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From The Reporter’s Notebook
TPM’s Allegra Kirkland wrote about an Anchorage lawmaker accusing a local Muslim man of being affiliated with a terrorist organization because of his lifelong membership in Muslims of America, a group that establishes religiously-minded rural communities throughout the U.S. Similar smears against the group prompted a former Tennessee congressional candidate to threaten to set fire to a Muslims of America settlement in upstate New York last year.
Agree or Disagree?
Josh Marshall: “As long as the President is making deals or allowing others to make them on his behalf, he has an open channel to accept payoffs from everyone. Domestic ones are just corrupt. Foreign ones may violate the constitution. They’re all the big money. Even for Trump. The register is open for payoffs from everyone. Everyone. It seems like he wants to get the payoffs. If he doesn’t the only way he can prevent it is stopping the deal making, which obviously means divesting himself of the companies. I think that is the only way for him to stop the payoffs. The President shouldn’t be taking personal payoffs from people who want to buy a piece of the presidency. It’s bad enough we let something like that happen with campaign contributions. But we’ve never allowed Presidents to pocket the money.”
Say What?!
“But he got up there and, for whatever reason, lied his ass off.”
– Carrier’s union president accused Donald Trump of significantly inflating the number of jobs he convinced the company to keep in Indiana.
BUZZING: Today in the Hive
From a TPM Prime member: “I think that there is a much larger iceberg on the horizon that is being missed. You hear rumblings about insurers and hospital systems being devastated with the repeal of the ACA already. I believe we will be facing a complete collapse in the health insurance market to the point that all insurers will simply leave that market altogether. This will also kill off access to medical services in rural markets and will likely cause most rural hospitals to have to close. Everyone works on the assumption that insurers will sell health insurance, what if that assumption is completely wrong and they just give up altogether. What if they even give up on the employer insurance market as well. Before the ACA many companies were already dealing with huge increases in premiums for their employees and a hell of a lot of corporations have reacted to those skyrocketing premiums by significantly reducing the labor force in their 50’s and 60’s as those are the employee base that is driving those costs up. The ACA at least forces a customer base into the system, get rid of it and the entire customer base could simply disappear and make it impossible for insurers to continue to sell in a market where the only people who want insurance are those that are sick….”
Related: Insurer Trade Group Lists Its Demands Of Republicans In Obamacare Repeal Fight
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What We’re Reading
Theater Refuses To Be A Safe Space For Donald Trump (BuzzFeed)
Seven Not-So-Serious Suggestions For The Trumps’ ‘First Pet’ (Mashable)
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