A couple things: Healthcare and Clinton

Yet another healthcare bill has managed to sneak in for a vote next week, the Graham-Cassidy bill might even be the cruelest of the offerings given us by the Conservatives this summer. Essentially it defunds Obamacare entirely, converting most federal funds to block grants handed out to the states "evenly" redistributing money from those like California who expanded the program, to others like Tennessee who chose not to, this is to make things fair of course, now it doesn't set requirements for what the states end up doing with the money, except that it of course defunds Planned Parenthood and bans the use of those funds for things like abortions. Additionally it removes requirements to cover preexisting conditions, or even requirements to have plans that actually do anything useful for anything approaching an affordable amount.

Oh, and in a blatant, and probably illegal effort to win over Lisa Murkowski, it promises extra funds to Alaska in hopes of winning her vote.

The above is of course the short form of the bill, but if you care that much you can find more in depth explanations if you want. You get the gist of it I think though. The Congressional Budget Office has not had a chance to grade the bill, and will not be able to before the vote is called next week, but most reliable estimates suggest that thirty million or so lose coverage because of the change, the poor die, the rich don't, the usual baggage except worse.

The news media and talk shows, excepting Jimmy Kimmel, have not really talked much about it, no one seems to be taking the plan seriously, this is likely because of the failure of the (now)comparably much more reasonable options earlier this summer and the fact that there appear to be at least four R senators opposed to the bill, probably more, which indicates the bill is basically dead in the water, and being pushed as one last ditch attempt before the GOP loses the ability to pass bills with budget reconciliation rules on the thirtieth of this month. After that they have to attempt to find 60 votes in the senate somehow, at least until they pass a new budget.

So signs point to no for the health care repeal, and another loss for for the conservative majority in the senate, but there is a possibility that this eleventh hour vote is an attempt to bring it in under the radar and avoid public outcry influencing the vote so it is till worth contacting your representatives and filling up their mailboxes to make sure they are aware that people are paying attention.

Interestingly, support for Obamacare has been on a steady rise since its inception, and particularly through the months of repeal attempts, turns out hat the more the Republicans draw attention to it, the more people realize they kind of like being able to not die when they are sick, or at least die less. Memories in politics being what they are, I suspect a failure next week will lead to us seeing some interesting and potential useful bills being pushed in a few months that actually do make an effort to fix the actual problems of the system, if nothing else because the red states could really use more money from any source and they will have to do things that actually are desirable to those across the aisle.

We wouldn't be having this problem at all if Clinton was in office.

Which leads me to the other thing I have been thinking about, she wrote a book and it came out a little bit ago, since then I have seen endless news articles, opinion pieces, and hot takes on Facebook about how hilariously out of touch and defensive she is about how the election went, man that Hillary Clinton, such a terrible politician, all avoiding responsibility for her failures, attempting to profit off them even!

Can I just say fuck all y'all? I can, it is my blog, so fuck all y'all, the Clinton campaign failed for a multitude of reasons, some of them her fault or hers to control, some not, not least of which is that this country is pretty fucking sexist and would rather elect Donald fucking Trump, a person who can't say Namibia, than a woman running on the most progressive platform in history, yeah she would have basically been Obama part three, but y'all fuckers voted for him twice! I can't go a day without seeing an "I wish Obama was president" meme on Facebook, but naw let's demonize the loser of the last election for writing a book. No other failed presidential candidate has ever written a book after the campaign after all, certainly none of the nearly twenty Republicans just last year or anything, all of whom are infinitely more insane than her and blamed even stupider things for their loss.

What did you want out of her? Do you want her to sit around taking the blame for possibly the most shocking election upset in history for the rest of her life? Because that is what it seems to look like, there surely doesn't seem to be much of an interest from certain elements of the progressive left to blame anything else for it.

Yeah yeah, peak Liberalism or whatever, fuck the hell out of you too, she ain't president, she is never going to be president, whatever errors she made, and there were many, are relevant only in that whoever comes next doesn't repeat them.

Yet we won't leave it alone, we run thinkpieces on just how fucked up she is, talking about why she lost, in her book about why she lost, how dare she not let go?

Here's the reality guys, no matter how much you think her campaign screwed the pooch, the reality of is that America is far worse than we had ever realized, our sexism and racism is inherent in all parts of the political spectrum, the 2016 presidential election proved that, we had a flawed but competent candidate, and we had a sex offending circus clown, but all parties decided to take whatever opportunity they could to decide that the woman was not fit to be president compared to to a Saturday morning cartoon villain, we then spend the next ten months trying to justify that to ourselves, as our president edges ever closer to outright nuclear war we tell ourselves "At least we didn't elect a blatant warhawk like her".

Fuck.