Tag Archives: political parties

Steve Bannon and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Steve Bannon is acting more and more (and more openly) like a stooge of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Is Steve Bannon working for my agenda—or his?

That’s the question Donald Trump might ask himself….

Indeed, since Bannon’s targets are Republicans of whom he disapproves—which is to say nearly all of them—all of us must ask for whose agenda is Bannon working so hard.  Bannon did, though, give his game away:

The only question on Capitol Hill, he warned Mr [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell, is “who’s going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar[?]”

Indeed.  Who’s going to play the role of assassin/traitor to the Senate?

Bannon intends to subject every Republican Senator who is rude enough to support McConnell to a primary contest with a view to removing that Senator from office and replacing him with a more malleable candidate in the general election.

I’ve written elsewhere of the likely outcome of Bannon’s campaign.  William McGurn, the author of the piece at the first link, has one take on Bannon’s motive for that outcome.  I have another.

If Bannon were truly interested in a Conservative victory in the coming series of elections, he’d be going after the Progressive-Democratic Party candidates instead of targeting Republicans, even those who aren’t conservative enough to suit him.  Instead, he’s carefully ignoring the Democrats.

Health Plan Providers Are Concerned

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These providers, which surprisingly The Wall Street Journal misapprehends as insurers, are bracing for a drop in enrollment in the ongoing health plan provision program “turmoil.”  There’s this key passage in the article at the link:

[M]any firms say they expect to lose consumers who will bear the full brunt of the rate increases—those who aren’t eligible for the health law’s premium subsidies, which help enrollees with annual incomes of less than around $48,000.

Yet it’s the “health law” that exploded health plan costs—premiums and deductibles, especially—by mandating coverage for things citizens don’t need or don’t want and by mandating that many of those coverages be provided at no cost to the plan purchaser.  This has led to a burial of many of those costs into the charges made rather than listing them openly as separate line items on the charge sheet and a parallel creation of the claimed need for the subsidies.

Those costs put a premium on getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with a private economy program of market oriented, actual health insurance policies sold by private companies not fettered by Federal government diktats.

That, in turn, requires three self-important Republican Senators to get with the program.  Senators John McCain (AZ), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Susan Collins (ME), especially, need to hear about our dismay with their reticence—and on a national scale.  These worthies are responsible to their State constituencies, to be sure, but the US Senate is a national body; these Senators also have a national constituency to whom they’re responsible, for all that the rest of us don’t vote for them.

On Whose Side Is He?

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[Steve] Bannon has been recruiting and promoting challengers to GOP incumbents and the party’s preferred candidates in next year’s midterm elections.

And

…it could also imperil Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

Indeed.  He’s trying to get farther right candidates nominated in place of incumbents, but he’s likely to drag the party too far right to suit a center-right population of Americans, force serious candidates to expend resources on frivolous primaries (rather than primaries involving serious Conservative candidates), even get candidates like Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, or Sharron Angle nominated—which in their time cost the Republicans entirely winnable Senate seats..

He could do more good for the Republican Party, and frankly for our Republic, by doing these things within the Progressive-Democratic Party to ensure incumbents spend their resources on primaries and are dragged farther left, even get Left-wing extremists nominated onto the Progressive-Democratic tickets in the general elections.

Of course Bannon knows all of this full well.  Hence my question.  Is he really willing to risk the Senate and lose the chance for a Republican President and Senate to get more Conservative jurists appointed to the Supreme Court and to our lower Federal courts?

Or, another question: is this just sour grapes run amok because Bannon can’t be a White House player anymore?

Civil War

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Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy demanded that Catalonia “clarify” its position following its referendum on independence from Spain following Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont’s declaration of Catalonian independence and his immediate suspension of that in favor of a period of negotiation with Madrid.

However, Rajoy’s pretended confusion says volumes about him without adding a syllable to the subject’s discussion.  His pretense is nothing but an attempt to obfuscate and distract from his deliberate decision to use violence to suppress a referendum when he could have peacefully arrested the referendum leaders in the aftermath of its defeat at the polls.

Rajoy’s preference for violence and its import are confirmed by Rajoy’s subsequent step.

[T]he Spanish government triggered the first step toward invoking Article 155 in the name of preserving the unity of the nation.

Article 155 of the Spanish constitution—a brief provision modeled on a similar measure in Germany’s constitution—allows the central government to suspend some of the powers of a region under specific conditions.

This is just a naked exercise in power and not at all a willingness to accept—or even begin discussing acceptance of—Puigdemont’s olive branch.

Madrid, by acting in ways that would force a civil war seems more interested in that than in any peaceful resolution.  Indeed, Rajoy is seeking to preempt peace.

This is about Rajoy’s ego and his demand for power and the abject surrender of his enemies.

Health Plan Coverage and Contraception

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The Wall Street Journal has noted that the Trump administration has taken regulatory action to reduce, if not eliminate (the Supreme Court still has to do its job vis-à-vis a Little Sisters of the Poor case, as does Congress legislatively, contra a short handful of Republicans who prefer Obamacare intact over any step toward getting rid of it), the requirement that health plan providers provide contraception to women at no cost to those women coverees and do so regardless of any question of conscience or religious tenet.

Naturally, Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally have their collective panties in a wedgie over that.  However, they carefully ignore certain inconvenient facts.

One inconvenience is the actual cost of contraception—to the user, not the rest of us who must pay for these “free” items.  Contraceptive pills can be had at places like Walmart for $9/mo, vaginal contraceptives are cheaper, condoms (don’t men have a role here, too?) are $6.50 the dozen.  These are not prices that will shatter anyone’s piggy bank.

Contraceptives are used to treat medical conditions, and they can be terribly expensive?  That’s the other inconvenience.  No they aren’t; those aren’t contraceptives.  They’re medications used for treating a medical condition; they happen to have a (if not the) major side effect of being anti-conceiving.  Insurance plans already covered such meds, and Obamacare could have, too, but the Progressive-Democratic Party eschewed that when they rammed through Obamacare.

In the end, there’s no reason anyone should pay for contraceptives other than the users.  Full stop.