LA Times - "So you think Obamacare is a disaster? Here's how California is proving you wrong"

It is not often reported in the news, but in those States that have actually attempted to implement the ACA, rather than trying to sabotage, it actually works quite well. The big key is the choice by California state officials who, unlike many states, used the health law to expand the Medicaid safety net and build a marketplace that put stringent requirements on insurance companies. Many other states simply refused to expand Medicaid despite the federal incentives for doing so.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obamacare-california-model-20161007-snap-story.html

Even as turmoil in insurance markets nationwide fuels renewed election-year attacks on the Affordable Care Act, California is emerging as a clear illustration of what the law can achieve.

The state has recorded some of the nation’s most dramatic gains in health coverage since 2013 while building a competitive insurance marketplace that offers consumers enhanced protections from high medical bills.

Californians, unlike people in many states, have many insurance choices. That means that even with rising premiums, the vast majority of consumers should be able to find a plan that costs them, at most, 5% more than they are paying this year.

And all health plans being sold in the state will cap how much patients must pay for prescriptions every month and for many doctor visits.

New Yorker - "TRUMP AND THE TRUTH: CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL"

While Trump's acts and words as a sexual predator dominate the headlines, lets not forget that he is a neanderthal in other ways such as wholesale denial of the facts of climate change.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-climate-change-denial

Over the past four years, Donald Trump has, at different times, declared global warming a “canard,” “nonexistent,” a “make-believe problem,” a “big scam,” and “a very, very expensive form of tax.” During the first Presidential debate, late last month, Hillary Clinton pointedly accused him of believing that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Trump denied it. “I did not—I do not say that,” he scoffed. But a 2012 tweet, written by Trump less than a week after Hurricane Sandy battered New York and New Jersey, was still up: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump’s “Chinese hoax” theory had been in the news before. In January, Bernie Sanders mentioned it during a Democratic primary debate. The following morning, the hosts of the Fox News program “Fox & Friends” played the clip for Trump, prompting him to respond. “Obviously, I joke,” he said, before adding, seriously, “This is done for the benefit of China because China does not do anything to help climate change.” His message, however scrambled, appeared to be that if China was not going to let “weather changes” slow down its industrial growth, then America shouldn’t, either.

Then, in September, President Obama and the Chinese President Xi Jinping formally ratified the international climate-change pact reached last December, in Paris. The agreement, signed by nearly two hundred nations, came after two decades of attempts to establish an international accord. It pledges to keep the global temperature increase to “well below 2°C,” or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and “to pursue efforts to limit” the increase to “1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” If and exactly how China and the U.S., which together account for forty per cent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, will follow through on their commitments remains to be seen—the agreement is not legally binding. Nonetheless, the U.S. and China’s ratification of the agreement was widely celebrated as a breakthrough in the international effort to slow global warming. Trump, for his part, called the Paris climate talks “ridiculous” while they were happening, and has pledged to “cancel” the agreement if elected President. According to a Sierra Club report, if elected, Trump would be the only world leader who denies that man-made climate change is occurring.

Trump’s energy plan, which he laid out in a speech in May, would essentially reverse every step Obama has made toward reducing carbon emissions and meeting the goals established in Paris. (This, like much of Trump’s climate talk, is perfectly aligned with the Republican Party’s platform.) Trump wants to “rescind” the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which would impose new, more stringent regulations on power plants, especially coal-burning plants. (The plan is currently tied up in federal court.) Trump would also open much more land to fossil-fuel exploration and drilling, immediately approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and “stop all payment of U.S. tax dollars to global-warming programs.”

Politico - How Hostile Poll-Watchers Could Hand Pennsylvania to Trump

Article describes Trump's plan to flood PA with poll watchers to aggressively challenge voters in order to shut down voting in Democratic areas.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/2016-election-pennsylvania-polls-voters-trump-clinton-214297

In 2004, hundreds of University of Pittsburgh students waited for hours to vote in the presidential election. The local Democratic Party, alarmed at the bottleneck, handed out pizza and water to encourage the students to stay. Pittsburgh Steelers Hall-of-Famer Franco Harris worked the line, armed with a giant bag of Dunkin Donuts, and Liz Berlin of the Pittsburgh band Rusted Root performed on guitar.

The stalled line wasn’t because of the high turnout. It was what was happening at the check-in desk.

The attorneys for the Republican Party were challenging the credentials of pretty much every young voter who showed up,” recalls Pat Clark, a Pittsburgh activist and registered Democrat who was working for an election-protection group that day.

The GOP attorneys were acting as poll watchers. A common practice in many states, partisan poll watching helps parties get out the vote and keep an eye out for irregularities. But in Pennsylvania, laws governing how observers can challenge voters are unusually broad, and that makes them susceptible to abuse.

WaPo: By 2025, most of Donald Trump’s tax cuts would go to the wealthiest 1% of Americans

I actually wish there was a little more focus on Trump's proposed tax giveaways, rather than his sexual assault fantasies.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/analysis-by-2025-most-of-donald-trump%E2%80%99s-tax-cuts-would-go-to-the-wealthiest-1percent-of-americans/ar-BBxiLQZ

Donald Trump has called for historic tax relief for the rich, which would likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. Hillary Clinton would ask the wealthy to pay much more than they do now, and she would use the money mostly to lessen the burden on middle-class families with small children.

A pair of new analyses published Tuesday afternoon by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center emphasize the extreme contrasts between the two candidates when it comes to taxes. In a campaign that has been defined by conspiracy theories, racial innuendos and sex scandals from decades past, the new data is a reminder that the election puts serious money at stake for many American households.

Where Clinton would increase taxes on corporations and investors, Trump would drastically reduce them. He has called for eliminating the estate tax, which Clinton hopes to increase. The Democratic presidential nominee would expand the credit for children, while her Republican rival would eliminate an important tax advantage for families.

"They really couldn’t be more different," Leonard Burman, the director of the center, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday. "In almost every meaningful respect, these plans are mirror images."

Ezra Klein - Donald Trump confirmed our worst fears about the kind of president he would be

At Sunday’s debate, Donald Trump revealed that he is not running to be America’s president so much as its dictator.

The debate’s most unnerving moment came early. “If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there's never been so many lies, so much deception,” Trump told Hillary Clinton.

“It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country,” Clinton shot back.

Trump, determined as always to make subtext into text, left no room for confusion. “Because you’d be in jail,” he said.

Vox - Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy

I know that there is going to be a lot of focus on sex scandals, but I think Trump's threat to imprison Hillary is far worse. indeed, I think it just builds on themes that the GOP itself has created. Once again, Trump is the GOP's frankenstein monster.

http://www.vox.com/2016/10/9/13222302/donald-trump-jail-hillary-clinton-second-debate

There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.

The exchange happened during a discussion of the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Trump began by decrying Clinton’s conduct — which, according to the FBI, was quite bad but not illegal. He then proposed appointing a special prosecutor to investigate her, and warned Clinton that, if he were president now, “you’d be in jail”:

TRUMP: I'll tell you what. I didn't think I'd say this, and I'm going to say it, and hate to say it: If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there's never been so many lies, so much deception … A very expensive process, so we're going to get a special prosecutor because people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you've done. And it's a disgrace, and honestly, you ought to be ashamed.

CLINTON: Let me just talk about emails, because everything he just said is absolutely false. But I'm not surprised … It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country.

DT: Because you'd be in jail.

New Yorker - "Trump and the Trurth: The 'Rigged' Election" - Spoiler, the GOP Is Rigging It!

Here is the great irony that the Republicans long standing efforts to pain elections as being rigged against them with Donald Trump being the chief conspirator in chief has pretty much painted the GOP in a corner. All the talk from Republicans calling on Trump to resign is just to give establishment Republicans plausible deniability. Otherwise, if the GOP elites are successful in pulling of their coup d'etat, doesn't this prove that Trump was right all along about a rigged election, except that it was not the Democrats who rigged it, but Trump's fellow Republicans. Worse, Pence is the one who was the chief backstabber by refusing to lift a finger to defend Donald Trump during the VP debate, then working with other Republicans to set himself up to step in at the earliest opportunity.

Put another way, the Republicans engaging in a backroom deal to replace Donald Trump would simply confirm the Republican base's wildest accusations about the system being rigged against their popular choice.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-the-rigged-election

The election is going to be rigged—I’m going to be honest,” Donald Trump said to a rowdy crowd in August, at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe,” Trump told an interviewer later. A few days afterward, in Pennsylvania, where Trump was then lagging by nine points in the polls, he warned supporters that “the only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” That week, a new page appeared on his campaign Web site, inviting concerned citizens to volunteer to be “Trump Election Observers” so that they could “help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”

At the first Presidential debate, Trump and Hillary Clinton were asked whether they would accept the ultimate outcome of the election. Trump evaded the question at first, before winkingly conceding that he would. But after the debate he went right back to his routine—more talk of rigging. Those polls that said Clinton had won the debate? They were skewed against him, he said, just like Google was, with its suspiciously pro-Clinton search results. At campaign stops this week, Trump reiterated his claims that Clinton was out to steal the vote. He even told the Times that he was reconsidering whether he’d accept a Clinton victory at all.

As my colleague Amy Davidson has discussed, Republicans have spent years, beginning well before Trump’s campaign, warning voters that devious people were trying to cast illegitimate ballots to swing elections. They gave the problem a tidy, intuitive-sounding name: voter fraud. But, in an especially toxic political gambit, Trump has taken this concept to the extreme: trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the Presidency.

* * *
Republicans themselves have stoked this paranoia. Over the past decade, Republican officeholders in dozens of states have used the threat of voters casting multiple or illegitimate ballots to justify imposing onerous identification requirements at the voting booth, measures that have often gone hand in hand with efforts to shorten early-voting periods before Election Day. An estimated eleven per cent of eligible voters, more than twenty million people, do not have any form of government-issued photo I.D., and minority and lower-income citizens, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, are disproportionately represented in that group. (As are college-age voters and the elderly.) A number of Republican Party officials from across the country have actually admitted to manipulating the threat of voter fraud to their advantage.

Imagine if Kaine and Pence Were Switched...

...and Kaine spent the entire debate denying easily verifiable things that Hillary said, refusing to lift a finger to defend Hillary, and started articulating positions that are completely at odds with Hillary's stated views. In so doing, the media take away is that Kaine is positioning himself for a 2020 run and Democrats wish that Kaine not Hillary were the candidate? Finally, what if Kaine's best attribute was to demonstrate by his conduct that he was cool and measured compared to Hillary who was tweeting insults and rants as the debate unfolded?

Would you consider that a win or a betrayal?

Cliff Notes: Glad I Watched The Debate. Tempted To Blow It Off...

...but given the media's spin, it is good to have watched the whole thing. In a nut shell, who won the debate depends on what do you think the objectives of the VP debate are. Are you selling the top of the ticket or are you selling yourself at the risk of distancing yourself from your own candidate?

Pence: Cool and calm. Did not lift a finger to defend Trump. Did not articulate any actual Trump policies. Just offered generalized statements about low taxes and less regulation and strength. Attacked Hillary, but did not really follow through on attacks. Also, made a lot of false denials that will be easily fact checked where I was saying, "Now that is just bullshit, Trump did say that." Also, some of Pence's statements on the importance of allies really departs from Trump's isolationist/anti-alliance/anti-trade views.

Kaine: Very aggressive in both attacking Trump AND defending Clinton. Was overeager at times in terms of interrupting and speaking out of turn. Very detailed and specific, but he simply does not have Pence's RW talk show host voice. Still, Kaine came off as very earnest and sincere with a bit of a voice crack, but maybe a bit overzealous.

Overall: Kaine was a far better attack dog and defender of his nominee. Pence was far better in defending the Pence brand while hanging Trump himself out to dry. So, from a personal popularity/maintain your Presidential aspirations point of view, Pence probably came out better. But, if the job is attack the other party's nominee and defend your own nominee, then Kaine easily came out better.

NYT (1989) - Republicans Settle Suit Over Guards at Polls

Donald Trump is just taking a page out of the GOP voter intimidation notebook.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/25/us/republicans-settle-suit-over-guards-at-polls.html

SANTA ANA, Calif., Dec. 24— The Orange County Republican Party, a Republican legislator and his campaign workers have agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing them of hiring uniformed guards to intimidate Hispanic voters.

* * *

State and Federal agencies are still investigating the posting of guards in a 1988 election at 20 polling places in areas of Santa Ana where Hispanic voters were predominant. Assemblyman Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, the Republican incumbent, defeated his Democratic challenger, Christian (Rick) Thierbach, by 843 votes.

The guards carried signs in English and Spanish warning that non-citizens cannot legally vote.

Hispanic community leaders said the posting of the guards amounted to racially motivated intimidation. Republican Party officials said the guards were there only to monitor the voting.