Weekend video schadenfreude fun

Via Instapundit and Michael Walsh at PJ Media on Trump and the media / celebrities:

"As Oscar Wilde famously said, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing." Ditto with these cocksure pronunciamentos about the impossibility of a Trump presidency from the usual suspects. (The Ann Coulter clip is especially funny!) Enjoy":

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The Health Care Compact: Moving to the front burner?

art credit: before it's news

Richard Fernandez (Wretchard’s Belmont Club, posting at PJ Media) speculates that the Health Care Compact may be one of the best options available to dismantle and repeal Obamacare. Rep. Tom Price, the nominee to head Health and Human Services, is a long-time advocate of the Health Care Compact. Here are a few extracts from Fernandez’s report:

According to the Congressional record the HCC [Health Care Compact]  would give "primary responsibility for regulation of health care to the state. Federal and state laws remain in effect in a member state until suspended by the state.  A member state is responsible for federal funding obligations that remain in effect in the state. Each year, a member state is entitled to federal funds equal to the total federal spending on health care in the state during FY2010, adjusted for inflation and population."  It turns federal funds into what amounts to a block grant, leaving states free to create, cooperate and compete.

The HCC specifically does not affect the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. "The compact establishes the Interstate Advisory Health Care Commission to collect information and data to assist member states in their regulation of health care. The commission may make non-binding recommendations to the member states."

That would ironically make it an ideal vehicle for states like Vermont or California whose voters are largely opposed to the Trump administration to roll their own health care and effort in which other like-minded liberal states can join them.  HHS nominee Tom Price's rhetoric suggests he would have no objections in principle to  taking Washington out of the picture. In a quote cited by the Wall Street Journal Price said:  “We think it’s important that Washington not be in charge of health care,” the six-term congressman said in an interview this summer. “The problem that I have with Obamacare is that its premise is that Washington knows best.”

The general tenor of an Obamacare replacement plans emphasize giving consumers money to pick and choose policies instead of forcing them to consume Federally prescribed products.

. . .

The HCC like so many other dark horses in this year of unexpected upsets is now a real player.  Too many impossible things have taken place for anyone to easily dismiss anything out of hand now.  The next few weeks will give a clearer indication of where health care policy is trending.  But one thing is for sure.  The long shot's not such a long shot any more.

The article includes a key quote from (gasp) the New York Times. Read it and the rest of Fernandez’s article here.

The last time Cleveland Tea Party reported on the Ohio Health Care Compact was October 2015, when the House in Columbus passed the bill.  At that time, it was headed for the Senate. Perhaps the time has come.

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The Democratic party, Progressive outrage, and post-election fallout

image credit: highfieldtales.wordpress

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and classicist. He also contributes columns to PJ Media and National Review online. Although he started off in the NeverTrump camp in the now infamous Never Trump issue of National Review, I decided to give him another look today.

His column today (“A Party of Teeth-Gnashers”) is about the fallout from the election and what has become of the Democratic party and the Progressive agenda. Here are a few paragraphs:

After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed. What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of teeth-gnashers.

. . .

Progressive outrage should not be taken too seriously because it is not intended to be serious. When Barack Obama invites rapper Kendrick Lamar into the White House and announces that his “To Pimp a Butterfly” is the president’s favorite song of the year — whose album cover shows the corpse of a murdered white judge, with Xs in place of eyes, on the White House lawn, as African-American youth toast his demise with drinks and cash — do we really assume that progressives like Obama believe in stopping hate speech and imagery, or perhaps even believe in anything at all?

Donald Trump, to progressives, supposedly harmed the Constitution and threatened our democracy because he would not say, after the WikiLeaks revelations, that he would accept the outcome of the election if he thought it was rigged. Yet after Clinton’s defeat, suddenly irate progressives have lodged conspiratorial charges that voting machines (miraculously only in swing states Hillary lost) were supposedly rigged, that the Electoral College should be dropped, and that electors should be bullied to ignore their pledges. Did anyone ever believe their original outrage at Trump’s suggestion that election results might be rigged? Are we now to have recounts in Nevada, Colorado, New Hampshire, and all the close states Trump lost, and then on into spring more recounts of recounts, until the last count achieves the desired result?

The Democratic party leadership is no longer an alternative to corporate wealthy America, but is corporate wealthy America, albeit in a new garb of jeans and flip-flops, Silicon Valley–style. The small-business person, assembly-line worker, and non-government wage earner mostly now vote Republican. 

Progressivism is a pyramidal capstone of wealthy elites who have the influence and money to embrace boutique positions and the cunning to profess egalitarianism, all while they lead private lives that would otherwise be condemned as illiberal and apartheid-like. So affirmative action ends up providing high-cheekboned Elizabeth Warren entry into Harvard Law School, the same way that progressive investigative journalism is reduced to Politico’s “hack” Glenn Thrush (who asked the Clinton campaign to fact-check and approve his article), and in the manner that philanthropy is reduced to the Clintons’ piling up of millions by selling influence. We are a long way from Harry Truman’s working classes.

. . .

The Democratic party for now is reduced to a loud racist/sexist/homophobe broken record that fewer and fewer are listening to — including many of the Democratic elites who continue to play it.

Hanson is not completely sold on Trump, though, as you will gather if you read the rest here.

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Rep. Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services

photo credit: Star Tribune

Good news! Rep. Tom Price is going to be Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. CTH reports:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Representative Tom Price, a six-term Republican congressman from Georgia who has led opposition to the Affordable Care Act, to be secretary of health and human services, according to a transition team official.

Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon, has been a severe critic of the health law, saying it interferes with the ability of patients and doctors to make medical decisions.

And he says that events have borne out his warnings.  “Premiums have gone up, not down,” Mr. Price said recently. “Many Americans lost the health coverage they were told time and time again by the president that they could keep. Choices are fewer.”

An announcement of Mr. Price’s appointment is expected as soon as Tuesday, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been released. [The WaPo announced it here.]

Some Republicans have attacked the Affordable Care Act without proposing an alternative. Mr. Price, by contrast, has introduced bills offering a detailed, comprehensive replacement plan in every Congress since 2009, when Democrats started work on the legislation.

From his days as a Georgia state senator, Mr. Price, now 62, has been a voice for doctors, often aligned with the positions of the American Medical Association and the Medical Association of Georgia.

Even the New York Times had something nice to say.

For Tea Party people who were active during the run-up to the passage of Obamacare, Tom Price is one of our heroes. Good news, indeed. And as Stephen Green (Mr. Vodkapundit) adds on PJ Media, “Give that man a giant scalpel.”

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Christmas lights at Public Square

 

photos by Cleveland Tea Party's roving photographer Pat Dooley

Secretary of State Romney? Or not.

Cleveland Tea Party founder Ralph King is quoted in the Washington Examiner’s article “Mitt Romney wrong choice for Trump’s secretary of state, experts say”, published on Nov-23:

Mr. Trump’s transition team has floated the former Massachusetts governor’s name for appointment to the post, and the two men met privately over the weekend in New Jersey.

Some in the tea party movement and some prominent conservative Republican stalwarts don’t trust Mr. Romney to hew to Mr. Trump’s views on a number of policy issues that were central to his upset victory Nov. 8.

“I trust Donald Trump’s decision-making, but I don’t trust Mitt Romney policy views,” said Cleveland Tea Party founder Ralph King. “I think Romney will actually work against Trump on trade, good relations with Russia, avoiding wars in the Middle East. Trump can fire him, but will he want to do that?”

Mr. King said firing a top Cabinet official gives ammunition to the president’s enemies.

“I understand why people say, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ but you don’t want to give them a gun to shoot you with, politically speaking,” Mr. King said.

Read the rest here.

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The Electoral College and the popular vote

Michael Ramirez cartoon (via Bookworm Room)

"The US Election Without the Electoral College"

William Sullivan at The American Thinker has a good article on the subject, well worth reading in light of the ongoing temper tantrums we are seeing:

By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic that is either racist (what else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.  Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.

Outgoing California Senator Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.

This argument is, of course, painfully dim and tiresome.  The Electoral College is one of many safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically, the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more populous than another.  After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.

In the simplest terms, the United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our Constitution.  It is very much by design that the prerogative of each sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the Electoral College helps to ensure that. 

But I won’t beat that dead horse.  There is ample reading material to inform interested parties about the wisdom of the Electoral College, in contrast to a strictly popular vote where highly-populated urban strongholds located in a minority of states might disenfranchise the will of the large majority of other states in presidential elections. 

Read the rest here.

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