Governor Kasich and Senator Portman on Obamacare

art credit: Conservative Review

The Washington Examiner reports:

Ohio Governor John Kasich said Sunday the collapse of the Republican healthcare bill in the U.S. Senate was a "good thing," but was adamant the policy debate was not over.

David Catron at The American Spectator blog named Portman as one of the six Senators whom he describes as liars, frauds, charlatans – well, you get the idea:

The following Republican Senators demonstrated [last Wednesday] that they are liars and frauds: Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Dean Heller (Nev.), John McCain (Ariz.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Rob Portman (Ohio).

. . . if a Republican won the 2016 presidential election, the same bill [as an earlier partial repeal bill] or something very similar could be quickly passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law. Every single Republican who ran for the House or the Senate in 2016 made similar statements, including the six charlatans listed above.

These mountebanks, all of whom voted for “clean repeal” when Obama’s inevitable veto made it safe and politically expedient to do so, voted against a virtually identical bill [last week] — knowing full well that President Trump would sign it. In other words, they consciously betrayed their constituents, their party, and the nation as a whole.

At least we know where Kasich and Portman stand.

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Michael P. Ramirez ~ cartoon of the day

 Well, that partly explains the failure to repeal Obamacare.

Cartoon via Townhall

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Tony Madalone is running for Mayor

Tony Madalone meets a Cleveland Tea Party Person

Yesterday evening, Cleveland Tea Party Co-Coordinator Diana went to a meet-and-greet with Tony Madalone –who is running for Mayor of Cleveland. Tony who? There are nine mayoral candidates heading into the September primary, and Cleveland Tea Party just met the one who probably rates the lowest in name recognition.

According to Cleveland.com, the “elections records list Tony Madalone as a Republican,” but he is running as an Independent. What follows are this voter’s first impressions of this candidate.

Madalone is a 32-year old entrepreneur who runs his own business, Fresh Brewed Tees, and as such, he could speak to his own experiences with City Hall. For example, he spent months going through the head-banging process of attempting to propose a simple piece of legislation concerning business permits. As a result, he experienced first-hand the political foot-dragging and machinations that casual observers may moan and groan about – but he’s got a few battle scars. It’s a start. He’s also gotten to know many of the key players in the municipal government through that process and also by sitting in on City Council meetings. That perhaps goes some way toward compensating for the fact that he is not running as a sitting Councilman or Commissioner or School Board member.

Does he support of oppose sanctuary cities?  His response is that it is difficult not to obey federal law. OK, but that was not quite the forceful stand for law enforcement that I hoped to hear.

One of Tony’s priorities is education for all. Even, so, I was not quite sure where Tony stands on Common Core. He expressed dismay at the state of education in Cleveland, but pointed out that solutions are difficult to formulate, especially in the short term. Re: both Common Core and the teacher’s unions, I hope he refines his positions on these issues and gets more specific.

Tony talked about the crisis in Ohio with heroin and opioids addiction. His response focused on education, so that potential users would understand the consequences better and would be less likely to experiment. I agree that education is important, but I am not sure I entirely agree that education is, on this issue, the key. A relative of mine, now in early 20s, succumbed to drug use for (as near as I can tell as an unqualified observer) a number of reasons, including predatory drug dealers on college campuses, cheap hits, being convinced that smoking heroin was not addictive, individual personality, and family and social circumstances. So in my view it is not just about education. Education would have addressed the myth about non-addictive smoking, but not the other contributing factors. Cutting off the cheap supplies would seem to be a more do-able option. Just this voter's two cents.

Tony hates the dirt bike track project, especially since it was approved without any plan in place, and he was critical of the process by which City Council called its final vote.

On a first impression, he struck me as someone who is tossing his hat in the ring for a good reason – wanting a better deal for Cleveland, in part based on his own frustrations with city government from his experiences as a business entrepreneur. On the downside: he has not held any public office and has no name recognition. And running a small business is not the same as running City Hall.

I asked him whether he would run again if he didn’t get across the finish line this time – or whether he might run for another office, such as Councilman, or Commissioner, or School Board, and he had not thought about it. But he thought it was a good question (I knew to ask that question from my training with Ralph King’s and Joe Scarola’s Politics 101 classes.) Tony would surely have more name recognition in a second or third run.

Thanks, Tony, for putting our little neighborhood on your door-knock schedule. Message to other mayoral candidates: we’re happy to meet with you, too. Leave a comment below with your email details (or email clevelandteaparty[at]gmail.com, and we’ll take it from there.

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There’s a Cleveland Connection

image credit: www.joyfulchristianliving.com

 Mark Steyn has lots more on the DNC computer hacking scandal:

On Monday night Imran Awan, the principal IT aide to former DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was arrested at Dulles Airport attempting to flee the country. "IT" means information technology, as in computers, as in hacking, as in what the Democrats insist happened to the election.

. . .

Monday's airport arrest follows the seizure of broken hard drives from the garage of the Awans' former home. 

. . .

What connects the "fake news" and the real news is the DNC. The Russia "story" exists because the election wasn't hacked but the DNC was. Wikileaks released the Democrats' embarrassing emails to the world, although, helpfully, the US media mostly declined to report on them. . .  As it happens, the world's most inevitable presidential victor somehow managed to lose the election, and casting around for a reason the Dems decided that blaming it on a stiff tired unlikeable legacy candidate with no message and a minimal campaign schedule was too implausible. So instead they decided to blame it on Russian "hacking".

. . .

Five months ago, as the coppers began closing the net on the family, other Democrats began distancing themselves from the Awan clan, notwithstanding their peerless IT skills. Representative Gregory Meeks of New York fired Mrs Awan on February 28th.

And here’s the Cleveland Connection:

Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio fired Mr Awan on March 1st. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not fire Awan until yesterday - after his arrest at the airport. 

Read more about this particular swamp here.

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Repealing Obamacare: again

YouTube: Right Side Broadcasting

Following President Trumps’s brief speech today (above) in a last-ditch effort to get the Uniparty RINOs to keep their promise to repeal Obamacare, it’s timely to review a couple of reasons why Congress should repeal:

• Medicare is not the answer. Here is today’s horror story about a 91-year old needing treatment but getting rejected by the system.
• Single-payer systems put the state, not the individual in charge of medical decisions. Here’s Mr. Vodkapundit (Stephen Green) on the final chapter in little Baby Gard’s life, and the tragic situation with his parents.

Yet Congress is so used to end-running rules, breaking campaign promises, and disregarding their constituencies that it will be a miracle if they do the right thing on healthcare. How do they keep getting away with it? Here’s an essay by Angelo M.Codevillaon at the American Greatness blog about what “regular order” in the legislative process is supposed to look like. 

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Cleveland Browns secret weapon

A little off topic but . . .

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What’s wrong with Rob Portman?

cartoon credit: Walt Handelsman

via US News and World Report / The New Orleans Advocate

Scott McKay at The American Spectator asks:

Do Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, and Shelley Moore Capito expect to ever get votes from Republican voters again?

Here’s a question: How long have Republicans been running for federal office on repealing Obamacare, in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s terminology, “Root and branch”?

Answer: since 2010.

. . .

You would figure that with Donald Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, repealing Obamacare would be a no-brainer.

OK, the repeal-and-replace angle could be harder to pull off. That’s understandable. There are lots of different kinds of Republicans, and it might be hard to get all of them to coalesce behind a single federal healthcare policy to replace it. Those of us whose studies of the American public sector have led to an understanding that the less federal healthcare policy there is the healthier the healthcare industry will be have a far simpler solution to that problem, but we are unfortunately not the majority — in the House, Senate or public. That’s a shame, and it’s a symptom of a larger civic disease, but that’s for another column in this space. There will be a replacement for Obamacare, and we can hope it’s less awful than what it stands in for.

But when the Senate version of an Obamacare replacement foundered and McConnell announced the next step would be, early next week, an up-or-down vote for an Obamacare repeal now and the crafting of a replacement as a consensus for one emerges, that’s something an entire GOP caucus can vote for.

Minus Susan Collins, of course; Maine’s quote-unquote Republican Senator wouldn’t vote to repeal Obamacare back in 2015 when McConnell’s majority sent a bill doing just that to then-President Obama’s desk to die. But outside of Collins and Mark Kirk of Illinois, who is no longer in the Senate, the rest of the caucus was on board with the repeal.

And yet Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, and Ohio’s Rob Portman have now joined Collins in announcing they won’t support a repeal when the vote comes up next week.

What is wrong with these people?

Capito laced her announcement with a special bit of arsenic for Republican voters. “I didn’t come to Washington to hurt people,” she said.

No, Senator, apparently you came to Washington to lie to people.

. . .

What’s wrong with these people? My guess in one word: Uniparty. And the rest of Scott McKay's article is here.