Republicans should not hitch their wagon to any single, comprehensive bill, nor should they promise the voters a “Republican health-care plan.” Instead, they should seek to roll out a series of improvements to the health-insurance system, each with its own voting coalitions. That conclusion is supported by two observations. One, many parts of the AHCA were more popular than the bill itself, so the odds of passage — and sustainable entrenchment over time — increase as votes are broken into pieces.
.. But they can’t, any time soon, solve the basic problem, which is pervasive in education and health-care debates these days: The costs have spiraled so far out of the reach of ordinary middle-income people that they’ve despaired of paying for them from their own earnings.
.. I don’t like the fact that Obamacare added 10 to 11 million new people to the Medicaid rolls. But I also don’t think it’s wise, fair, or good to yank Medicaid coverage away from these people without a reliable way to move them to alternative affordable private coverage. This doesn’t make for good table-founding talk radio or cable news segments, but it is a fact of life.
.. The Republican answer can’t be, “don’t worry, with enough competition amongst different insurers, you’ll find a plan with premiums, co-pays, and deductibles that you can afford someday, maybe in about ten years, based on the CBO score.”
The French Elites, Comfortable with American Elites’ Playbook from 2016
.. The prospect of a Le Pen presidency upsets a kind of political positivism: the view that democracy can go only from good to better, from being a necessity to being a right. Ms. Le Pen’s election would run counter to the course of history, the reasoning goes, and therefore it cannot be.
Fox News’s Steady Nurturing of a Certain Kind of Right
.. When much of Fox News de facto backed Trump, midway through the primary season, it could hardly come as a shock: It was already obvious that the same type of person Fox had targeted for 20 years was likely to be an ardent Trump supporter.
.. Tomi Lahren, a former host on Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, was attempting to re-create the glib, pugnacious Fox News model for a younger audience.
.. I recall a somewhat similar generational split in 2011 when easily forgotten presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexual harassment and affairs. Prominent conservative voices of the Baby Boomer generation were quick to insist the accusers had to be lying and this was all part of a smear campaign by liberals. Generation-X conservative writers weren’t so eager to rush to the ramparts to insist there was no way Cain would behave badly.
.. It seemed to the older voices, Cain was “one of us” and thus deserved to be trusted and defended on faith; the younger voices weren’t quite so certain that “one of us” couldn’t possibly have done something wrong. They remembered John Ensign, Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Bob Packwood…
Tomi Lahren Was Made for the Trump Era
The rising TV starlet might have run afoul of social conservatives. But with her wide reach and trademark sass, her future could be positively Trumpian.
.. she’s pro-choice
.. I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”
.. Beck, Lahren’s boss, questioned Lahren’s libertarian bona fides as a zealous Trump supporter
.. Trump is anything but libertarian.
.. high-speed rant style with “Final Thoughts .. little jalapeño poppers of bravura bile clock in at just 30 seconds, and are perfectly suited to social media
.. Lahren’s departure from TheBlaze might contain clues for the future of conservative media in the age of Trump and beyond, and even for the Republican Party.
.. most in conservative media are impotent to censure the president himself for his betrayal of signature conservative positions, they can flex some muscle by smacking down Lahren
.. a suggestion of what could happen, ideologically, if the GOP is ever emboldened .. to take Trump to task for his disregard of both civil liberties and family values.
.. on track to be the Samantha Bee of the right
.. the ironies that interest her concern “snowflakes” and “participation-trophy” types
.. she admitted that Trump’s on-tape comments about groping women didn’t “look good
.. “Don’t go around acting holier than thou about this, like you’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before.
.. “When will those in black communities take a step back and take some responsi-damn-bility for the problems of black communities? Because it seems to me blaming white people for all of your problems might make you the racist.”
.. grew up in a military family in South Dakota
.. with decades of sass ahead of her, Lahren is rumored (without clear evidence) to be in Fox’s sights
.. Mindful of her senior-citizen base, Lahren has made her home not primarily on Snapchat or even Twitter but on venerable old Facebook.
.. Facebook is a perfect place for her to perform for Tea Partyers and older conservatives, leaning on her love of guns and country to come off as the dream daughter—like Ivanka Trump, but country and not snooty.
.. tacit pact with Beck: He could give her the conservative white-old-man seal of approval and then she would be allowed to be spicy and pro-Trump, which in turn would be evidence of Blaze’s big tent.
.. Beck is a genuinely principled conservative, and his commitments to both family values and libertarianism made Trump—multiply-married, genital-grabbing, pro-choice in some interviews—insupportable, and finally appears to have made Lahren insupportable, too.
.. many uneasy bargains .. are being tested now
.. If Ryan’s tax reform, or Pence’s desired overturn of Roe v. Wade, come to nothing, how much more will they be willing to sacrifice for this rogue president?
.. there are libertarians, who have quarrels with Trump.
There are family-values types, who have quarrels with Trump.
And then there is Trump—a reality star who darkens his skin and lightens his hair and says whatever gets the biggest response
.. She’s trying to be Trump.
Trevor Noah Finds His Late-Night Voice
The Daily Show host was measured, respectful, and challenging in his 26-minute conversation with TheBlaze pundit Tomi Lauren.
He tried to get a genuine answer from Lahren on a much more nuanced query relating to Kaepernick’s protest. “Here’s a black man who says, ‘I don’t know how to get this message across. If I march in the streets people say I’m a thug. If I go out and protest, people say it’s a riot. If I go down on one knee, it’s wrong,’” Noah said. “What is the right way, I’ve always wanted to know, what is the right way for a black person to get attention in America?”