Discussion: Despite Bipartisan Breakthrough, Senate Remains Stuck In Health Care Hell

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This Trump fella seems to have a real cognitive deficit.

Somewhat on topic:

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I wrote my Senator, Patty Murray. I told her it would be a waste of time, but she had to do the work anyway, and thanked her.

I also told her she would now find herself in Rumps Twitter crosshairs. He probably hadn’t paid much attention to her before, but now that he sees her name, he will have to belittle and degrade her because he is a narcissistic hedonist who gets pleasure from that kind of behavior, and cannot exert any self control over it.

I’m surprised he hasn’t launched his personal attacks on Murray yet.

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OT, but I can’t help it. This asshole and his Fisher Price briefcase infuriate me to no end. His legal analyses are as vapid and absurd as it gets and his blatant misuse, misrepresentations, hiding, sweeping under the rug, twisting and spinning of the facts and legal principles involved can be described as nothing but propaganda. In any event, here’s the latest on how the GOP and Faux News are trying to lay the foundation and excuses for Sessions bringing charges against Clinton, maybe both of them.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/10/18/gregg-jarrett-clinton-cover-up-brought-to-by-same-guys-who-are-investigating-trump.html

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Well… if anyone can get Donald to stop lying.
Donald has no clue what he is doing? I
s this Alzheimer disease, dementia, just plain nuts . . .

He doesn’t care about the policy at all. He only cares about taking credit for a “win” whichever way it goes.

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Murray and the other Senators are wasting their time trying to get any sense out of Trump. Full stop.

This may by OT and rather far into the weeds but I believe attending too much to to the next thing Trump says or does is not only the road to madness but to a kind of thrashing futility: a dissipation of force and focus when what is needed is a reaction more like that to an oncoming mud slide or rabid dog; focused flight and then focused response/defense.

I also believe trying to interpret what Trump is saying or doing is a fools game. Not simply because he is mentally ill or cognitively compromised (neurologically damaged), although it seems likely he is both, but because truth or falsity is a matter of complete indifference to him and so are the words he speaks themselves.

The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt asserts that, “[W]hat bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.”

The focus on maneuvering audience into responding a particular way leads to the thought that Trump is mainly communicating at a pre-verbal level. Jane Goodall once observed that Trump’s debate style is reminiscent of a male chimpanzee dominance display. I think this observation can be extended to his verbiage as well: Trump’s words are not vehicles of content, they are missiles no less than torn tree limbs and flung objects.

Recent research for example strongly suggests that chimps flinging feces or chow is a case of social tool use rather than a simple attempt to gain attention or ease boredom; e.g., “[T]hrowing in wild chimpanzees is seldom, if ever, observed for the purposes of obtaining food, but rather is almost always directed towards other chimpanzees or humans. In captivity, it is difficult to imagine that human caretakers would overtly reward a chimpanzee with food immediately after they had just been soiled with faeces by the very same ape. In short, what appears to be the main reward for throwing is the simple ability to control or manipulate the behaviour of the targeted individual (ape or human).”

This brings me back to my main point: the futility of attempting to interpret Trump’s words as elements in a coherent syntax intended to persuade. Such attempts will never reveal his intended message first because he is fundamentally a bullshitter and secondly because words themselves are simply part of a (mostly pre-verbal) dominance display repertoire. He damages things and people so they will acknowledge his power, he flings words at them so they will acknowledge his power; he changes those words nearly at random so they will acknowledge his power by trying to understand; there is nothing else there, nothing!

Trump’s primary language isn’t English, it is Alpha Ape.

Sorry to drag this out but it’s been bugging me awhile and I wanted to get it on to the page somewhere; feel free to ignore.

NB: Trump is clearly an authoritarian leader and that helps explain his success as well as the impulses of his followers but it doesn’t explain the rank stupidity, the willful ignorance and incompetence, the intrusions, the apparent near-randomness of at least some of his behavior; that needed further exploration.

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Excellent article, Alice!

The damage will be widespread.

The tax burden on the middle class can’t possibly pay to recover the damage. We can’t even afford the Trump plan to jerry-rig higher premiums, narrow coverage, much higher costs outside the network for those treatments not covered now. That’s Trump’s plan.

We’re under Trumpcare now.

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Face it,

TrumpDon’tCare

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Tne real problem here is the Republican leadership. The Republican senatorial co-sponsors, with the Democrats, could pass the bill. And Mitch McTurtle could stop a filibuster. If Paul Ryan allowed moderate (or scared) Republicans in the House to act with Democrats, the bill could pass there, too. It’s the leadership that’s preventing this bill from moving forward. (At least to put it on der Furor’s desk.)

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This issue is waaaaay more important than how Trump disrespects the families of those killed in action. Sorry to those who disagree, but it is. Health care is important to everybody in the country, however their health care is paid for. And the fucking moron going back and forth like about what he is and isn’t for (I guess the wind or the hosts on FOX are changing quickly), and Republicans in Congress trying to decide what hurts their re-election chances rather than what helps people more, makes what should be a ‘no-brainer’ (now that’s something they should relate to) into another shit sandwich of governance in Trumpworld.

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Insurance companies are making such obscene profits on ACA that they are fleeing the exchanges.

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They need to get this thing passed somehow. Trump can’t go any longer without mental health help. Lord help the therapist who gets stuck treating Donald when Kelly insists that he starts talking to someone else besides himself.

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However, it’s still OK for the oil industry and military industrial complex to make obscene profits. They know how to handle the kickbacks to politicians, ever increasing tax breaks they get and the extortion necessary to make landfall profits. While the Insurance and pharmaceutical industries are clearly as incompetent as the Heritage Foundation which started this chaos.

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The reboot of “Der Sturmer” has only lowered the antisemitism, but compensated for it with pornography about Clinton.

“This is so bad,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told TPM outside the Senate chamber. “If McConnell and Cornyn and the President don’t let Alexander and Murray and all of us fix this, it’s going to mean higher prices, it’s going to be terrible for our country. I can’t imagine they would just blow this up. I can’t imagine anybody would be that mean-spirited.”

Senator Brown sir I have to be honest with you. McConnell the Alpha Hotel is that mean spirited:

Mitch McConnell Assaulted the Constitution (and Got Away With It)

The senator refused to perform his duty in rejecting any consideration of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee.
By William Greider

…McConnell wasn’t subtle about his political motive. He announced he was holding the Constitution at bay in the hope that a Republican would win the presidential election and therefore conservatives could restore their 5-4 majority. Trump’s victory fulfilled McConnell’s gamble. The country will suffer the damaging consequences of right-wing lawmaking for years to come…

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Obama should have put a stop to McConnell’s charade. All he had to do was publicly and repeatedly state that if Congress didn’t turn down his court appointment they were, in fact, approving it. Then he should have sworn in his appointee and insisted the Supreme Court accept him. That would very likely have forced the Senate to vote on the appointment, and possibly approve it.

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"I can’t imagine they would just blow this up. I can’t imagine anybody would be that mean-spirited.”

Looks like somebody needs to work on their imagining skills.

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Universal health care is a topic largely tackled by OECD countries a half century ago – or longer. And at an average cost of about 10% of GDP. The US is still struggling with this issue. The inability of government to function normally becomes an unobtainable quest for normalcy. Andrei Shleifer coined the term “A Normal Country” in the early Putin years to describe what had become aspirational for Russia. Similarly, MAGA has a similar aspirational and impossible tone. The US accounts for an ever-shrinking share of global GDP and, judging from Xi’s speech yesterday, the Chinese are taking up the slack planning to wipe out poverty by 2021. Increasingly, Americans, too, long to live in a “normal” country.