Voters nationwide should brace themselves for the red state blues. Given the PEOTUS Trump’s recent appointments, all of us will soon be subjected to a world of right wing hurt on a national level. The Electoral College, an antiquated system that may have made sense 200+ years ago will elect Trump. In so doing it silences the voices of the majority of actual voters. And so now we are stuck with the consequences. Again. The second time in sixteen years. This is wrong.
Dead wrong.
Thanks in part to voter suppression efforts in some states, dirty, dark money funding candidates and fake news, the GOP maintains the majority in the U.S. Senate and House. So get ready folks, because the do nothing, three day work week deadbeat Congress of the last six years will suddenly become the can do Congress. But not in a good way. Not at all. With Trump in the White House this Congress cannot wait to rob us of our rights, access to affordable healthcare and economic security. Be prepared for crony capitalism on steroids, voter suppression laws, anti-abortion laws, the dismantling of civil rights, voting rights and public school education. Bid adios to Obamacare and welcome to voucher care. Beware the privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Goldman Sachs must be licking its chops. All of that money to gamble away!
I doubt that most of Trump’s voters fully grasp the deal they made with the devil on election day. But they should know by now that actions speak louder than words.
Now elected, the candidate who promised to build a wall along the Southern border, deport undocumented residents, ban Muslims, lock up Hillary Clinton, kill bad trade deals, bring back jobs to the U.S., punish corporations for outsourcing jobs and make America great again, finally affirms his true colors.
For given his Presidential appointments, Donald Trump reveals himself to be a monumental scam artist of the highest order.
I hate to break it to Trump voters, but you have been stiffed. You have been hoodwinked like few voters before you. And you will soon be thrown under the freight train. By the man whom you thought would improve your economic futures and make our country great again.
Trump will not bring back your jobs. Nor will he increase the minimum wage. He’ll block overtime pay. He won’t make our country great again. He will instead wreck it to pieces. You enabled a monster who has been lying to you all along.
Trump’s “saying it like it is” actually translates to Don the Con will implement much of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan’s policies with regard to taking care of needs of the rich and the Party’s donor class.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this horror show before. Trump and his billionaire class will get richer while those poor sorry middle and working class chumps are going to pick up the tab. And, as we’ve heard from previous Republican economic policies, tax cuts for the rich will trickle down to lift all of our boats.
Except it is not going to happen. Never did. Never will. If there are any boats to speak of, all will sink. History proves it.
And we sorry “morons” and “losers,” including all of us who did not vote for Trump, will bear the burden of enriching the rich, as we did during the Reagan and W. years. When some voters thought W. would be a nice guy with whom to have a beer. The same thought Reagan was a kind grandfather.
Right.
But what Trump’s supporters don't understand, at this point, is the fact that their hero put a couple of nails in our coffins just to stick the knife deeper into the backs of his bamboozled suckers and stiffs.
Listen up on what Trump has in store for his stooges. Along with those of us who didn’t vote for Don the Con.
Trump’s promise to “drains the swamp” means he’s filling it up with alligators like these.
Perhaps even more important and more ominous, he is assiduously assembling a team of advisers made up of billionaires and bigots, homophobes and Islamaphobes, climate change deniers and white supremacy believers.
Goldman Sachs is back, too. Remember how G.W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson looted the federal treasury in order to bail out the Wall St. banks in 2007?
Be prepared for more plunder.
How’s Trump’s populist message resonating with you now?
Moving along to Texas where former Governor Rick Perry’s appointees converted the state’s cancer institute into a cash cow for his donor cronies.
Get ready for more of the same on the national level.
In Texas a hard right Republican majority has made it difficult to vote for people of color and the poor. Voter fraud is rampant! Non-citizens are voting in droves! People are voting more than once! Sound familiar?
Voter fraud is a myth of course and is nothing more than an excuse to impose harsh voter ID laws on those who tend to vote for Democrats. The TX Jim Crow Voter Photo ID law, recently ruled unconstitutional by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals this year, disenfranchised over 600,000 voters in 2014.
The rest of the US had better get ready for more Jim Crow. Because Donald Trump appointed an old white Southern male who happens to be nakedly bigoted. In 1986 President Reagan appointed Jeff Sessions to the federal bench. As it turns out Sessions could not be confirmed because of his racist comments and inability to be impartial and fair.
Meet your new Attorney General, folks.
Sessions once described the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” because they, quote, "forced civil rights down the throats of people.” Critics also testified they had once heard Sessions say he admired the Ku Klux Klan.
Sessions will run rough shod over the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and Voting Rights. Mark my words. He and then Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott are birds of a feather that will flock together. Worse, Trump will attempt to nominate a Supreme Court extremist justice who shares Jeff Session’s views on voting and minorities.
Also in Texas the Republican Party passed a severe anti-abortion law that forced the closure of most of the providers, especially in the rural areas. Women, specifically low income women, have to travel to the large cities, hours away such as Houston and Dallas for their reproductive healthcare needs. Needless to say, the Texas Republican Party has been on a relentless witch hunt against Planned Parenthood, though not all of of its clinics perform abortions. But this is really not entirely about abortion. Abortion is an excuse to punish women for exercising their right to choose and for having the power to plan the size of their families.
Remember the old saying that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant? In Texas we are still there, thanks to hard right misogynists. It should also be a given that many of President Pus*y Grabber’s appointees share the same sentiment.
The rest of the US should prepare for an all out assault on Roe v. Wade.
The Texas Republican Party has been on a crusade against public school education for as long as I can remember. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s ongoing mission is to raid public school budgets, thereby giving vouchers to families so their children can attend charter or religious schools. But the vouchers won’t cover the tuition costs and fees of private schools.
Gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts and low voting enables non-compromising extremists to run the state. If most of us voted in Texas the state would likely be purple.
Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos shares much in common with Dan Patrick. The rest of the country’s public schools had better brace themselves for the struggles ahead. Education by vouchers that won’t amount to much. The GOP will take a hatchet to public school funding like it has in Texas.
Let’s discuss healthcare in Texas to give one an idea of what Trump’s nominee, anti-abortion, anti-gay Tom Price, as head of Health and Human Services, has in store for our future healthcare options.
Voting for Republican idiots matters. Big time.
Texas boasts the highest number of uninsured residents in the U.S. When Obamacare became available in 2013 over one million formerly ineligible, uninsurable Texans could finally obtain affordable care.
At the same time, the state refused to expand Medicaid because the Texas Republican leadership is comprised of thinly veiled racists who couldn’t stand the fact that a black guy occupies the White House. Period. It stung the good ol’ white boys that Obama won two elections hands down without having to cheat or steal. He swept the Electoral College and the popular votes. Twice. But the President’s success and his likable approval ratings made the Texas GOP nastier, more bullheaded and vicious. It continues to punish the poor and sickly. Fine Christian men and women that all GOP leaders profess to be.
This and the GOP leadership has nothing but contempt for the poor, those shiftless lazy slackers who purposely made their beds with the poverty devil.
And so these stubborn, nasty, deplorable ideologues made up excuses to refuse to expand Medicaid. Medicaid is broken! Medicaid is a fool’s errand, according to Rick Perry, who was the biggest fool of them all, among the Republican Presidential candidates in 2012.
Meanwhile Judges for the state’s the largest counties, healthcare officials and members of various academic medical institutions implored the Texas Republican leadership to accept federally expanded Medicaid. To no avail. Let ‘em die.
Get ready for more of the same nationwide. For Trump appointed a one man death panel for the Affordable Health Care Act.
Now that Trump appointed Tom Price, another old Southern white boy, as the head of Human and Health Services, good luck with that Obamacare plan one could finally afford. Good luck with ongoing treatments and drug therapies that had been impossible in the past. We’ll likely to revert to the Republican Party’s original health care plan. Don’t get sick. If you do get sick die quickly. Or go bankrupt.
Price is an orthopedic surgeon who doesn’t like health care plans that have rules and require him to treat patients with little means. Some physicians in Houston no longer accept insurance plans or Medicare because both cramp their bottom lines. These are doctors who prefer to serve the rich, only. Or they make their patients battle the insurance companies.
Rep. Tom Price is likely to be announced as the Trump administration’s new secretary of health and human services, according to a report by The Washington Post on Tuesday. Price currently chairs the House Budget Committee and has been a leading Republican in the campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. He has also advocated converting Medicaid into block grants to states and requiring “able-bodied” applicants to meet work requirements before receiving health care benefits. He has advocated that Medicare become a “defined contribution” instead of a “defined benefit” — meaning the government can replace the program with a mix of private insurance and vouchers.
Price has the same level of compassion as the Texas GOP mentioned above.
Price’s other distinctions as a congressman have included his opposition to gay marriage on the grounds that “the tried and true traditions in history that made us great are preserved and have survived because they are effective.”
He opposed mandatory contraception coverage for businesses that cite religious objections. In 2012, he erroneously claimed that there was “not one” woman in the country who can’t afford birth control.
Perhaps Price’s most famous (some might say infamous) moment occurred in 2010, when he repeatedly interrupted Rep. Lois Capps, D-California, as she tried to advocate in favor of Obamacare by shouting out “I object!” He was eventually ruled out of order and required to cease his disruptive behavior.
Price will go after Medicare too.
On Nov. 17, Talking Points Memo asked Price about his timeline for phasing out Medicare and Price replied that he did not believe it would be among the Trump administration’s initial legislative agenda.
“I think that is probably in the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY ’18 budget resolution in the first 6-8 months,” Price said to Talking Points Memo.
President Bait and Switch fooled a lot of people. And all of us will pay the price. Unfortunately a minority of individual voters fell for the biggest con artist scam of the 21s century.
Oh and the above is just the tip of the iceberg. We will also have to contend with Trump’s foreclosure king. Hang on to your homes!
(Issues with block quote below).
“During his tenure at OneWest, the bank was responsible for attempting to remove families from their homes against the families’ wills.
A New York judge erased $525,000 in mortgage debt owed by a Long Island couple to OneWest Bank in 2009 because the institution was harassing them. Suffolk County Judge Jeffrey Spinner blasted the bank’s “harsh, repugnant and repulsive” acts as they attempted to toss the family out on the street around Thanksgiving.
Spinner wrote that the bank refused to work out a deal with the couple to help make mortgage payments they owed and called the bank’s conduct “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious, and opprobrious,” according to a report by the New York Post.”
It gets worse.
“Around the same time, Mnuchin’s bank was hounding an 89-year-old widow, attempting to foreclose on her home in California. Irene Jones, the woman in question, is reported to have said in court that the stress of repeated foreclosure threats from OneWest Bank and its predecessor IndyMac Bank made her husband depressed and contributed to his death.
That same year, the bank changed the locks on Minnesota woman Leslie Park’s home. She discovered that she had been locked out when she returned home in a blizzard. The bank later acknowledged that the incident was a mistake.”
Steven Mnuchin sounds like a really nice guy. He is a perfect addition to team Trump, a team that will never have legitimacy for most of us.
Voters in blue and purple states won’t know what hit them until they lay splatted under the train.
Trump will never be my President. For twice in sixteen years the voices of the majority of U.S. voters have been silenced, thanks to a system that may have made sense 200+ years ago. But as of now the Electoral College is robbing the majority of our voices. Hillary Clinton earned 2.5 million more votes than Trump. This is not chump change. But she is not our POTUS. This is obscene. And this is why I refuse to sit down, shut up and get over it.
Please join me. The stakes have never been higher.
