The decline to moral bankruptcy of the GOP

I’m reserving judgement until he weighs in on caging kids or depriving people of healthcare. :)

Really? The only tweet I could find where talks about is this one.

I guess he didn’t quite demand an apology, as much as complaining about being made fun of.

Posted that at someone on a local FB news site claiming how Satan was at work when Sinema was declared the victor, but that God will ultimately prevail. Because Yahweh is a Republican.

Not gonna lie, I figure I’ve got 2:1 odds I’m going to have to bust it out at thanksgiving

I have a great niece’s birthday coming up that I don’t look forward to. Someone age 70 or up will throw down over politics and the cake will fly.

Let me be clear, I have no, zero, zip intention of bringing it up.

But I sear to god if someone starts complaining how unfair everyone is being to Trump, or how the… you get the idea, I will (rhetorically) cut a motherfucker

I mean literal actual Nazi was the GOP candidate for congress in my district.

I’m continuously amazed by the complete shamelessness of Mitch McConnell. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I guess I keep believing part of him, somewhere, is human.

A cynic would say that he’s being exactly human. Pursuing his own self-interest and that of his group at the expense of the truth, other people, and anything else that stands in his way.

This is how you go after them, American Media.

Raw Story: WATCH: Al Jazeera host corners Trump supporter on president’s lies like few American journalists ever have

He almost got the guy to repeat the lie too, almost. Yeah, that’s how you deal with the daily lies. It’s not misinformation. Trump makes shit up and then his people try to make it true, except even good aides can’t make six new steel mills magically show up.

As it turns out, he may actually be remembered as the King of Debt, and not in a good way.

“The U.S. recorded a $100.5 billion budget deficit in October, an increase of about 60 percent from a year earlier, as spending grew twice as fast as revenue.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/u-s-budget-gap-jumps-to-100-billion-at-start-of-fiscal-year

Since I’ve posted many times about terrible GOP policy ideas, I think it’s only fair to give some (if very limited) credit when conservatives put forward at least minimally non-terrible policy ideas.

Rich Lowry says Trump is not Populist Enough

Now, Trump is such a terrible President that magical policy unicorns of optimal awesomeness could fly out of his ass and I would still oppose him. But Lowry is at least willing to engage in discussions of some not-so-liberal ideas that are at least within the window of reasonable discussion IMO. (I don’t support these proposals but if the GOP were really proposing this sort of thing, we could in fact negotiate in good faith).

Here’s an example of what I consider a non-insane approach by Mr. Lowry: "Another broad category should be the cost of living, especially health care and college. Although you wouldn’t know it from the midterm campaign, conservatives do have proposals to deal with pre-existing conditions, even if few Republican candidates seemed aware of them. The thrust of the GOP health care agenda is to reduce costs to consumers, a theme Trump should emphasize. Hospitals are a key driver of health care spending and deserve much more critical scrutiny.

It should be natural to take on the costs of higher education, driven in part by the unintended consequences of federal programs, and promote alternative means of training and accreditation besides four-year college. The higher-education establishment is obviously politically uncongenial to Republicans, and Trump, of all politicians, should want to promote the interests of young people entering the workforce without a four-year degree.

As for Trump’s signature issue of immigration, it would go down easier in the suburbs if he began talking about E-Verify, which puts the focus on the employers who hire undocumented immigrants rather than the immigrants themselves."

The fact that these quite-conservative-but-not-insane ideas are simply out of the question for national GOP discussion is a sign both of how far gone the current GOP is and also a sign that there is a path back to sanity for the GOP.

Indeed, Republicans have so many good proposals on this issue that Lowry listed not one of them.

Why take this nonsense seriously?

Yes, that proposal is high risk pools. On a national level it will cost many, many billions of dollars to fund each year and no conservative plan has included that funding. Not really a solution.

Please immediately correct that misattribution.

For what it’s worth, what were the non-terrible policy proposals you found in Lowry’s column?

Keep in mind, I’m not in favor of these policies, I just feel like if these were the actual policy positions of the GOP (which they are not), then we could have a meaningful policy discussion. Currently it’s all lies and extremist positions so there’s not even an opportunity to have a meaningful discussion.

That said, I consider the following to be within what I would consider the bounds of reasonable debate, even though I don’t personally agree with them.

Quoting Lowry again:

"Hospitals are a key driver of health care spending and deserve much more critical scrutiny.

… Trump, of all politicians, should want to promote the interests of young people entering the workforce without a four-year degree.

As for Trump’s signature issue of immigration, it would go down easier in the suburbs if he began talking about E-Verify, which puts the focus on the employers who hire undocumented immigrants rather than the immigrants themselves."

Of course the devil is in the details. When Lowry says “more critical scrutiny” of hospital costs, what does he mean? What kind of alternatives to 4-year colleges is he talking about and how would those alternatives be implemented/funded. And, although E-Verify is a key component of comprehensive immigration reform, doing it by itself would not be good.

The contrast I am making is that the current GOP is so full of deception and extremism on policy that there’s no possibility of meaningful compromise or bipartisanship and that any efforts at “compromise third parties” are bad ideas. However, if the GOP itself were to start splitting along more populist/less populist lines, that would probably be good for the country.