monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The truth is that Donald Trump never ever will even try to make sexual advances to stupid women.

Case closed.

cameronleon wrote:

The truth is that Donald Trump never ever will even try to make sexual advances to stupid women.
Case closed.

Somehow, you managed to miss the bus tape where Trump admitted that as a famous person, he can get away with groping women. So your entire contention that Trump doesn't do this is preposterous.

Attempting to reason with cameronleon is an exercise in futility; in other words, a waste of time.

Mitch McConnell will meet Donald Trump for lunch on Monday, two days after the president’s former chief strategist called for the metaphorical assassination of the Senate majority leader.

Speaking to a religious conservative audience at the Values Voter Summit in Washington on Saturday, Steve Bannon called for “a season of war against [the] GOP establishment” and said: “This is our war. The establishment started it … You all are gonna finish it.”

Bannon, who left the White House in August and returned to the hard-right Breitbart News website, added: “Up on Capitol Hill it’s like the Ides of March. The only question – and this is just an analogy or metaphor, or whatever you want to call it – they’re just looking to find out who’s going to be Brutus to [McConnell’s] Julius Caesar.”

Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Brutus on 15 March in the year 44BC, on the steps of the Senate in Rome. Bannon’s remarks were lent a dash of irony when considered in light of rightwing protests this summer over a Shakespeare in the Park production of the play Julius Caesar, in which the assassinated emperor was made to resemble Trump.

More prosaically, Bannon is working to mount primary challenges against establishment figures including McConnell. On Saturday he singled out John Barrasso of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Dean Heller of Nevada for not siding with Trump in an exchange of insults with Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who is not seeking re-election in 2018.

Trump remains close to Bannon and blames McConnell for a stalled legislative agenda that includes repeated failures to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, despite Republican control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. The two men will meet at the White House. Vice-President Mike Pence – reportedly a mediator in Trump’s recent disputes with secretary of state Rex Tillerson – will also attend.

“Mitch McConnell’s not our problem,” Lindsey Graham, a senator from South Carolina who co-sponsored one of the failed healthcare bills, told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. “Our problem is that we promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, and we failed. We promised to cut taxes and we have yet to do it.

“If we’re successful, Mitch McConnell’s fine. If we’re not, we’re all in trouble. We lose our majority and I think President Trump will not get re-elected [in 2020].”

Somehow, you managed to miss the bus tape where Trump admitted that as a famous person, he can get away with groping women. So your entire contention that Trump doesn't do this is preposterous.

The only question left is whether Trump did it to this particular woman or not, since we know he does it to women.

“Our problem is that we promised to repeal and replace Obamacare...

My question is what is left to repeal with respect to Obamacare? It's been effectively killed already.

Quote:

“Our problem is that we promised to repeal and replace Obamacare...

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Republicans in Congress have been promising their voters they would repeal the Affordable Care Act for years. Despite those promises, they've been unable to agree on how to overhaul President Obama's signature health care legislation. So today, President Trump took a shot. The president signed an executive order that says he will allow consumers and small businesses to band together and use to their combined market power to negotiate better deals for health insurance. Here's what he said.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The competition will be staggering. Insurance companies will be fighting to get every single person signed up. And you will be hopefully negotiating, negotiating, negotiating. And you'll get such low prices for such great care.

MCEVERS: In a moment, we'll hear how this executive order could affect people and the health insurance industry. First, NPR's health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak is with us to talk about the order itself. Hey, Alison.

ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hey, Kelly.

MCEVERS: So what does the order do?

KODJAK: Well, I have been told several times today that the order itself doesn't really do anything to the health care system.

MCEVERS: OK.

KODJAK: But what it does do is direct three different federal agencies to look at their regulations around health insurance to try to make it easier for trade groups and small businesses to work together to negotiate with insurance companies for better deals. And those companies can be in different states. And they theoretically could get cheaper insurance than they do now. Small businesses today have to buy their insurance through their local Obamacare exchange.

MCEVERS: Right. I mean, it sounds like a reasonable concept. Is - will it work?

KODJAK: Well, there are a couple of challenges. And the first one is legal. There are a whole bunch of people - health care analysts, lawyers - that are saying essentially there are significant legal hurdles to creating what these - they're called association health plans - in a way that makes them cheaper than insurance that's already on the market. And these are people - Democrats and Republicans.

What would have to happen is the administration has to allow those small businesses to be governed by the rules of large employers. That would pretty much reverse a long history of legal precedent in how that law has been understood. The order says this outright. It encourages the agencies, as they say, to modernize their interpretation of the law. The second challenge is just that these plans are only cheaper if they cut benefits or exclude people who are sick or small businesses with a sicker employee group.

MCEVERS: I mean, why is that? Wouldn't their combined market power give them advantage - an advantage?

KODJAK: Well, not necessarily because today, small businesses already are sort of combining their market power through the Obamacare exchanges. They're buying in a group. All the businesses in D.C., for example - in Washington, D.C. - they have to buy on the Washington exchange. So there's not really a new strength in numbers that would come with these association plans. The advantage only comes if they include companies with younger people and leave out older, sicker people.

MCEVERS: These association plans weren't the only thing in this executive order, I understand. What else did the president put in there?

KODJAK: So he's trying to loosen rules regarding short-term insurance plans. And these are policies - right now they're limited to only 90 days, and they'd be good for up to a year. And I looked at some today on the market that are available now, and they have the deductibles as high as $10,000. They don't necessarily cover prescription drugs. And they don't have to cover you if you have a health history. So they're not the greatest insurance, and they don't fit the Obamacare consumer protections.

MCEVERS: Overall so far, what has been the reaction to this executive order?

KODJAK: Well, as I said, there's some skepticism about whether or not it's legal or can accomplish...

MCEVERS: Right.

KODJAK: ...Anything. And then there's this figure that it could split the market again to where it was before the Affordable Care Act was passed, which is, people who are healthy and young can get really cheap insurance, but people who need health care will find it really hard, expensive or out of reach.

MCEVERS: NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak, thanks a lot.

KODJAK: Thanks, Kelly.