CHIP Funding Down to the Line in Pennsylvania

Teresa Miller is the CHIP coordinator in PA. She’s got a dilemma. Should she give parents a 30 day notice now that PA is going to run out of CHIP funding in January or wait to see if Congress will pass a funding bill by Christmas?

The answer is: send out the letters now because after the Tax Reform bill is signed by Trump, Republican lawmakers are going to whip around and scream, “THERE’S NO MONEY FOR CHIP! IT WILL INCREASE THE DEFICIT!!”

You know they will.

Tax Reform has consequences.

Speaking of which, check out Atrios’ post about the geniuses behind the spending cut triggers in the bill, contractionary policy, recessions and zero lower bounds. Unless you’re a Trump voter, in which case cause and effect are meaningless, the tax reform package will wreck the economy, the Republicans will scare the s#%^ out of you with videos of scary faux Muslims beating up kids and North Korea ad nauseum and you’ll vote for the monsters anyway.

Ezra Klein tweets:

Soooo, you know, there’s that….

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The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Yulín Cruz, was on Late Night with Stephen Colbert and announced something truly shocking and heartless. The new Tax Reform bill will slap a 20% excise tax on any goods from Puerto Rico into the US. I’m trying to understand how that money will be transferred directly to the hedge funds that own Puerto Rico’s debt. A debt which can never be discharged in bankruptcy according to some weird legislative trickery from a decade ago.

Anyway, she is echoing how all rational compassionate and intelligent people feel about Trump and the Republicans right now, which means they will need to find new and better ways to suppress the vote next year.

Puerto Rico still needs our help. You can donate to Somebody Help Us here.

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More on Matt Lauer. The accusations against him are very serious. One woman says he summoned her to his office, locked the door and then had sex with her to the point where she passed out. I’m still trying to figure out what that’s all about. Did he try some kind of asphyxiation on her? In any case, that’s not even the act that got him fired. It was a completely different sexual encounter. Something tells me that Lauer is going to turn out to be the worst kind of sadistic misogynist and these first few accusations are only the tip of the iceberg.

But I’m not sure that’s even the worst of it. What he did to drive Ann Curry out of NBC was supposed to be worse. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with sexual harassment but it might have to do with gaslighting her, ruining her reputation amongst the executives and generally being a fucking asshole to work with. And he probably got away with it because Lauer had “Star” power.

That sounds familiar. Wasn’t it Trump who said he could get away with grabbing women by the pussy because he was a star and they can do whatever they want?

Yes, I believe he did.