Trump is driving the Left insane

Leftist columnist Michael A. Cohen’s writes in the Boston Globe that "Trump is everywhere and Americans are getting buried". Trump's amazing achievement of getting himself high in the news asgenda every day is deeply painful for the Left.  Some excerpts from Cohen:

It’s impossible to keep up. It’s all-consuming. For millions of Americans, Trump has become an unbearable, infuriating, enraging, and draining presence in our national life. As a political columnist, there’s no escaping him. Going on two years he’s become an omnipresent force in my life. But what about the rest of America? What about those not afflicted by the need to constantly be spinning on the news cycle hamster wheel and those who don’t count themselves part of the MAGA crowd?

I surveyed friends and threw the question out to my Twitter feed about the emotional toll of Trumpism. The responses speak to the extraordinary and largely underreported national trauma — and increasing pessimism about America’s future — that Trump’s presidency is creating.

“There are no grown-ups in charge, no protectors, no one to make sense of things, no one to assure us it will be OK,” said a professor who lives in Las Vegas. “It is so deeply, and continuously, disturbing, that I sometimes doubt our country will survive him.”

A former Obama administration official said, “I am exhausted. All. The. Time. I simply can’t keep up.” A friend and former member of the intelligence community told me he is “utterly exhausted from having my humanity and standing attacked. Wary and anxious that we can’t change it.”

Others struggled for the right words. “Nausea is difficult to describe succinctly,” said an old friend who lives in a blue island in Kansas.

In all the responses I received to this query there was extraordinary and debilitating sense of hopelessness that I’ve never seen before in American politics. “My sense of political efficacy of being able to have any larger impact in the world individually or even as part of a group, has been radically diminished,” a close friend and fellow New Yorker vented. That is, she said, “a bad thing for me and a very bad thing if it gets multiplied out to all of us.”

Many expressed fears of nuclear conflict; others of losing their health care if Republicans succeed in gutting Obamcare. Some talked about moving out of the country, while some compared Trump’s presidency to being in an abusive relationship. People report weight gain, increased anxiety and depression, and sleeplessness.

SOURCE

After all the frustrations and heartburn the Left have visited on everyone else with their insatiable demands for political correctness, it is deeply pleasing to hear that the Left are getting some of their own back

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The Scandalous Truth about Obamacare Is Laid Bare

A government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable.

It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order.

What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It also redefines the meaning of “short term” policies from one year to 90 days. But more importantly–and this is what has the pundit class in total meltdown–it liberalizes the rules for providers to serve health-coverage consumers.

In the words of USA Today: the executive order permits a greater range of choice “by allowing more consumers to buy health insurance through association health plans across state lines.”

The key word here is “allowing” – not forcing, not compelling, not coercing. Allowing.

Why would this be a problem? Because allowing choice defeats the core feature of Obamacare, which is about forcing risk pools to exist that the market would otherwise never have chosen. If you were to summarize the change in a phrase it is this: it allows more freedom.

The tenor of the critics’ comments on this move is that it is some sort of despotic act. But let’s be clear: no one is coerced by this executive order. It is exactly the reverse: it removes one source of coercion. It liberalizes, just slightly, the market for insurance carriers.

Here’s a good principle: a government program that is ruined by permitting more choice is not sustainable. The New York Times predicts:

"Employers that remain in the A.C.A. small-group market will offer plans that are more expensive than average, and they will see premiums increase. Only the sickest groups would remain in the A.C.A. regulated risk pool after several enrollment cycles"

Vox puts it this way:

"The individuals likely to flee the Obamacare markets for association plans would probably be younger and healthier, leaving behind an older, sicker pool for the remaining ACA market. That has the makings of a death spiral, with ever-increasing premiums and insurers deciding to leave the market altogether"

The Atlantic makes the same point:

"Both short-term and associated plans would likely be less costly than the more robust plans sold on Obamacare’s state-based insurance exchanges. But the concern, among critics, is that the plans would cherry-pick the healthiest customers out of the individual market, leaving those with serious health conditions stuck on the Obamacare exchanges. There, prices would rise, because the pool of people on the exchanges would be sicker. Small businesses who keep the more robust plans—perhaps because they have employees with serious health conditions—would also likely face higher costs"

CNBC puts the point about plan duration in the starkest and most ironic terms.

"If the administration liberalizes rules about the duration of short-term health plans, and then also makes it easier for people to get hardship exemptions from Obamacare's mandate, it could lead healthy people who don't need comprehensive benefits to sign up in large numbers for short-term coverage"

Can you imagine? Letting people do things that are personally beneficial? Horror!

Once you break all this down, the ugly truth about Obamacare is laid bare. Obamacare didn’t create a market. It destroyed the market. Even the slightest bit of freedom wrecks the whole point.

Under the existing rules, healthy people were being forced (effectively taxed) to pay the premiums for unhealthy people, young people forced to pay for old people, anyone trying to live a healthy lifestyle required to cough up for those who do not.

This is the great hidden truth about Obamacare. It was never a program for improved medical coverage. It was a program for redistributing wealth by force from the healthy to the sick. It did this by forcing nonmarket risk pools, countering the whole logic of insurance in the first place, which is supposed to calibrate premiums, risks, and payouts toward mutual profitability. Obamacare imagined that it would be easy to use coercion to undermine the whole point of insurance. It didn’t work.

And so the Trump executive order introduces a slight bit of liberality and choice. And the critics are screaming that this is a disaster in the making. You can’t allow choice! You can’t allow more freedom! You can’t allow producers and consumers to cobble together their own plans! After all, this defeats the point of Obamacare, which is all about forcing people to do things they otherwise would not do!

This revelation is, as they say, somewhat awkward.

What we should have learned from the failure of Obamacare is that no amount of coercion can substitute for the rationality and productivity of the competitive marketplace.

Even if the executive order successfully liberalizes the sector just a bit, we have a very long way to go. The entire medical marketplace needs massive liberalization. It needs government to play even less of a role, from insurance to prescriptions to all choice, over what is permitted to be called health care and who administers it.

Freedom or coercion: these are the two paths. The first works; the second doesn’t.

SOURCE

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West Point Digs Deeper Hole on Cadet Communist

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a West Point 2016 graduate, now-2LT Spenser Rapone, who, despite his brash history displaying contempt for our nation, and his advocacy for communism, was allowed to graduate. As I noted, now-retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Robert Heffington, an Academy history professor in 2015, had issued a sworn affidavit alerting senior USMA command about Rapone.

In his complaint LTC Heffington concluded, “I cannot reconcile the image of a first class cadet at West Point with the things he has posted online for the world to see. To me, these are red flags that cannot be ignored, and I fail to see how this individual can possibly graduate and become a commissioned officer in six months.”

But they did ignore it.

More recently, Rapone, now assigned to the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, has boldly posted his hatred for his commander in chief, SecDef James Mattis, and other senior military leadership on public social media accounts. That constitutes a clear and overt UCMJ Article 88 violation: “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense … shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

West Point command responded to the exposure of Rapone’s insubordination and UCMJ violations with an official statement asserting, “Rapone’s actions in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army,” and that “Rapone’s chain of command is aware of his actions and is looking into the matter.”

Responding to that lame assertion, LTC Heffington sent a letter to his USMA class of 1997, noting his “intense devotion and loyalty to West Point,” but detailing the inaction over Rapone and how that reflected the degraded “leadership” culture at West Point.

Heffington wrote, “I firmly believe West Point is a national treasure and that it can and should remain a vitally important source of well trained, disciplined, highly educated Army officers and civilian leaders. However, during my time on the West Point faculty … I personally witnessed a series of fundamental changes at West Point that have eroded it to the point where I question whether the institution should even remain open. The recent coverage of 2LT Spenser Rapone — an avowed Communist and sworn enemy of the United States — dramatically highlighted this disturbing trend. Given my recent tenure on the West Point faculty and my direct interactions with Rapone, his ‘mentors,’ and with the Academy’s leadership, I believe I can shed light on how someone like Rapone could possibly graduate.”

However, Rapone’s case is just the latest indicator of military academy degradation under Barack Obama’s regime. Recall that The Patriot Post took on the command staff at the Air Force Academy in 2012, when Obama’s appointees there quietly endeavored to remove “So Help Me God” from oaths in the cadet handbook “to Support and Defend” our Constitution.

Bottom line: The investigation that needed to be done was two years ago, based on LTC Heffington’s original affidavit concerning Rapone. The investigation that really needs to be conducted now is why that didn’t happen — and of much greater significance, determining how deep Obama’s deep-state socialists have been imbedded in the ranks of American military leadership.

SOURCE

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