June 26, 2017: Healthcare Rhetoric Heats Up | CNN Is Fake News | Bernie Double Standard
1. Forget the Medicaid Cuts. Be Nicer, Democrats.
Senate leaders finally unveiled their draft of the bill that would repeal Obamacare but it’s a bill that has been in trouble from the start. Just three Republican no votes would sink it, and it will be hard to make both conservative opponents and liberal opponents happy.
Still, the alt-Right press didn’t blame conservatives for this funky situation. RedState was feeling huffy about how Democrats have attacked the bill, claiming that they are violating their own promise of a truce on hate speech after the shooting of the GOP congressman Steve Scalise.
Any pretense of toning down the rhetoric ended on Thursday as the Senate GOP release their version of a repeal/replace Obamacare bill. Within minutes of the bill being posted online the attacks began. Many of them were hyperbolic charges that the Republican bill was going to murder people:
Connecticut’s stolen valor senator Richard Blumenthal tweeted,“Senate Republicans want to gut Medicaid – throwing children and families who rely on it to the wolves” and “The Republicans’ health care plan will literally cost American lives.”........
Senator Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA) claimed that the GOP were liars who are trying to fool women. She tweeted,“Women aren’t fools. We know the difference between reality & lies. That’s why we’re fighting back to stop the @SenateGOP healthcare bill.”
If the Red Media had any advice at all, it was to counsel senators to hold their noses and pass it in some form anyway. Anything, they say, is better than Obamacare. The Federalist typified this thinking in this article:
Listen, I wish [Senator] Mike Lee were writing a market-based Obamacare repeal bill and that we had a president who was interested in reforming welfare, but at some point conservatives are going to have to take a page from Democrats and occasionally embrace incrementalism. Idealism is empowering and necessary. Yet pragmatism can’t always be treated as a transgression. You’re going to see the bill change — provisions in the bill might need to be altered once we get a Congressional Budget Office score and the parliamentarian vets it — but you’re not going to see a market-based iteration of reform. It’s going to have to be achieved piecemeal.
What We’re Noticing:
The biggest political danger of the GOP repeal bill is, of course, that it will touch a third rail of politics: cutting Medicaid. The impact of such a cut could be dire, but we found surprisingly little coverage in the conservative media on this topic, which is the focus of mainstream and progressive media.
2. CNN Is Fake News?
After baselessly claiming for months that CNN is fake news, the conservatives won a legitimate point this weekend against the cable news giant. The network published an online story on Thursday claiming that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into a "$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump's transition team four days before Trump's inauguration."
That story was deleted Friday, with an apology note saying it wasn’t up to the network’s editorial standards -- but not before it was called out in alt-right Breitbart. According to BuzzFeed, the mistake has caused the network to impose “strict new publishing restrictions for online articles.”
A gleeful Breitbart was taking all the credit. Its headline read: “Leaked CNN Memo: Top Execs to Review All Russia Stories After Very Fake News Retraction.”
3. Kid Gloves for Bernie
Last week, the Mainstream Media reported that Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane, were under investigation for bank fraud. There are allegations that Sanders pressured a bank to approve a loan to Burlington College in Vermont when his wife Jane was president. Jane is also apparently accused of lying on the loan application about the colleges financial credentials. But, points out The Daily Caller, Sanders was not even asked about it on “Meet the Press” yesterday.
Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” had seven minutes on Sunday to grill Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders about being the subject of an FBI investigation but let Sanders off the hook entirely.
Todd asked Sanders about his rhetoric, about the Republican health care bill and about the struggling Democratic party, but he did not ask the socialist senator once about the investigation into himself and his wife.
4. Hollywood Should Make Depp Walk the Plank
While out of the country, the actor Johnny Depp made a joke about assassinating Donald Trump only a week after the shooting of Steve Scalise. The White House demanded that not only should the actor apologize (which he did) but that other celebrities should condemn him. Meanwhile, LifeZette saw a moment to vent on celebrity entitlement.
Somehow, when it comes to acting, Depp can be thoughtful, skilled and empathetic enough to understand just about any character — but in real life he doesn't like Donald Trump. So, in his mind, that means the man should be killed.
And by the way, what exactly has the president done to warrant such a detestable comment or belief? Celebrities keep whining and moaning about the death of democracy, but Trump is a democratically elected leader, and no rights of any group have been stripped away. He's also been in office for oh, about six months.
Depp's words are despicable, especially given that he headlines Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, a collection of films that appeal greatly to kids. His name means something to this segment of our population — and they could be more aware of him as an actor and see this and think it is the sort of discourse that is OK.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, many on the Right demanded that Disney sever ties with Depp using the hashtag #FireDepp. Here are some examples:
Chad Kubis @ChadKubisNC wrote:
So Disney decides to cut Tim Allen's contract because of his anti-pc rants but keep Johnny Depp who's called for the assassination of POTUS
Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec added:
The silence of @Disney on domestic abuser Johnny Depp is deafening
bout the investigation into himself and his wife.
5. The Kennedy Watch
Lots of rumors that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, 80, will announce he is stepping down. That would give Trump a second Supreme Court Justice to name -- a particularly crucial appointment that could eliminate what is often a swing vote on the court. The Washington Examiner had a typical piece:
“Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and his clerks moved up a long-planned reunion event for his staffers by a year, sparking rumors that the 30-year veteran of the high court was contemplating retirement. Should Kennedy step down, it would remove one of the Supreme Court's key swing votes and give President Trump the opportunity to give it a durable conservative majority.”