If you are calling your Senators to vote no on the Grassidy health bill, remind them to work on this:
WaPo:
‘If anyone can hear us … help.’ Puerto Rico’s mayors describe widespread devastation from Hurricane Maria
A janitor stopped [San Juan mayor] Cruz with a request on Friday: “Tell the world we’re here,” he said, Cruz recounted. “Tell everyone we’re fighting. Tell everyone that can listen that we are going to make it.”
With her voice faltering, Cruz echoed that cry: “If anyone can hear us . . . help.”
Here’s a round-up of some of the protests, including the Steelers staying in the locker room and some Dolphins wearing “black T-shirts supporting free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick during pregame warm-ups”.
WaPo:
Players, owners unite as Trump demands NFL ‘fire or suspend’ players or risk fan boycott
Ravens Coach John Harbaugh joined his players, locking arms, and Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, a Pakistani American billionaire and businessman, joined his players before the game's kickoff at 9:30 a.m. in London's Wembley Stadium. Ravens Hall of Famer Ray Lewis also took a knee during the anthem.
WaPo:
GOP health bill in major peril as resistance hardens among key senators
The floundering Republican attempt to undo the Affordable Care Act met hardening resistance from key GOP senators Sunday that left it on the verge of collapsing, even as advocates vowed to keep pushing for a vote this week.
With Senate GOP leaders just one “no” vote away from defeat, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a TV interview that it was “very difficult” to envision voting for the bill written by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said he and a colleague were not ready to back the measure. And Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has come out against it, showed no signs of backing down in his own TV appearance.
As Graham and Cassidy pledged to keep trying to pass their bill, the White House and the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave differing accounts of the path ahead. White House legislative affairs director Marc Short predicted a Wednesday vote while a McConnell spokesman declined to publicly embrace that timeline.
They don’t have the votes. Rand Paul and John McCain are hard ‘no’s, Collins just abut no. Murkowski is undecided, and there are possibly others not yet heard from.
Of course, no one believes Ted Cruz.
WaPo:
Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in.
Review of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" by Bandy X. Lee (ed.), "Twilight of American Sanity" by Allen Frances, and "Fantasyland" by Kurt Andersen.
Talk about pushing the Overton window.
Washington Examiner:
New polls send bad news to Trump, GOP
A pair of new polls brought bad news for both President Trump and his party early Sunday morning.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Trump's approval rating sitting at 39 percent, the lowest approval rating for a president after eight months in office in 70 years. A CNN poll showed just 29 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, the lowest since CNN began asking the question in polls in 1992.
I’m over it.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Why Cede the Flag to Trump?
Colin Kaepernick and other athletes have a better claim on the United States’s symbols and their meaning.
In the Civil War anthem, “Marching Through Georgia,” the stars and stripes is described as “the flag that makes you free”—but for most of the previous three-quarters of a century, it was anything but. It was the flag that flew over slave ships until 1808, the flag under which federal marshals enforced this country’s fugitive slave acts before the Civil War. Only the Civil War changed that flag’s character. Indeed, as Adam Goodheart observes in his remarkable history, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, it was not until the Civil War that the habit spread of flying the flag over private as well as Federal buildings. It exacted hideous quantities of blood, from black and white soldiers alike, to wash that flag clean of its former meanings.
Maybe the washing has never been completed, and possibly it never will be. But that’s no reason to resign the flag and the anthem to the president. Colin Kaepernick has better right to that flag and anthem than Donald Trump. Why concede that right? Assert it.
Don’t take the knee. Stand for the flag; hand on heart for the anthem—and then put your signature to the demand that this least American of administrations be investigated down to its bottomest murk and filth.
Not an endorsement. But we are not afraid of a different POV.
Jack Shafer/Politico:
Sean Spicer Is Washington’s First Pariah
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer has achieved the impossible.
Washington routinely forgives its philanderers, drug addicts and alcoholics, embezzlers, perjurers, bribers and bribees, liars, burglars and tax evaders, granting them the redemption of another term in office or a job in a lobbying shop or think tank after their scandal passes. It even absolved a drunk who killed a young lady, giving him a prince’s funeral when he died. The writer who said that there are no second acts in American life never lived here.
But that iron law hasn’t helped Spicer. Since leaving the White House this summer, he has gained admittance to a circle of one: He has become a Washington pariah. Nobody wants to be anywhere near him, but everyone wants to talk smack about him. He’s not just a punchline. He’s become a national laughing stock ever since his cameo on the Emmy Awards this week, where he attempted a joke about his most famous White House lie.
Awww. OK, I’m over that, too.
This is good:
Axios:
Here's the new Graham-Cassidy bill
What's different: According to Graham and Cassidy's analysis, the revised bill would direct more money to Alaska, Arizona, Kentucky and Maine, compared with earlier versions. But it would still reduce overall federal funding to those states — whose Republican senators are, for now, opposed to the bill or undecided.
- Although the state-by-state numbers being circulated show these states faring well, the Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt called them "pretty misleading," as they don't take into account the per-person cap on federal Medicaid funding. They also add state savings to the block grants under the bill, but don't include them in the current law baseline, meaning the comparison isn't apples to apples.
...
- States only have to describe their plans; they don't have to submit waivers of insurance rules.
- "If there was any question about Graham-Cassidy's removal of federal protections for pre-existing conditions, this new draft is quite clear," Levitt tweeted.