GREAT Health Care At A Tiny Fraction of the Cost

I’m late posting this because I had planned just to toss out some happy stuff —

Spamilton moves to Broadway! See it there or in Chicago. “I laughed my brains out.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda

Al Franken: Giant of the Senate (by Al Franken) has just been released! You’ll laugh nearly as hard.

— but it’s hard to be happy as, day by horrifying day, you watch your amazing country slip.

Putin is winning. Bannon is winning. The forces of intolerance and ignorance are winning. And millions of fine people — not deplorable, just bamboozled — are still eager to give this petulant, bullying, narcissistic, uncharitable, pathologically dishonest, ignorant president time to come through with “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost” (“it’s going to be so easy”) — even as he takes $900 billion out of health care and slashes the budget for research that could one day save their child’s life.

By now everyone knows we’ve joined Nicaragua and Syria — alone among the nations of the world — in eschewing the Paris Climate Accord. What 38% of the electorate don’t seem to know (but the rest of the world and America’s business leaders do) is that virtually everything Trump said about this in the Rose Garden is false.

Click here for a clear, measured, even-handed review.

Even North Korea recognizes the need for the Paris Accord — which is voluntary. Trump could scale back our goals without renegotiating anything.

Our allies are sad for America, turning elsewhere for leadership. Our planet is at risk of becoming uninhabitable in a few generations (if we don’t nuke or poison it sooner). After ten thousand generations of suffering and striving that it took to get us to this magical moment, when virtually all things are possible if we don’t hurtle off the rails, Donald Trump is in charge.

Putin and the KGB are winning.

The coal miners of Kentucky will be losing even worse than most of the rest of us. They need Medicaid.

Finally, because it was in the news, a footnote about how we got into this nightmare.

Hillary — who was spot-on for most of her recent Code Conference interview, if you ask me (and who would have made a terrific, steady, savvy president) — was arguably too tough on the DNC. Read it here (“Democratic data experts said Thursday there was a zero percent chance that Hillary Clinton lost because the Democratic National Committee gave her bad data”).

Andrew R: “So I did a search on the polling pre- and post Comey letter, and while you can certainly find someone to back up the idea that Hillary didn’t lose because of the Comey letter, most of the polling says it was decisive. This includes Nate Silver, who ran a long, careful piece on polling just before the Inauguration that came down on Comey being the thumb on the scales. More recently, it’s been advanced that Comey fell for a piece of Russian disinformation–or at least, if he did know it was such, worried that he’d be attacked with it anyway if he didn’t issue the letter. We’ll never know if it was the Russians (I keep wanting to type “Soviets”), but most of the data I found suggests the Comey letter elected Trump.”

Have a great weekend. See Spamilton. Read Al Franken’s book.