Investigation into the Scam Rehab industry which started after the passage of Obamacare, which sucked in as many patients as possible and, if they had insurance, milked it for as much as possible.
An ambitious plan to help people goes off the rails, and a man from Florida tries to fix things the only way he knows how: with prank phone calls.
How Trump Won Re-election in 2020
A sneak peek at the Times’s news analysis from Nov. 4, 2020.
.. Extraordinary turnout in California, New York, Illinois and other Democratic bastions could not compensate for the president’s abiding popularity in the states that still decide who gets to live in the White House: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
.. In exit poll interviews, Mr. Trump’s supporters frequently cited the state of the economy to explain their vote. “What part of Dow 30,000 do the liberals not understand?”
.. despite an economy that continues to struggle with painfully slow wage growth, spiraling budget deficits and multiplying trade wars that have hurt businesses as diverse as Ohio soybean farmers and California chipmakers.
.. their signature proposals — Medicare for all and free college tuition for most American families — would have been expensive and would require tax increases on families making more than $200,000. Mr. Trump and other Republicans charged they would “bankrupt you and bankrupt the country.”
.. Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms. Yet by Election Day, the charge that Mr. Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.
.. “I don’t care if he lies or exaggerates in his tweets or breaks his vows to his wife, so long as he keeps his promises to me,”
.. citing the economy and Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as decisive for her vote. “And he has.”
.. Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters also said they felt vindicated by the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the former F.B.I. director painted a damning portrait of a campaign that was riddled with Kremlin sympathizers and a candidate whose real-estate ventures were beholden to Russian investors, no clear evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and Moscow ever emerged and the president was never indicted.
.. Democrats also failed to capitalize on, and may have been damaged by, winning back control of the House of Representatives, but not the Senate, in the 2018 midterms. Mr. Trump proved effective, if characteristically vitriolic, in making a foil of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
.. Efforts to impeach the president mainly served to energize his base. Polling surveys suggested that wavering voters saw a Democratic Party more invested in humiliating the president than in helping them.
.. it did not take long for campaign aides to Senator Warren to offer damning appraisals of her performance as a candidate. Historical references abounded: The Children’s Crusade; Pickett’s Charge; the McGovern campaign of 1972. The common thread was that the campaign’s moral fervor repeatedly got the better of its message focus.
.. He got my party to lose its marbles.”
.. The lawmaker cited calls by party activists to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — calls the Warren campaign did not formally endorse but did little to refute — as emblematic of the party’s broader problems.
.. “What do Democrats stand for?” he asked.
- “Lawlessness or liberality?
- Policymaking or virtue signaling?
- Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”
“Democrats used to stand with the Working Man,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Now it’s the party of Abortion and Amnesty. All that’s missing is Acid. Sad!”
What Government Interest Is Served by Disenfranchising Felons?
The bumpy path of Desmond Meade’s life meandered to its current interesting point. He is a graduate of Florida International University law school but cannot vote in his home state because his path went through prison: He committed non-violent felonies concerning drugs and other matters during the ten years when he was essentially homeless. And Florida is one of eleven states that effectively disqualify felons permanently.
Meade is one of 1.6 million disenfranchised Florida felons — more people than voted in 22 states in 2016. He is one of the 20 percent of African-American Floridians disenfranchised. The state has a low threshold for felonious acts: Someone who gets into a bar fight, or steals property worth $300 — approximately two pairs of Air Jordans — or even drives without a license for a third time can be disenfranchised for life.
.. What compelling government interest is served by felon disenfranchisement? Enhanced public safety? How? Is it to fine-tune the quality of the electorate? This is not a legitimate government objective for elected officials to pursue. A felony conviction is an indelible stain: What intelligent purpose is served by reminding felons, who really do not require reminding, of their past, and by advertising it to their community? The rule of law requires punishments, but it is not served by punishments that never end and that perpetuate a social stigma and a sense of never fully re-entering the community.
Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed
Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns.
.. March for Our Lives the students wore price tagsaround their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.
.. Republican majorities were forged by anger and a kind of smash-mouth politics, it’s incumbent upon liberals to give no quarter in return, and to treat any sudden conciliation from a prominent figure like the Florida senator not as an opportunity for deal making but as a welcome sign of weakness that should inspire further fierce attack.
.. The problem, then, is relying on the bipartisan impulses of few Republican politicians when what you need is a broader climate change. The path to that change requires first putting the fear of God (or, if you prefer, the fear of the Arc of History) into vulnerable Republican lawmakers, and then making them unpopular enough that you can simply beat them.
.. he’s precisely the kind of Republican who needs to be defeated to build a Democratic supermajority.
.. the chance to make him the face of G.O.P. intransigence on gun control
.. The deeper logic here is that the only plausible mission for Democrats after the Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P. is a kind of Carthaginian peace: Delenda
.. it seems to me that once conservatism surrendered to Donald Trump, arguments about corrosion became a bit irrelevant.
.. the president that the Florida senator endorsed is as consistently ad hominem as the young school shooting survivors with rather less excuse.
.. one reason that the Dreamer amnesty was an executive decision that Donald Trump could simply reverse, landing us in our current immigration stalemate, was that the Obama White House deliberately chose to make it one, pre-empting an effort by, yes, Marco Rubio to craft bipartisan legislation.
.. Don’t let Republicans disguise their anti-immigrant views with modest bipartisan maneuvers, create a clear contrast so that voters will reward you even if doing so requires pushing certain constitutional limits on your power.
.. if anything Obama’s executive action contributed to Trump’s victory by helping to radicalize conservative voters
.. Marco Rubio who made an extended effort to move the bill in a more middle-class-friendly direction by adding and then enlarging a child tax credit. The push was opposed by many of his Republican colleagues, but for a time Rubio thought that he could get an amendment in with Senate Democrat support.
.. having watched the Trump G.O.P. hold power with a largely negative agenda and an ugly rhetorical style, I can certainly believe that a no-quarter liberalism will gain power eventually in its turn.