Gary Cohn Does Not Live in the Same World I Live In



Um, who?  Wha?



Holy crap are we screwed.


Ethics, what ethics?

McConnell shows off prized accomplishment to Kentucky: Justice Neil Gorsuch





So CHIP Program Will Expire








Camerota: Go ahead, mayor.





Funny story he told on Howard Stern:






Common Sense and Conventional Wisdom Never Seem to Stop the Stupid






The Germans were reading other books.



If You Support Roy Moore You Support a Lawless Theocrat Whack Job



As Charlie Pierce says:


NY Times lays out Moore’s greatest hits of crazy:




“America the Beautiful, or so you used to be,


Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand,


Your children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine,

Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain.

From sea to shining sea this Nation has turned away,



The Assault on Healthcare is Not Really Over, This Part Nobody is Talking About

The CHIP program will end on September 30.  That program provides health insurance for 9 million kids.

About 9 million children across the country get coverage through CHIP, and it costs about $14 billion a year (the feds pick up about three-quarters of that bill). It is a smaller program than Medicaid and Medicare, but it is still a big reason why America has nearly eliminated uninsurance among kids.

That’s besides the Trump administration’s continued undermining of Obamacare.  If they can’t throw people off their healthcare coverage by legislation they can still do everything they can to make sure the markets can’t work and nobody knows to sign up for them.  Tom Price needs to save healthcare money for his private flights.

Republicans who pretend to care said all along that a deal would get made and there was plenty of time.  But then Graham-Cassidy came along, so here we are on September 27 and there are 3 days left.

My optimistic side says 50/50 a deal does get done because when people’s attention does get turned to 9 million kids losing healthcare coverage it’s going to go badly for them.




Virginia to Honor Nat Turner a Full 360 From the Confederate Statues

Interesting turn going on in Virginia as noted by Josh Marshall (Shock and Awe: Nat Turner and the Old Dominion).  As we all know there’s a lot of statues honoring the insurgents that fought against our flag for the continuation of slavery.  To the extent we honor the fighters for civil rights, in this country, they’re almost exclusively the non-violent activists like Rosa Parks and MLK. A statue “honoring” the leader of a very bloody slave rebellion would be new.

A state commission in Virginia is planning an anti-slavery monument which will be built in downtown Richmond, specifically on Brown’s Island. So far, nothing terribly remarkable. But one of the 10 figures to be honored in the monument is Nat Turner, who led the largest and deadliest slave rebellion in United States’ history in 1831….


Indeed.  Is a statue by itself a de facto honoring of the person depicted or merely a rendering of history like a diorama in a museum?  That question holds for those of the insurgents as well?  What’s the context of the work?

Whether Turner is even a positive figure in history is debatable, but that’s the point – anything that gets people thinking and talking and learning about that period and our history of race relations is absolutely positive.

That is until the Nazis riot in protest and someone gets killed.

Interior Secretary Says One Third of His Staff Aren’t Loyal to Trump

If this were a normal democracy I’d say it was the other two thirds that are the problem, bub.  But normal is out floating in the middle of the ocean, like Puerto Rico*.

In a speech to the oil industry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke claimed that nearly a third of his staff is disloyal to President Trump, saying that workers in Washington are reluctant to relax regulations to permit increased mining for coal and drilling for natural gas and oil on public land.

Yeah, because they’re humans with judgment who know that’s a horrible, stupid and godawful thing.  Our conservative crop is pretty twisted up these days.  They want to treat the national parks like they took a knee for the National Anthem or something.

*Trump said today it was hard to get help to Puerto Rico because it’s an island.  But he’s doing a great job helping them.

“We’ve gotten A-pluses on Texas and in Florida, and we will also on Puerto Rico,” Trump told reporters in Washington. “The difference is this is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean. It’s a big ocean, it’s a very big ocean. And we’re doing a really good job.”

You know damn well he has no clue where it is on a map. He’s acting like it’s friggin’ Fiji or something.