Healthcare update – and it’s good

image credit: powerlineblog.com

Headline: Trump Just Revolutionized Health Care — And Nobody Noticed

The editorial at Issues and Insights reports:

Under the plan, employers will be able to fund tax-free Health Reimbursement Accounts for their workers, who can then use the money to buy an individual insurance plan — thereby taking another step toward fixing the 77-year-old tax distortion. The rule also lets employers fund a different account to buy cheaper “short-term” plans.

“This subtle, technical tweak has the potential to revolutionize the private health insurance market,” wrote Avik Roy, one of the smartest health care experts around, in the Washington Post.

The administration figures that 800,000 employers will eventually move to HRA plans, and 11 million workers will get their benefits this way.

At the same time, Trump also loosened the federal rules that had needlessly impeded “association health plans.” These are plans that let members of various groups band together to buy insurance. The result will be more competition, and more affordable choices for millions of people.

The Democrats’ response? Attack these changes as another attempt by Trump to “sabotage” Obamacare. What they really fear, however, is that the two new rules will destroy their case for socialized medicine.

The full report is here. Even as Congress continues to drag its feet, and the RINO’s who campaigned on repealing Obamacare reneged on their promises, the Trump administration is finding ways to improve healthcare for Americans.

# # #

Deporting illegal immigrants: some good news

Meme credit: Bookworm Room

From Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner: 

President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal immigrants is inspiring anger, but it's hardly righteous. If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal immigrants who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them. The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.

The immigrants Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice. First, they entered the country illegally, without papers. Second, when given a court hearing (where they could, for example, make bids for asylum or otherwise make a case for being allowed to stay), they again thumbed their noses at the legitimate authority of their generous hosts. Such poor guests deserve no sympathy, no matter what circumstances they came from.

Full report is here.

P.S. For livestream links to President Trump’s campaign launch this evening at 8 pm, try here.

# # #

The new "normal"? -- Victor Davis Hanson

Over the weekend, the historian Victor Davis Hanson posted an essay at American Greatness. With the progressive-liberal community constantly projecting their own fantasies and corruptions on conservatives, it is a relief to read VDH’s perspective. Here's a brief extract from his closing comments:

The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.

Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.

Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.

Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.

Full article is here.

# # #

Are you a “Hate Agent?”

Allum Bokhari at Breitbart has this scary report:

Facebook monitors the offline behavior of its users to determine if they should be categorized as a “Hate Agent,” according to a document provided exclusively to Breitbart News by a source within the social media giant.

The document, titled “Hate Agent Policy Review” outlines a series of “signals” that Facebook uses to determine if someone ought to be categorized as a “hate agent” and banned from the platform.

Those signals include a wide range of on- and off-platform behavior. If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”

Facebook may also categorize you as a hate agent if you self-identify with or advocate for a “Designated Hateful Ideology,” if you associate with a “Designated Hate Entity” (one of the examples cited by Facebook as a “hate entity” includes Islam critic Tommy Robinson), or if you have “tattoos of hate symbols or hate slogans.” (The document cites no examples of these, but the media and “anti-racism” advocacy groups increasingly label innocuous items as “hate symbols,” including a cartoon frog and the “OK” hand sign.)

Facebook will also categorize you as a hate agent for possession of “hate paraphernalia,” although the document provides no examples of what falls into this category.

The document also says Facebook will categorize you as a hate agent for “statements made in private but later made public.” Of course, Facebook holds vast amounts of information on what you say in public and in private — and as we saw with the Daily Beast doxing story, the platform will publicize private information on their users to assist the media in hitjobs on regular American citizens.

Full article is here.

# # #

Congress going rogue: Action Alert

NumbersUSA has the legislative update for next week:

House Democrats are poised to vote on an enormous appropriations bill that will fund a great deal of federal spending next year. It covers the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Education, Labor, State, and others.

This funding bill contains language that UNDERMINES AND EVEN REVERSES efforts already being made to tighten enforcement and end the border crisis. NumbersUSA has already urged House Members to oppose the bill. We warned them that we will score against this action in our Immigration Gradecards. These grade cards are read by hundreds of thousands of our activists. They sort out those that merely pay lip service to enforcement from those who actually vote to reduce immigration.

The NumbersUSA scoring notice sent to Congress states, "House Democrats, however, aren't content with the utter collapse of our entire immigration infrastructure, and instead are using this bill to actively obstruct the Administration's efforts to deal with the crisis on the southern border."

The bill, H.R. 2740, contains these outrageous provisions:

Blocks any federal funds from any source whatever from being used to construct "border security infrastructure." This includes blocking the wall/fencing money appropriated by Congress even earlier this year! But H.R. 2740 provides funding to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia to protect their borders.

Rewards illegal immigration by making DACA recipients eligible to take federal jobs.

Protects and rewards the illegal alien sponsors of unaccompanied alien children by blocking ICE from working with HHS to deport the illegal alien sponsors. Many of these sponsors are directly involved in human trafficking.

By obstructing efforts to control the border and enforce immigration laws, his bill could help strengthen Mexican drug cartels, which control the entire Mexican side of the Southern border.

The House is pursuing this ruinous course despite border apprehensions exploding, up by another third in May compared to April. Over 144,000 were apprehended in May. Reuters reports the makeup of the arrests: "While the vast majority of undocumented migrants arriving in the United States are from Central America, significant numbers have been arriving in recent months from Cuban and Haiti, via Panama, and from African countries, often via Brazil."

The Capitol switchboard number is:

(202) 224-3121

# # #

Google's thumb is on the scale

Brent Scher at the Washington Free Beacon reports on continuing censorship on Google:

News that Chicago police charged Jussie Smollett with staging a brutal attack on himself was covered on every network and in every major newspaper, but Google is hiding searches of it from its platform due to concerns of "potentially disparaging" the liberal actor.

A review of Google's autocomplete function on searches of Smollett found no references to anything regarding the hate crime, even though the company's own data show it is the only reason his name was ever searched.

The top suggested searches for Smollett included Empire (a show he no longer has a role in), Mighty Ducks (a nearly three-decade old movie he had a small role in as a child), and his wife (who doesn't exist), the Free Beacon found.

Even with a nudge—adding the letter "H" to indicate an interest in the Smollett "hate crime" or "hoax"—the top suggestions were inquiries into his height and ties to Hawaii.

Full report including potential bias in searches re: Hillary's campaign, the Trump presidency, Harvey Weinstein, and the Covington students is here ; the report includes screen shots of the writer’s search results. H/T Don Surber.

# # #

Update: National Popular Vote Compact

Michael P Ramirez cartoon via scoopnest.com

This blog posted previously on the dangers of the National Popular Vote Compact and its goal of end-running the Electoral College. J.R.Dunn reports on a hopeful development:

. . . on May 30 Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada vetoed the bill, which had been passed by the state senate nine days before. This action may very well break the momentum of the march to 270, marking the high tide of the Democrat’s latest attempt to subvert representative democracy.

The Electoral College has outdone the Founder’s fondest hopes for it. Over the past twenty years alone, in has prevented two utterly unworthy candidates from occupying the White House – Al Gore, a flake at the very least, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt American politician since Aaron Burr.

Both, of course, were Democrats, which raises a very interesting question, because so too is Steve Sisolak. The motive behind the national popular vote movement is unquestionably a search for a means for the Dems, who can no longer command a national following, to gain the presidency by hook or by crook. So why did Sisolak turn against his own party and its future presidential hopes? Sisolak gave as his reason the fact that  “Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states,” which at least shows that he was thinking, unlike the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, or Washington, just to mention three.

It has often been pointed out that the end result of the popular vote movement would be national elections effectively decided by New York, Southern California, D.C., and a handful of other high-density districts. The government of the U.S. would be effectively handed over to the Northeast, a few spots on the West Coast, and a couple of Midwestern cities. As a second-order development, media coverage and interest in any other areas would simply cease. Even today, coverage of the flyover states is as minimal as mass media can get away with. Under the new system, it would be nonexistent.

And so would flyover politics. From that point on, all presidential candidates would come from New York, the Massachusetts Bay area, LA, and perhaps Chicago. Politicians from those areas would be the sole recipients of national coverage. 

Everybody else – all the Trumans, the Jacksons, the Coolidges, the Lincolns – would be as unknown as if they were living in the Mato Grosso.

It’s likely that this occurred to Steven Sisolak.

Fingers crossed. Full report at American Thinker is here.

# # #