Tag Archives: Barack Obama

national news, political news

Witch hunt, Mr. President? C’mon!

Donald John Trump awoke from his all-too-brief Twitter nap to bang out a few words of “wisdom” this morning about the latest bit of big news.

The president tweeted: “With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel (sic) appointed!”

There was more: “This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!”

Yet another tweet needs to be challenged

Mr. President, I believe I will take issue with you.

Robert Mueller’s appointment this week as special counsel aims to answer some serious questions about the president’s connections with Russian government officials. It also seeks to get to the bottom of whether Trump sought to obstruct justice by “asking” then-FBI Director James Comey to back off his investigation of Michael Flynn, the president’s disgraced former national security adviser and his own ties to foreign governments.

There might be more to uncover.

Witch hunt? The “greatest … in American history!”?

I don’t think so.

Let me cite a couple of recent examples of actual witch hunts that eclipse the examination of the current president.

President Bill Clinton was impeached because he was untruthful about a relationship he had with a White House intern. Did that relationship have any material impact on his duties as head of state and commander in chief? No. But the House of Representatives hounded him incessantly before finally approving articles of impeachment. Clinton went to trial in the Senate and was acquitted. That, Mr. Trump, was a witch hunt.

One more example deserves a look.

President Barack Obama’s legitimacy as commander in chief was questioned by his enemies over a bogus allegation that he was born in Africa and that he wasn’t constitutionally qualified to serve as president. Who led that inquisition? Oh! That would be reality TV celebrity/real estate mogul Donald John Trump. Obama said all along he was born in Hawaii, one of the 50 U.S. states. He produced a birth certificate after badgering by Trump and other arch-enemies of the president. That wasn’t good enough to satisfy them. Finally, while campaigning for the presidency in 2016, Trump said in a single sentence that Obama was “born in the United States.” That was really big of him, don’t you think?

How about knocking off the crap alleging the “greatest witch hunt” in history, Mr. President?

The president clearly is no student of history and doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about — on this or anything else!

national news, political news

On the hunt for millions of illegal votes? Good luck with that

Donald John Trump has made a number of scurrilous accusations since entering political life.

One of them involves an allegation that “millions of illegal aliens” cast votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016, which gave her the 3 million popular vote “victory” over the president.

What has the president done to bolster that accusation? He has appointed a voter-fraud conspiracy theorist to lead an investigation.

Welcome to center stage, Kris Kobach.

The Kansas secretary of state has been one of the leaders in this movement that impugns the integrity of the nation’s electoral system. He has contended there are incidents of massive voter fraud, with non-citizens casting ballots in races in Kansas and Missouri. Now he gets to prove it’s all true in a national level.

What utter crap!

This has the earmarks of a witch hunt and is the kind of thing that in the end only will further erode the credibility of a president who’s prone to fabricate conspiracies and “fake news.”

Record is full of fabrications

Trump has done so repeatedly since he rode down that escalator to announce his presidential candidacy in the summer of 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t qualified to run for president because he wasn’t a “natural born U.S. citizen”? Thousands of Muslims cheering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Ted Cruz’s father’s alleged complicity in President Kennedy’s murder? Those millions of illegal votes cast for Hillary in 2016? President Barack Obama wiretapping the Trump campaign office?

Now he has selected a fellow conspiracy nut to get to the bottom of a problem that does not exist.

Give me a break.

national news

Do you remember past Trump absurdities?

It occurs to me as the nation wallows in this latest Donald J. Trump immersion that we’ve all but stopped talking about some of the president’s previous absurd assertions.

For example:

* Do you recall how the president accused his predecessor, Barack H. Obama, of wiretapping his campaign offices in New York City’s Trump Tower? Trump produced no evidence of it but in the process essentially defamed President Obama.

* How about the allegation that “millions of illegal aliens” voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton, giving her the nearly 3 million popular vote margin over Trump? Again, this clownish president never offered a hint of proof for the allegation. He also managed to defame the reputations of local elections officials who work diligently to protect the integrity of our electoral process.

* Then there was the interview Trump gave to former Fox News talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, who questioned why the president was so kind to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He’s a killer,” O’Reilly said, to which Trump responded, “There are a lot of killers. Do you think the United States is so innocent?”

These previous controversies have been buried now the latest avalanche dealing with Trump’s firing of James Comey as head of the FBI. We have the possibility of obstruction of justice. There are the many contradictory statements and the chaos that has erupted in the West Wing of the White House.

Our attention span is getting tested terribly by this guy, the president of the United States.

My head is spinning.

medical news

‘Trumpcare’ it will be

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Barack Obama’s critics have relished the opportunity to call his landmark health insurance overhaul legislation “Obamacare.”

I chose a while ago to forgo that term, preferring to call it by its official name: the Affordable Care Act. Any reference to the “Obamacare” would acknowledge that’s the term others have hung on it. The former president himself eventually would refer to the ACA by the term used by his critics.

Obama no longer is in office. Donald J. Trump is now the president. Trump has pushed another piece of legislation. It is called the American Health Care Act.

In the spirit of those who were so highly critical of the president’s predecessor, I am now preferring to refer to the AHCA as “Trumpcare.”

Hey, I am as critical of the current president as Barack H. Obama’s critics were of him. My loathing for Donald J. Trump entitles me, therefore, to refer to his version of health care overhaul as Trumpcare.

business news

This a ‘disaster,’ Mr. President?

The job numbers came in this morning — and they look pretty darn good.

The U.S. Labor Department reported today that the economy added 211,000 non-farm jobs to payrolls in April and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent.

The boost in jobs was considerably greater than analysts had predicted. The jobless rate has inched a bit closer to what one might consider to be “full employment” in the United States.

Donald J. Trump used to disparage the Labor Department figures as phony, bogus, cooked up, fake. That, of course, was during the Obama administration. The president doesn’t say those things now that he’s on the job.

Hey, I’ll give the president credit for presiding over this sparkling jobs report. Let there be many more of them.

I do have one question: A little more than three months into your presidency, is this the economic “disaster” and the “mess” you have said repeatedly you inherited from Barack Obama?

medical news

As if we needed reminding … POTUS is clueless

Donald J. Trump’s endorsement of the Australian universal health care system confirms what many of us have thought for as long as this individual has been involved in politics.

He doesn’t know anything. Not about public policy. Or governance. Or public service. Nothing outside the realm of personal enrichment and self-aggrandizement.

The president and his Republican colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives had just passed a bill that repeals the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with something called the American Health Care Act. Then he jetted to New York and sat next to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull — and then lauded the Australian health care system.

The president said we should pattern our system after the Aussies’ system of providing universal health care for every citizen. How do they do it? The government pays for it.

But wait! Didn’t the GOP members of Congress want to do away with government mandates? Didn’t they insist on letting the marketplace set the price for health care insurance? Haven’t they been savaging the ACA as some sort of “socialized medicine” scheme cooked up by the socialists ensconced in the White House, led by President Barack Obama?

The GOP’s main man, the president of the United States, just endorsed a government-run health care system that reportedly works pretty well for the people it serves.

The president doesn’t know anything! He is utterly and completely unaware of the very public policy he says he favors.

He’s been involved in politics for less than two years. He rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential campaign. He got elected and has continued almost daily to demonstrate his absolute ignorance of the office he now holds and the awesome responsibility he has assumed.

I truly don’t expect him to learn all there is to know about everything in such a short span of time. However, it wasn’t too much to expect that he at least had some semblance of a grasp of policy matters before deciding to run for president of the United States.

medical news, national news, political news

Get set for next fight over health care overhaul

Congressional Republicans kept their vow to vote — no matter what — on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

It was a squeaker, 217 “yes” votes to 213 “no” votes. Every congressional Democrat voted “no,” which gives the minority a faint claim of bipartisanship, as some moderate Republicans joined them in voting against the Trumpcare health bill.

I want to make only a couple of observations about this effort.

First, Republicans yapped and yammered that Democrats shoved the ACA down the GOP’s throats in 2010. The GOP response was to do precisely the same thing to Democrats. Payback is a bitch, right?

The GOP throat-shoving, though, took on a little different tone than what the Democrats did in 2010. President Obama tried to get Republicans to sign on, but was unsuccessful. Donald J. Trump didn’t make that effort; neither did House Speaker Paul Ryan. Oh, no. They relied on their healthy Republican majority to win the day — barely, it turns out — in a now-or-never vote on the House floor.

Second, the initial effort to repeal the ACA and replace it with the American Health Care Act, ran into a Congressional Budget Office “score” that told a grim story of 24 million Americans losing their health insurance under the new plan.

This time the GOP didn’t bother to wait for the CBO to “score” this latest rendition of the replacement bill. Republicans forged ahead anyway. Damn the scoring! Who needs to know how this is going to affect Americans?

Oh, and the polls around the country indicate a growing base of support for the ACA. Hmm. Imagine that. The House of Representatives isn’t exactly representing its constituents.

The AHCA now heads to the Senate, where it faces an even steeper climb than it had in the House. The GOP majority in the upper chamber is pretty skimpy and the Republicans cannot afford to lose any support among their ranks. The initial signs don’t look good for final approval in the Senate.

House Republicans sought to win over reluctant conservatives by sweetening the pie for them; then they assuaged some moderate GOP concerns by tossing in some money to pay for those with pre-existing medical conditions.

What say you, senators?

Now it falls on the Senate to decide what to do with this legislation that doesn’t yet have any analysis on how much it will cost and how many Americans might lose their insurance.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are back-slapping each other like crazy. They said they’d cast that vote to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

They got the job done. Now they can go home for their 11-day recess. I would bet real American money they’re going to run into a good bit anger among the home folks.

national news

Obama veto comes back to bite him … and his predecessors

Barack Obama just had to veto a bill this past year that would have cut presidential pensions.

Then the former president just had to accept a speaking invitation in which he raked in a cool 400 grand for remarks he delivered on health care issues.

Congress may try again

Now we hear that Congress might reintroduce the pension-cutting bill that will affect not just former President Obama, but all the other four living ex-presidents.

I was mildly critical of President Obama getting paid such a huge speaking fee. It’s not that he isn’t entitled to earn what the market will pay, but only that he ought to do as CNN commentator Van Jones suggested: take a poverty tour to see how “the other side” struggles.

President Obama issued the veto in 2016. Republicans in Congress didn’t try to override it. As USA Today reported: “At the time, Obama argued that the bill would have ‘unintended consequences’ and ‘impose onerous and unreasonable burdens’ on former presidents by requiring them to immediately lay off staff and find new office space.”

The legislation being considered is called the Presidential Allowance Modernization Act. It would roll back presidential pensions to $200,000 annually, plus another $200,000 annually for office and staff expenses. The bill would roll back the pension dollar for dollar for anything more than $400,000 in outside income a former president earns in a year.

According to USA Today: “Under the Former Presidents Act, the nation’s five living former presidents — Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — get a pension equal to the salary of a current cabinet secretary: $207,800 in 2017. They also get $150,000 to pay staff, and ‘suitable office space, appropriately furnished and equipped.'”

I get that presidents deserve a nice pension once they leave office. They have all earned it, having served in the toughest job in the nation, if not the world.

However, the legislation being considered really isn’t an unreasonable alternative to what’s on the books now. Two hundred grand a year plus expenses isn’t a bad living at all.

medical news

ACA repeal vote illustrates what is wrong with Congress

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Americans are now scheduled to receive an up-front view of what is so terribly wrong with their U.S. House of Representatives.

It is a body that doesn’t represent the nation. It represents political dogma.

House members are slated to vote Thursday morning on a repeal of the Affordable Care Act; yes, the vote also will include provisions on a replacement for the ACA.

Look at the polls, pols

Congress is dysfunctional in the extreme! Why? Because poll after poll shows that Americans support the ACA. Yet the Republicans who control the House — and the Senate — are hell bent in their determination to do away with it.

The vote Thursday won’t have any Democratic support and a few moderate Republicans are going to vote against the ACA replacement option. What we are seeing here is continuing fallout from enactment of the ACA in the first place. Congress enacted the ACA in 2010 with zero Republican support. Democrats had to go alone on this deal — despite concerted efforts from the White House to persuade Republicans to join in the effort to provide health insurance to Americans who couldn’t afford it.

Congressional Republican leaders said, “No way, man.”

Here we are, seven years down the road. President Obama is out of office. Republicans now control both congressional chambers and the White House. Has the new president sought to work with Democrats to bring them aboard? Umm. Nope.

Yet the congressional leaders have decided to blow the ACA apart because they contend it is a “disaster.” It isn’t. Independent analyses suggest that the ACA is continuing to stabilize and that Americans are signing up for health insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Premiums are still too costly. Insurance providers have bailed out.

I’m at a loss as to why Republicans cannot concede that much of the ACA is worth keeping, but that they could improve certain elements in it.

It can be mended without ending it, correct? Isn’t that how you legislate? You work with lawmakers from across the aisle, seek some common ground and then hammer out differences. Legislating is a complicated process at times. Providing health insurance for Americans has proved to be among the most complicated and contentious exercises we’ve ever witnessed.

OK, so here we go. House members will vote Thursday. The GOP leadership concedes the vote will be razor thin. If repeal fails Thursday morning, then the Republicans have nowhere else to go.

Once the details of the replacement legislation becomes more widely known, my trick knee tells me that our Republican congressional leaders are going to get a snootful from their constituents. Many of them have heard already at those raucous town hall meetings that voters are none too happy with what is likely to take place on Capitol Hill.

Yep. This is how you describe government dysfunction.

medical news, national news, political news

Why not repair ACA instead of repealing it?

Barack H. Obama used to say it all the time: If Republicans have any improvements they want to make to the Affordable Care Act, I am willing to work it with them.

The Democratic president was open to tinkering with the ACA. He said he was keeping an open mind on ways to improve his signature piece of domestic legislation.

Then his time as president expired. His successor, Donald J. Trump, had vowed to “repeal and replace” the ACA starting with Day One of his presidency. He has labeled the ACA a “disaster.”

But the president can’t seem to bring himself to persuade his fellow Republicans in Congress to do as his predecessor has suggested regarding improving the ACA. They have dug in hard in their effort to repeal and replace the ACA. Trump has joined them. They now are left to fighting among themselves over the best way to replace the ACA.

The ACA is not the “disaster” that Trump has asserted about it. The law has provided health insurance for more than 20 million Americans who couldn’t afford it.

I am willing to concede that the ACA isn’t perfect. However, it is the law of the land. Why in the world can’t the GOP pick the law apart, huddle with Democrats, agree on what’s working and then seek to reform the elements of the ACA that aren’t working?

Oh, no. They cannot go there. The intention among the GOP leadership is to throw out every vestige of the ACA because, I’m going to presume, it has President Obama’s imprimatur. The Republican congressional caucus had declared its intention to make Obama “a one-term president,” and the ACA — approved in 2010 — simply had to go.

Tinkering and mending this law doesn’t constitute an unprecedented solution. Congress did as much with Medicare in the 1960s and with Social Security in the 1930s.

They managed — somehow — to improve those other two pieces of landmark legislation.

What about the here and now?