He doesn’t really have four years because the last year or so he is a lame duck and people don’t normally pay much attention to him.

But Trump is most powerful right now because he has four, and possibly eight, years ahead of him. People know if they dodge or delay he’s going to come back at them. As his term runs out people can wait him out; they can’t do that now.

And if Trump should get reelected, the clock starts running again.

*****

The news media keep reporting that Sessions lied under oath about meeting with the Russian ambassador. I’ve watched the question and answer portion of the Senate hearing several times and I disagree.

The first time I watched it I thought that Sessions was being asked if on behalf of the Trump campaign he had met with the Russian ambassador, and I still think that.

Sessions would have been better off if he had simply said no, but he chose to expound on that no.

What he wasn’t asked was if he had ever in his life met with a representative of the Russian government. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee one would hope that Sessions had met many times with many Russians.

One problem with these Senate hearings, which is completely bipartisan, is that it doesn’t appear a single senator can ask a simple question. Each question seems to have about five minutes of talking points attached. Politicians are like that; why use one word when 100 words will accomplish the same thing and that is 99 times more face time?

It still baffles me that for a US senator to meet with the Russian ambassador is in anyway suspicious. The job of the Russian ambassador is to meet with members of the US government.

It was, according to the mainstream media, perfectly acceptable for members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to meet with representatives of the Russian government, which doesn’t make sense, but then what does.

*****

Trump’s presidential campaign got its first big boost when Trump said he was going to build a wall on the US-Mexico border. At that time people were streaming over the border in such a large volume that the Border Patrol couldn’t keep up.

Since Trump was elected, the whole scene along the border has reportedly changed. The number of people being picked up by the Border Patrol has dropped by 40 percent.

The huge difference is Trump. Obama thought that people who entered the country illegally should be assisted in their attempt to get wherever in the US they wanted to go, and at some date in the far distant future their legal status could be worked out.

Trump believes that people crossing illegally into the US should be taken directly back across the border. The word that people were being sent back to Mexico instead of receiving free bus tickets to wherever they wanted to go has stemmed the tide.

The mainstream media are still harping on the fact that Trump can’t build a wall. Some of their reasons are so silly that if they weren’t super-serious liberals they couldn’t say these things with a straight face.

One of my favorites is that the government doesn’t own the land on the border, as if the government had owned all the land where roads are today.

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A related issue is the constant confusing of legal and illegal immigration. The mainstream media keep running stories about legal immigrants with the implication that Trump and his followers are against all immigration.

Most Americans are smart enough to know that the vast majority of us are the descendants of immigrants. Whether they came to this country before it was even a country or in the 240 years since its founding, most came here from some other country. America is a melting pot and that is one of the things that makes America great.

One of the aspects of Obama’s immigration policies that I found infuriating is that Obama wanted to make room for millions of people who came to this country illegally across the Mexican border, and at the same time keep out thousands of people with skills and education who went through the proper channels.

*****

I know that Trump has a lot on his plate and can’t do everything at once, but April 15 is less than a month away, which makes me think about the Internal Revenue Service. If Trump is really intent on draining the swamp, it is a good place to start.

We know that the IRS was targeting conservative organizations for special treatment and refusing to grant conservative organizations tax-exempt status because of the political views of the members. We also know that the IRS lied about the evidence and attempted to destroy it. Lois Lerner was the poster child for this operation, but she didn’t act alone.

Current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen should have been impeached, but now he doesn’t have to be. Trump can fire him. It’s a wonder that Trump has let him stay in office this long.

The tax laws need a complete overhaul, but until that is done the IRS is in charge and Trump needs to clean house as much as he possibly can. He could empty out the white-collar criminals from federal prison and put them in charge of the IRS and we’d have a more honest crowd than what is currently running the department.

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If you have any doubt about the prejudice of the mainstream media, watch a press conference with White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and then watch a press conference with any of Obama’s press secretaries.

With Obama’s press secretaries, a question was asked, the press secretary gave some reply that may or may not have made sense, be true or even address the question, and then another question was asked.

With Spicer, a reporter asks a question, berates Spicer and Trump, then asks the question again and again while other reporters encourage the questioner.

In my opinion, Spicer is doing a phenomenal job of handling the press,

*****

North Korea is threatening to attack – Japan, South Korea, Alaska, Hawaii, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, take your pick. It seems like every month Kim Jong-un does something to get himself on the front page.

What I have absolutely no idea about, and I wonder if anyone does, is will he ever be done with posturing and attack someone. If he had any sense at all, and he really wants to attack someone or something, he should have done it while Obama was president.

Obama didn’t retaliate in Syria even when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad not only crossed over the “red line,” but crossed over it and then jumped up and down and shouted, “Nah, nah, nah, nah.” All in polite diplomatic-speak, of course.

But if Kim Jong-un goes too far now, Trump may decide to exhibit some American firepower. Then again, he might invite the North Korean dictator to Mar-a-Lago for a round of golf. With Trump you never know.

So far what we know about Kim Jong-un is that he likes to fire missiles into the ocean, he doesn’t care much about feeding his people and isn’t too fond of his relatives.

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I have read more about the US Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough in the past week than I have read about all previous Senate parliamentarians put together.

Evidently, the Republican senators are terrified of this 50-year-old woman who works for them. They are concerned that she will rule that the Obamacare repeal needs 60 votes rather than the 51 votes required for budgetary items.

Who cares? In an elected body, unless the Constitution or some other governing document says otherwise, anything can be done with a simple majority. The Constitution in this case says that the Senate will make its own rules.

The Senate had the 60-vote rule for cloture for appointments until Sen. Harry Reid, who was at that time Senate majority leader, and the Democrats decided to invoke the so-called nuclear option and allow appointments other than Supreme Court appointments to be passed with a simple majority.

The Republicans need to go the rest of the way and make everything a simple majority. The fear is that if the Republicans lose control of the Senate then they won’t have any control in the Senate.

But here is the scenario that the Republicans should consider: In 2018, the Democrats win control of the Senate and they immediately invoke the nuclear option for everything and the Republicans have no say in any legislation and look like fools because they didn’t do it themselves when they had the majority.

There is a time to be nice in politics, but unfortunately that time has passed. The Republicans in the Senate need to take whatever action they need to take to get Trump’s Supreme Court nominee approved and to get to the legislation they need through the Senate. If that means invoking the rest of the nuclear option, so be it.

In our form of government the majority is supposed to rule. The people of this country elected a slim majority of Republicans to the Senate. It is a slim majority but if a candidate wins by one vote that candidate has no less power than the candidate elected by 1 million votes. It is winning that makes the difference, not the margin.

The Senate actually doesn’t have to invoke the nuclear option to get the Obamacare repeal through the Senate, but it might have to have Vice President Mike Pence overrule the parliamentarian, which he has the authority to do.

The Democrats, as you would expect, say this would be

The proposed healthcare plan now working its way through Congress looks like a good start toward the repeal of Obamacare.

Not forcing Americans to buy something they don’t want and in many cases don’t need gets America back on track to being the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Unlike with Obamacare, there is no reason to think if the current repeal passes that it cannot later be amended.

*****

The Republicans in Washington could learn some valuable lessons from President Donald John Trump, if they would stop staring at themselves in the mirror and pay attention.

The Republican rank-and-file elected official in Washington is terrified of getting bad press. What they need to learn from Trump is how to handle the press.

*****

According to the Financial Times, Trump’s budget will cut US funding to the United Nations by 50 percent. This is great news. It isn’t enough, but it’s a good start.