I was in Las Vegas over this past weekend, seeing shows and visiting friends, losing a whopping $7.00 on Video Poker and spending a fair amount of time in the room working on scripts. I still have scripts in urgent need of completion so I'll tell you about my trip in the days to come. Right now, here's some of what's in the news…
- As Kevin Drum notes, the new Republican/Trump line on their Health Care Plan is that Obamacare was a failure because though it drastically reduced the number of uninsured in this country, it still left some people uncovered. So that's why we need their new plan which will leave more people without insurance. I don't know what the endgame is on this or even if they're thinking one move ahead of what they say today. I guess it'll be something like, "Well, yes, there are more millions more uninsured now that our plan is in place but all those people chose not to buy insurance so we don't have to think about them."
- In a very long article, Frank Rich compares Trump in his current scandals to Nixon in the thick of Watergate. I was hesitant about that comparison but Rich finds a lot more common points than I'd imagined. In the end though, it all comes down to whether a Republican Congress is even going to acknowledge wrongdoing on the part of a Republican President.
- Jonathan Chait has an update on the unfolding scandal of Russian collusion. How amazing to see people who felt Benghazi had to be investigated over and over because those damned GOP-led hearings kept concluding Hillary was innocent, keep insisting it's wrong to even look into these allegations.
- And the latest Big Lie that the Trump administration is pushing is that millions of illegal voters are the reason Trump lost the popular vote that he really won. So we need to pass strict laws that just coincidentally would make it harder for non-white people to vote.
- Ezra Klein discusses how Donald Trump has diminished America's morality and sense of decency. As he notes, "The party that tried to impeach Bill Clinton to protect family values has embraced the position that it does no good to publicly discuss the [current] president's routine violations of basic decency."
- And as the Fourth of July is upon us, Jesse Berney assesses the state of patriotism in a country with Donald J. Trump in the White House.
Just so you know, by the way: I don't post these links because I think they will contribute in even a microscopic way to bringing down the Trump administration. I think the Trump administration will bring down itself. I just post things because I find them interesting. And maybe some of this will help us all maintain our equilibrium, especially when we encounter — as I did at the Vegas airport — someone who thinks our country is being saved from the certain doom of Gay Marriage, saving the environment and more people being able to afford to see a doctor.