Could you still ….Watch what you wanted on TV or at the movies? Yep.

Travel anywhere in the world you could afford? Yep.

Enjoy the best selection of foods of any grocery stores in the world? Yep.

Go to any church and worship any god you wanted? Yep.

Watch any weird porn you wanted on the Internet? Yep.

Speak out freely on the internet or in public? Yep.

Buy guns if you wanted them? Yep.

Take a walk in the park when you wanted? Yep.

Get health insurance even though you are old or had a chronic illness? Yep.

What exactly was the problem?

It is time that every decent human being in America understands that Republicans do not consider most of us as human. They simply don’t see us as their equals. It’s time we do the same.

Republicans are evil. We are not; we are the good ones.

Republicans are greedy. We are not; we understand the importance of the common good.

Republicans are racist. We are not.

Republicans are misogynist. We are not.

Republicans are xenophobic. We are not.

Republicans do not read. We do!

Republicans are Nazis. We punch Nazis in the face.

Republicans are sociopaths. We understand and value the concept of community.

Republicans are scared of everything. They are pussies. We are not.

Republicans are chickenhawks. We are not. More Democrats serve in the military than Republicans.

Republicans are hypocrites. We are not. When we say Fuck Ted Cruz we mean it.

Conservatives have no clue who is going to mow their yards for them and no clue who is going to swab out their toilets, do their filthy laundry and work on their cars when they break down but they believe that once all of the non-republicans and non-whites are dead, ‘murika will be the perfect Utopia.

That craptastic lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act was the subject of a hearing at a federal courthouse in Fort Worth last week. And holy shitbeans, the judge hearing the case, US District Judge Reed O’Connor, sure sounds like he’s just DYING to get the chance to throw out a major law passed under Barack Obama, possibly in hopes that one day a fine bronze statue will be raised in his honor. It will be a statue of a poor person dying in the street after being ejected from an emergency room.

The lawsuit, brought by oft indicted, slow-eyed Texas AG Ken “I Be The Governor Next?” Paxton and a bunch of other Republican attorneys general, is based on a simple idea that should be so stupid that any judge would throw the case out, ideally while chuckling and imposing a fine for a frivolous lawsuit: Since the Supremes found the individual mandate was constitutional because Congress has the power to tax, the 2017 Tax Cut for Rich Fuckwads — which put the “tax” for not having insurance at “zero” — renders the entire law unconstitutional, because if there’s no tax on the individual mandate, it … can’t be called a tax, and so it is unconstitutional? (I guess?!) Like I said, it is ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME DUMB. That means no Medicaid expansion, no kids on parents’ insurance until the age of 26, no more exchanges, and especially, no more protections for preexisting conditions.

The Trump administration found the argument so persuasive that the DOJ decided it would no longer defend the individual mandate or the protections for preexisting conditions, but it would like other parts of the law to remain in place for now. Guess somebody at the DOJ has a kid aged between 18 and 26. Fortunately, a bunch of AGs from blue states, led by California, have taken up the defense of the law.

Vox offers a  ‘splainer on why legal scholars find Texas’s argument “ludicrous” — or, if you prefer, “ridiculous,” and also “absurd.” The main reason is that there’s nothing in the law itself saying that if the mandate falls, then the insurance regulations have to be rescinded as well. That’s not just from a liberal crazypants, either: Libertarian legal scholar Jonathan Adler, who’s no fan of Obamacare and has supported other lawsuits against it, says that just because Congress in 2017 reduced the tax penalty for not having insurance to $0, that has no effect on the rest of the law. If Congress intended to kill the entire program, it would have to actually repeal Obamacare, which as you may recall from all of last year, it didn’t manage to do.

“Because Congress A claimed this provision (as originally enacted) was an essential component to the broader scheme, plaintiffs claim this still applies to the subsequent revision (even though Congress B didn’t say so), and thereby want the whole statute to go down. That’s just absurd,” he said by email.

But gosh, oh golly, this account by Timothy Jost, emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, who attended the hearing last week, sure presents Judge O’Connor as simply captivated by the plaintiffs’ exciting legal theories. Jost says O’Connor showed no sign of having read the amicus briefs filed by virtually every stakeholder in the American healthcare system—doctors, hospitals, insurers, patient groups, consumer organizations, small businesses, older Americans, as well as numerous health economists and public health experts–demonstrating those consequences.

Jost also noticed what appears to be a shift in the position of the Justice Department, which had said it didn’t want to defend the ACA at all. At the hearing, the DOJ’s attorney took a more nuanced approach to the idea of striking down protections for preexisting conditions right away:

[The] DOJ seemed to be having second thoughts, begging the court not to eliminate preexisting condition protections immediately and not to rule on the case until after the 2019 open enrollment period ends (incidentally, after the midterm elections). The DOJ argued that an immediate injunction could “cause chaos in the insurance markets” and that adjusting to an insurance market without the mandate would be a “multiyear” process.

Funny, that very convenient request to hold off on killing the ACA until after the midterms was also noticed by the New York Times, although the DOJ attorney explained it was really for sure more about not causing chaos during ACA open enrollment, which has been such a concern for the administration in the past. “We certainly don’t want people to lose their health insurance going into next year,” he said, and that can surely be the only reason he’s so very concerned, you bet.

The California attorneys argued that the individual mandate wasn’t any sort of keystone to the ACA as a whole, particularly from a legal standpoint (though as a practical matter, yes, it helped to keep premiums down by getting younger, healthier customers into the risk pool). They also noted Republican lawmakers’ statements that the elimination of the tax penalty was not intended to bring down the entire law, and argued that while killing off protections for preexisting conditions would be devastating to tens of millions of Americans, leaving them in place wouldn’t harm the plaintiffs at all, particularly since they now won’t even pay a penalty for not being insured. (If they get hit by a truck or a major illness, on the other hand, they’re now free to try to pay for it themselves, HOORAY.)

Jost says O’Connor appeared to have little interest at all in the defense case. Instead, the judge

questioned the attorneys for the next hour trying to elicit support for the plaintiffs’ arguments. Doesn’t the ACA still say people “shall” have coverage? Didn’t Congress by zeroing out the tax in 2017 remove the one justification the Supreme Court found for finding the mandate constitutional? Don’t the “findings” in the mandate section of the original ACA say that the mandate is “essential” to creating markets where preexisting conditions could be covered? (He ignored powerful evidence that the finding was wrong) […] Didn’t the dissent in the earlier Supreme Court case establish that once the mandate disappears, the whole ACA collapses? Can’t the court simply recite the magic formula proposed by the plaintiffs and make the ACA disappear?

Not a lawyer, but one has to wonder whether it’s really the judge’s role to join the plaintiffs in hammering at the defense’s case like that.

Judge O’Connor is expected to rule sometime in the next few weeks — the Texas Tribune notes that on his way out of the courtroom, he said he would “get something out just as quickly as I can.” We’re not really expecting it to be informed by a lot of fancy-schmancy legal scholarship, though.

Maybe United Way and other organizations could learn to tell people to get a damn job and pull their weight, huh? And if insurance is still too expensive, which it will be if the Republicans kill off the ACA, then obviously more people will be incentivized to become investment bankers, and everything will be fine.

For a terrific general overview of why this is bad and what you can do to fight it, see this thread by Andy Slavitt, Barack Obama’s director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, from the quaint old days when presidents and their cabinets followed laws instead of dismantling them.

You’ve got to be a really soulless evil fucking putrid shit to fight this fucking hard to take health care away from people.

Who else is sick of the hypocritical, self-righteous, completely uninformed grandstanding from every idiot in the country today? This year seems worse even than last year,  because Trump has become so difficult to defend, so Republicans are really leaning on 9/11 this year to justify him. They do that with everything every day. Sure, Trump’s “no saint”, but Hillary killed her staffers. Sure, Trump’s not the most articulate, but Hillary called half of America deplorable.

Today its, “Sure Trump’s not perfect, but remember when Muslims killed a bunch of Americans because we let ourselves get too soft? We need scrappy fighters like Trump, not pansy compromisers like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.”

I don’t like being lectured on history or patriotism by people who voted for the closest thing to a classic 1930’s fascist that I’ve seen in my life, and to boot one who accepted help in winning the election from a foreign adversary.

We haven’t learned shit in 17 years, and in fact we have become a worse nation because of it. Hateful and paranoid and xenophobic. We never were “unified”. While “traditional Americans” were saluting and singing that fucking Lee greenwood song, brown Americans were getting their fucking ass beat. We got an illegal war due to pure propaganda from Fox, which capitalized on some weird hyper patriotism that in reality amounts to blind support of the military and the state.

We never examined the road to 9/11, we just said “they hate us for our freedom”.We’ve killed thousands of innocent people, we’ve sacrificed liberties due to fear. We’ve withdrawn into our borders, and fallen victim to propaganda within our own state. Bin laden may be dead, but as the years go by, more and more I think he got what he wanted.

Also, we know that right now if something horrible were to happen on the scale of 9/11 half the country would want the perpetrator’s homeland turned into radioactive glass. And now they have someone who would push the button to do it.

Note that the bloody, entirely wrong, superfluous Republican War on Iraq as a “result” of 9/11 is entirely wiped from memory.

Donald Trump, White Trash Icon

One of the most remarkable things about the Old Days is that there were Americans with taste. Today, Americans appreciate bad taste, or America wouldn’t look the way America does. Enough has already been said about Trump and his shitty taste, his awful manners his gross appearance, the garbage of his personality, and what we surmise are his astronomical outstanding credit card balances — because you know how New Money always has to parade itself around in front of you like a dumb peacock. But there is more to say.

Trump’s bad taste is typical of a large swath of Americans. Not like he necessarily dresses the way most Americans do, in gigantic suits with a cut and a sheen of a drunk Bombay tailor and inexplicably long, shiny neckties in Bus and Tunnel colors the have to be held down with tape (it is hard to believe that this vulgar hair-weave troglodyte made his home in NYC, though).

[click to continue…]

Lindsey Graham apparently isn’t upset that the unindicted co-conspirator president he spends so much time snuggling with has treated his dear dead friend with such grave disrespect, unbefitting of a syphilitic housecat, not to mention the purported leader of the free world. He said this on the “Today” show this morning:

Lindsey Graham has been normalizing the idea of Donald Trump firing Jeff Sessions in order to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation, saying that it’s not just because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation that Trump can’t stand his little elfin racist face. It’s MORE THAN THAT.

GRAHAM: This relationship is beyond repair, I think. […] It’s much deeper than that. We won’t say on this show, but it’s a pretty deep breach.

Graham continued by saying “the relationship’s not working” and that Jeff Sessions should be replaced with somebody who will “commit to the Senate” that he or she will not interfere with the Robert Mueller investigation.

Also, what the hell kind of “deep breach” is Lindsey Graham talking about? Did Trump try to grab Sessions by the pussy but came up empty? Did Sessions invite Trump to his Family Hootenanny and was the country fried moose turd casserole unsatisfactory to the president’s delicate palate?

WHAT THE FUCK IS IT, LINDSEY?

Also, evidently the official GOP mourning period for John McCain has sailed right on past, since I heard opportunistic ghoul Jim Inhofe today on NPR blaming McCain for the rift with President ShiterBrains. It got so bad that I started screaming “What the fuck do you want McCain to do? Rise up from his casket and apologize?”

article on NYTIMES