I noted yesterday that Paul Ryan has signaled he plans to phase out Medicare next year and replace it with private health care insurance for which the federal government will provide seniors vouchers. There are numerous dimensions to this story. And we’re working with our team this morning to prep for covering it. But one key part of the equation we need your help with. DC journalists tend to think this kind of story evolves in DC. And there’s plenty to follow in Washington. But the real action happens in the states and congressional districts where members of Congress have to sell getting rid of Medicare to their constituents. And that is going to come out in local media, constituent letters, public appearances and so forth. So let us know what you are seeing where you live. In the local paper, on TV, something you hear directly from a representative or senator. Find out where your representative or senator stands on this issue. We want to know. How to contact us? Easy. There’s an email link right below the logo up at the upper left of every page.
If you missed it over the weekend, TPM turned 16 over the weekend. Here are a few details about that and our pledge to going forward during this uncertain period.
With all the other things we’ve discussed so far today, I wanted to return to one critical one. It’s not about mights or maybes or fears of what’s to come. It’s about what’s coming just after President-Elect Trump’s inauguration. Paul Ryan has been pushing to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for several years. But now it’s real with unified Republican government. He just said he will try to rush it through early next year while repealing Obamacare.
Below is a transcript of what Ryan said on Fox’s Special Report, along with a flat out false statement suggesting that Obamacare has weakened Medicare’s finances.
Today TPM turns 16.
These are not at all the circumstances in which I expected to mark this day. A week ago I expected a profoundly different result. But here we are. And here we’ve been.
I wrote the first post for TPM in the early evening of November 13th, 2000. It was about the unfolding Florida recount and George Bush’s decision to hire Ted Olson as his top recount lawyer. Olson had just come off years as a key player on something called the ‘Arkansas Project’, pouring money into digging up dirt or anything that might pass as dirt on Bill Clinton in his home state. Since then Olson lost his wife on 9/11 and went on be one of the two lawyers who argued for the decision which eventually made marriage equality the law of the land. Things change. About twenty minutes later I wrote a second post. And about an hour after that I wrote a third one.
Kellyane Conway warns Harry Reid his comments on President-Elect Trump are “beyond the pale” and warns him to “careful” in the “legal sense.”
A simple point: Apart from all the other things people are rightly worried about, the Trump administration is going to be mind-bogglingly, often cartoonishly and comically corrupt.
All administration’s have venal corruption. A US presidential administration is large enough and has sufficient power that it is simply a matter of human nature. Indeed, even administrations run by presidents who are not themselves corrupt are often filled with corruption. Ulysses Grant and Harry Truman are good historical examples. But the break with the immediate past is going to be unusually sharp because the out-going Obama administration has been historically clean. We’ve been living in the Obama era for long enough that this historically anomalous record has started to seem like the norm. But it’s not. This is something we need to recognize both to give credit where it is due and remind ourselves that it is not the historical norm.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer …
Villanova University’s Department of Public Safety is investigating a reported incident in which a black female student was assaulted by white males as they ran toward her yelling, “Trump, Trump, Trump!”
TPM Reader ER just flagged this to me. From The New York Times …
Chants of “lock her up” became a frequent rallying cry at Trump campaign events, and Mr. Trump told Mrs. Clinton at the second presidential debate that if elected, he would instruct his attorney general “to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”
A TPM Reader who is a member of the Democratic National Committee chimes in on who leads next …
I am a DNC Member from [REDACTED] and I will be voting on the next DNC Chair. I am responding to your recent post suggesting that Keith Ellison is a “done deal” as the next DNC Chair. I believe that this is a much more difficult choice than what you suggest.
Give this a read …
My good friend and award-winning journalist, Hannah Allam received this message from a… https://t.co/rncN5lwkSD pic.twitter.com/Tqh0x2IskQ
— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) November 12, 2016