Crude Comedians of 'the Resistance'

Brent Bozell

TV comedy cannot be too harsh when directed at President Donald Trump. There are no limits, and CBS "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert has proven it. Under the rubric of corporate loyalty after the president cut an interview short with CBS "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson and mocked his show as "Deface the Nation," Colbert called the president a "prick-tator," and then suggested the only thing the president's mouth is good for is being a holster for the sexual organ of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This was on national television, and his audience roared -- and gasped.

The notion of defending Dickerson and CBS as victims of Trump is a ruse. The network was given 33 minutes with the president on "Face the Nation" and 10 minutes on "CBS This Morning," with the president fielding an endless barrage of negative questions before he finally tired of it and calmly cut off Dickerson, saying: "That's enough. Thank you."

To put things in their proper perspective, it could be argued that Trump faced more CBS hostility in one interview than former President Barack Obama faced on CBS in eight years.

Conservative Twitter swiftly imagined the reaction had Colbert aimed this "comedic" fire at Obama -- not to mention Hillary Clinton. He would have been fired. But it was Trump, and where he's concerned, blind hatred is never having to say you're sorry.

CBS refused comment to press inquiries. Colbert was pressed into a measure of regret ... by the gay left, for disparaging same-sex activity. He bowed to them by saying on his show on Wednesday, "Anyone who expresses their love for another person, in their own way is, to me, an American hero." (Think through the criminal stupidity of that statement.) As for Trump, he said: "I have jokes; he has the launch codes; so it's a fair fight."

Does anyone wonder why Trump refused to attend the White House correspondents dinner? This is the level of "humor" he was expected to endure at the hands of industry leaders who despise him."

Liberals think comedians should lead the "resistance" because the journalists are just too damn nice. A video of Colbert's penis joke arrived on Twitter with a promotional sentence that read, "Stephen tells the President everything journalists, restrained by their dignity, wish they could say."

This year, the White House Correspondents Association president and Reuters correspondent, Jeff Mason, displayed the usual schizophrenia by proclaiming it would be "unfair" to roast President Trump in absentia, and then hired Hasan Minhaj of "The Daily Show" -- the son of Muslim Indian immigrants -- to roast Trump. This man is best known for a vicious leftist tirade at another "objective" TV news dinner, including his label for Trump as a "racist Cheeto."

Mason was surely only responding to rejected "Daily Show" host candidate Samantha Bee, who brought her TBS show to Washington, D.C., to tape a "Not the White House Correspondents' Dinner" special. In her taping before the dinner, Bee attempted to outdo Minhaj by comparing Skype questioners at the White House to survivalists who drink their own urine and delighting in the smear that Trump paid for Russian prostitutes to urinate on him.

At the White House dinner, Minhaj uncorked lame jokes about "Nazi Steve Bannon" and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos "curating her collection of children's tears. He insisted: "Donald Trump is liar in chief. And remember, you guys" -- the press -- "are public enemy no. 1. You are his biggest enemy. Journalists, ISIS, normal-length ties. And somehow, you're the bad guys. That's why you gotta keep your foot on the gas."

The left is too angry and frustrated to admit that its poisonous remarks are having the effect of discrediting the liberal media in all its forms. It's congratulating itself while burning down the village in order to save it.

Krauthammer: We'll Be In a Single-Payer System In Less Than Seven Years

Leah Barkoukis 

Republican lawmakers spent the last seven years vowing to repeal and replace Obamacare, and while the House took a first step toward that end Thursday in the narrow passage of the American Health Care Act, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made an ominous prediction about where health care in this country is heading.

“Historically speaking we are at the midpoint and we had seven years of Obamacare, changing expectations. I would predict that in less than seven years, we will be in a single-payer system,” he told Fox News host Chris Wallace.

This, he said, is the “great irony”—that despite the electoral losses Democrats faced because of the Affordable Care Act and even though the law has largely failed in practice, Obamacare will still win in the end.

“Obamacare failed at every level politically. … As you say, they lost seats in the House, Senate, governorships. Largely because of Obamacare. It failed on the ground, as was pointed out earlier. The insurers are in a dead spiral. The Obamacare exchanges are collapsing. You've had these exchanges … completely disintegrating. But the irony is in the end, I think Obamacare wins the day because it changed expectations,” he said. “Look at the terms of the debate. Republicans are not arguing the free market anymore. They have sort of accepted the fact that the electorate sees healthcare as not just any commodity. It's not like purchasing a steak or a car. It is something people now have a sense that government ought to guarantee."

Wallace pushed back, asking how we are going to get to single-payer and wondering if he was saying the Senate would not pass the repeal and replace plan?

Krauthammer said in the short term, the Senate will not accept the House plan but will come up with one of its own. While he acknowledged he didn’t know how that would end up, he was certain “it’s going to be a rickety arrangement.” This in turn will negatively affect Republicans at the polls.

“It’s likely that Republicans are going to suffer at the polls. And as a result of that, if that happens, you're going to get a sea change in opinion and then there’s only two ways to go: to a radically individualist system where the market rules or single-payer. And the country is not going to go back to radical individualist,” he said. 

Here are the 20 Republicans who rejected ObamaCare repeal

Here are the 20 Republicans who rejected ObamaCare repeal
By Cristina Marcos - 05-04-17 15:33 PM EDT

Twenty mostly centrist House Republicans who represent swing districts voted against the GOP's legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act on Thursday.

Two more defections would have doomed the bill, signaling how tough a vote it was for many lawmakers.

Only one member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, freshman Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), voted against the measure because it didn't go far enough to fully repeal the healthcare law. Two other libertarian-minded conservatives, Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Walter Jones (N.C.), also opposed it.

The defectors were primarily centrists who had trepidations about voting for the bill after the addition of an amendment to let states apply for waivers from certain ObamaCare provisions that prevent insurers from charging sick people higher premiums and mandate which services insurance plans must cover.

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) was the only co-chair of the centrist Tuesday Group to vote no. Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a leadership ally, and Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), who negotiated the state waiver amendment, supported the bill.

Dent said he thinks the proposal will increase health insurance costs for low- and moderate-income Americans, citing the original Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report that estimated the bill would result in 24 million more uninsured people over the next decade.

"Too much time and energy has been spent on meeting arbitrary deadlines and artificial timelines, all to improve the budget baseline for tax reform. We must and can do better," Dent said in a statement.

"It is my hope that cooler heads will prevail in the Senate," Dent added.

Hardly any Republicans opposed the bill over the rushed process that brought it to the floor. Republican leaders scheduled a vote before waiting for an analysis from the CBO estimating its effects.

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) was among the few to cite the lack of a CBO score as a reason for why he'd vote against the bill on Thursday.

"I'm sympathetic to leadership's challenge - getting 216 votes in this highly polarized environment isn't easy. Also, as I have stated in the past, I'm certainly not going to vote on a bill of this magnitude that hasn't been fully scored by the Congressional Budget Office and whose estimated price tag is unknown," Coffman said in a statement hours before the vote.

Jones, in a statement, called the rushed process used by GOP leaders without a revised CBO score "shameful."

"As a result, no one has any idea how much those deals will cost the American taxpayers, or how they might affect the cost, quality and availability of health insurance coverage for American families," Jones said.

"Seven years ago, Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously said of the Obamacare bill: 'You have to pass the bill so we can find out what's in it.' Sadly, the Washington Republican leadership is repeating the same mistakes."

Other centrist Republicans who voted against the bill were Reps. Barbara Comstock (Va.), Ryan Costello (Pa.), Dan Donovan (N.Y.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.), Will Hurd (Texas), John Katko (N.Y.), Leonard Lance (N.J.), Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), Patrick Meehan (Pa.), Dave Reichert (Wash.), Chris Smith (N.J.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.).

All of the centrists except for Smith and Dent represent districts being targeted by the House Democratic campaign arm for the 2018 midterm elections.

The remaining two Republican defectors, Ohio Reps. Mike Turner and David Joyce, are typically reliable leadership allies but weren't able to support the legislation this time.

"This bill will leave our most vulnerable citizens with inadequate health coverage. I cannot support a health plan to replace Obamacare that puts my constituents' health benefits at risk," Turner said in a statement after the vote.

Many of the 20 Republicans will be barraged with ads tying them to the healthcare legislation, despite their votes against it.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced Thursday it is launching digital ads in 30 districts, regardless of whether the Republicans holding them voted for the healthcare bill.

Coffman, Joyce, Costello, Hurd and Comstock are among the Republicans whose districts will see the ads.

- This story was updated at 4:46 p.m.

Senate GOP vows big changes for ObamaCare bill

Senate GOP vows big changes for ObamaCare bill
By Alexander Bolton - 05-05-17 06:00 AM EDT

Senate Republicans plan to dramatically overhaul the House ObamaCare repeal bill that passed Thursday and are warning the process could take weeks.

The House bill, the American Health Care Act, has raised an array of concerns among Senate Republicans, chiefly among lawmakers from swing states who are opposed to the cap on ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion that would take effect in 2020.

GOP senators are also troubled by analyses that the legislation would significantly cut federal subsidies for people between the ages of 50 and 65, especially in rural areas such as Maine, Montana, Nebraska and North Carolina.

Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) announced Thursday that there would no "arbitrary deadlines" for the healthcare legislation, setting up an open-ended process.

"We're going through the issues methodically," he said. "The House passing the bill gives us a little bit more of a sense of urgency but it's going to take a while."

Senate Republicans say the bill in its current form cannot pass, and some of them privately question whether it will ever get a floor vote. There's also skepticism in the conference that they will be able to cobble together 51 votes behind any plan.

"I think it needs a lot of improvement," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who is concerned about the Medicaid provisions, said about the House bill.

West Virginia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries under ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion, with 175,000 new people signing up under the law's more generous guidelines as of 2015.

Capito said she is also worried about the reductions in subsidies for older, less affluent people under the House plan.

For example, a person who is 60 years old earning $30,000 a year in Kanawha County, W.Va., would see a subsidy reduction of nearly $9,000 a year under the House proposal.

Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.), two Republicans who have sounded the alarm about the potential Medicaid rollback, issued statements Thursday afternoon opposing the House bill.

Portman said he doesn't support the measure "because I continue to have concerns that this bill does not do enough to protect Ohio's Medicaid expansion population."

Portman said on Wednesday that he would like to see "a longer runway" for reforming Medicaid instead of abruptly capping the program two and a half years in the future.

Heller said "the current bill falls short" and said  "we cannot pull the rug out from under states like Nevada that expanded Medicaid."

The House bill could also face resistance from some of the Senate's most conservative members.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that while changes to the legislation insisted on by members of the House Freedom Caucus improved the legislation, he's still not satisfied.

"I really frankly am not too excited about subsidizing the profit of insurance companies," Paul told Fox News in an interview Thursday.

"There's about $300 or $400 billion in this bill for insurance company profit," he added. "It boggles my mind how that became a Republican idea."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) cautioned Tuesday that getting a healthcare bill through the Senate would be "a real big challenge."

He has convened a working group that includes members of his leadership team, moderates who are worried about the Medicaid rollback, conservatives and two key committee chairman - Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) - to work out a compromise.

The group met Tuesday and again on Thursday.

"The majority leader has pulled together a working group of people that represent different approaches, trying to get consensus there, and we're going through the issues methodically," Cornyn later told reporters.

Alexander has been working for weeks on a healthcare reform bill that could pass the Senate with only Republican votes.

He has begun working closely with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), a conservative who earlier this year voiced misgivings about the House healthcare reform bill, but could emerge as the key to getting a deal.

McConnell initially hoped to pass the House healthcare reform bill through the Senate quickly.

He first eyed the last week of March for the job, but the political calculations changed after Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) failed to muster enough votes for the legislation on March 24 and pulled it from the floor.

As it's become increasingly clear how much opposition there is within the Senate to the bill, McConnell has opted for a less ambitious timeline.

Twenty House GOP lawmakers voted against the legislation Thursday, and some of them criticized it in harsh terms.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said the bill "has the potential to severely harm the health and lives of people in South Florida."

McConnell initially planned to bring the House bill directly to the floor but now he wants to vet it through the working group he has assembled to make sure it can get 51 votes.

Senate Republicans control 52 seats and can afford only two defections, as Vice President Mike Pence could break a 50-50 tie.

The expected plan is to use the working group instead of the primary committees of jurisdiction, the Finance and Health panels, to negotiate the bill.

"I think what you're going to see is more of a working group approach, which has already started to meet," Cornyn said.

But not all Republicans are thrilled about bypassing the committees.

"My hope that we treat the bill seriously, that we have hearings, that we have witnesses," said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). "I want the regular order to work."

Not a single House Democrat voted for the ObamaCare repeal legislation in the House, and Democratic leaders said Thursday that it would not get any support from their caucus in the Senate.

"The proposal that is coming from the House doesn't have a pulse in terms of Senate Democrats," said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the senior Democrat on the Finance Committee.

Will: Fear of Trump's rashness is rational

By George F. Will|7 hours ago

WASHINGTON - It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump's inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.

In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice." Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump's verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.

Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson's death. Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward's 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was "an irrepressible conflict," Trump says:

"People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war's origins, so who, one wonders, are these "people" who don't ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely? Presumably they are not the astute "lot of," or at least "some," people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress: "A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber." Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.

What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation's history. As this column has said before, the problem isn't that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.

The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea's nuclear arsenal. North Korea should reciprocate this worry. Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism: "I would bomb the s-- out of them. ... I'd blow up the pipes, I'd blow up the refineries, I'd blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left."

As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is. Asked about it, he said: "We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame." Invited to elaborate, he said: "I think - I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me." Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer's word salad: "What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you're afraid to use it?" To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity: "The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing."

As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the "one China" policy. About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored. It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." His fathomless lack of interest in America's path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

George Will is a syndicated columnist.

The Enemy Within – the Democrat version

Silvio Canto, Jr.

Years ago, I helped an old friend move to a new home.

At one point, we ordered some pizza and sat down to take a little rest. We also found a box of old paperbacks from our school days. We found books by Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Carter, Alexander Haig, Richard Nixon, and The Enemy Within, a book written by Robert F. Kennedy in 1960. (My friend said that his dad had bought the book)

The book is a summary of a U.S. Senate investigation into organized crime. The information means nothing today except that the title is a perfect description of everything going on in the Democrat Party.

As Noah Rothman wrote, the party's problems are Democrats: 

Since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the party has found the enthusiasm commanded by its progressive members irresistible.

The Democratic Party's most celebrated personalities are self-identified progressives, but not necessarily self-identified Democrats.

The chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee came down to a race between a progressive radical and a progressive populist -- a race the progressive populist only just barely won.

That chairman has since made it clear that the party he leads is no home for Americans who consider themselves, for example, pro-life, despite the fact that somewhere between 18 and 27 percent of Democrats would likely fall into that column.

This is a party that sees standing in schoolhouse doorways to block the entry of Trump appointees, destroying property, and scoffing at non-violent demonstrations as legitimate forms of "Resistance."

It is a party whose bitter luminaries reject even the pretense of reconciliation with the registered Democrats who broke ranks for Trump.

It is a party that, when it tried to elevate a white southern Democratic former governor to repair its image among Trump voters, was laughed out of the room by the politically active celebrity left.

To their detriment, both the party's elected leaders and its committee chairs are indulging the hyperbole that typifies the modern left.

We see this hyperbole and lunacy everywhere, from Colbert imploding on TV to Democrats becoming the party of sanctuary cities.

The insanity goes on. Mrs. Clinton was on TV discussing the 2016 election. It's true that she accepted responsibility but did manage to bring in FBI Director James Comey, Russia, and the woman factor. Incredibly, no one asked the obvious question: did you really think that you could have a private server and hide it from everyone? Did it occur to you that such a bold move would come back to bite you?

We are watching people go crazy by the minute. They say little but scream a lot.

Maybe someone should bring a placard to the next Tom Perez speech. It can say in bold letters: There is too much leftism around here, Tom! Way too much for our electoral good!
Yes, the enemy is within and he or she or the other gender is a Democrat.

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk), (YouTube) and follow me on Twitter.

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