National

Many thanks to the wild-eyed radical Senator from Vermont for dragging the Democratic Party into a winnable position.

In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.

For a bill that does not exist yet and whose details are not public, Bernie Sanders’s new single-payer health care bill sure is popular. First, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced her plans to co-sponsor it; then Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined in. According to reporting by my Vox colleague Jeff Stein, Cory Booker (D-NJ) has staff working with Sanders and others on formulating the bill. Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booker are arguably the most famous and most-admired Democratic senators in the country among the party’s base; the betting markets give a 55 percent chance that one of them will be the 2020 nominee for president. Other contenders are getting on board with single-payer — or “Medicare for all,” where the federal government would provide health insurance for every American financed through taxes — as well. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) declared, “We should have Medicare for all,” at a rally against Republican attempts to roll back Obamacare. Meanwhile 117 House Democrats (over 60 percent of the caucus) have co-sponsored HR 676, the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act offered every Congress by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI). This is what an emerging party consensus looks like. Over time, some issues become so widely accepted within a party as to be a de facto requirement for anyone aspiring to lead it. No Democrat would run for president, or even for House or Senate minority leader, without supporting the DREAM Act. No Republican would try for a leadership position without supporting repeal of the estate tax.

Can this shit show get more ridiculous? Trump's lawless AG and magical elf Jeff Sessions, says it is all about following the law (as Joe Arpaio nods in the backround), and having Congress "act" (like that is going to happen.) Then the Republican President folds on that plan and says that he'll fix it in six months when Congress inevitably fails. WHAT THE HOLY FUCK?

If every dollar of tax revenue collected from a successful business corresponds to a dollar decrease in potential economic growth, (and conservative "thinkers" tell us there is a direct correlation while reality tells us no such relationship exists), then the looming explosion in health insurance premiums that will ripple out of the destruction of the ACA should really hit the economy hard.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it will cut 90 percent of its budget for advertising Obamacare’s open enrollment period and will nearly cut in half the funding for hundreds of navigator groups across the country who provide in-person assistance to people signing up for health insurance. Former HHS officials and health care experts predict the sharply scaled-back outreach effort will significantly depress insurance signups this fall, especially among the young and healthy, causing premiums to skyrocket. “The people who are sick will navigate any obstacle in order to obtain insurance,” Josh Peck, the former chief marketing officer for HHS, told TPM. “They don’t need a reminder because their illness is their reminder every day. But healthy people need and respond to reminders, so this clearly will have a negative impact on the risk pool.”

Caeci procedimus “We forge ahead aimless”

Branding Bitches!

In 2001 and 2002, I was reading and commenting on Dana Garret's blog and Mike Mathews. There was also someone ...Delacrat? who had a great wit, but didn't stick with it. I was also trolling some Republicans pretty hard. Hube mostly. Like everyone I was shocked and outraged about how terrible George W. Bush was. About how he wanted to invade Iraq on a transparently flimsy pretext and with no plan for the occupation. (Little did I know that the GOP had not yet begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel.) Anyway, my arms were to short to box with GWB, so I decide to keep an eye on Mike Castle who I discovered to be a straight down the line "Yes Man" for Bush in spite of his PR campaign to the contrary. I tricked Liberalgeek into coming aboard, then Pandora and Cassandra, Nemski, Donviti. El Somnambulo was a goldmine of a commenter for a long while before he came on board. Delaware Dem started "Daily Delaware" but decided to come over after a while. Those years were fun. Then Hillary Clinton came along and ruined America with her shit ass campaign. I think that's how it went down. This short piece in technically Delaware reminded me of all of that. Read Steve Newton's post on outing. That's one for the time capsule.

In 1609 Henry Hudson poked around the mouth of the Delaware Bay and finding it to not be the Northwest passage, continued on to the islands at the mouth of…