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Saber-rattling, or agenuine threat? Left-wing groups arewarning Democratic Senators that if they don't fight against President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, they may find themselves out of a job. It's unclear if these organizationshave the wherewithal or resources to follow through on that challenge, but Chuck Schumer's caucus is no doubt acutely aware that their base is demanding nothing short offull-blown "resistance" at every turn -- and some of the loudest elements of said base are making sure that these lawmakers never forget it (via Jazz Shaw):

A "do or die" issue, says the woman from the extremeabortion lobby. Fact check: Literally true. A quick digression on abortion, since the Left is obsessed with maintaining America's radical status quo on the issue: In case you missed it, Planned Parenthoodturned down an offer from the Trump administration to maintain its federal funding if the organization stopped performing abortions. That's no surprise.Despite all the misleading and downplayingspin, abortion is amajor component of Planned Parenthood's business model -- especially when they could augment their revenues through theghoulish sale of harvested fetal organs. It should be underscored that in the event that Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion would not become illegal nationwide; instead, states would set their ownabortion-related laws, with some abortions remaining legal in all 50 states. Many jurisdictions would, however, implement additional common-sense restrictions on the practice, a good number of which arebroadly popular with the American people. Anyway, back to Gorsuch. The Hill piece notes that conservatives are "winning the message war," as liberals have failed to convince the public that Trump's pick is an extremist:

Yet some within the professional Left are ratcheting up their threats, led by unserious bomb-throwers like Michael Moore (who recentlytweeted about the wonders of Socialism in, um,collapsing Venezuela):

These rumblings must be music to the National Republican Senatorial Committees' ears. The Democrats' left-wing base is not representative of the overall American electorate, especially in the 30 states carried by Donald Trump last fall. Senate Democrats from ten of those states (this list, plus Michigan)are up for re-election next year; five of whom represent states Trump won by 19 percentage points or more. If incumbent Democrats are forced to spend energy and money fending off insurgencies from their ideological left, they'll be in an even weaker position in a general election setting. Numerous Democrats have already indicated that a Gorsuch blockade isn't going to materialize, with somecandidly admitting that he'll be confirmed. I'll leave you with some positive reviews from Democrat-aligned Maine Sen. Angus King, who's sounding an awful lot like a "yes" vote:

Parting thought: If thenot-entirely-unsubstantiated buzz is true, and there's another vacancy on the Court opening up in the relatively near future, the calls for an all-out Democratic filibuster will grow much louder. If Schumer and company choose togo that route, Senate Republicans must be prepared to follow through on the Reid Rule and break the filibuster with 51 votes, or re-implement the'two speech' precedent. The stakes would be too high not to hold Democrats to their own standards.

Tillerson Recuses Himself from Keystone Pipeline Decision

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Angry Progressives: Damn Right We'll Primary Democrats Who Don't Oppose Neil Gorsuch - Townhall

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There is a lot to dislike about the new GOP House ObamaCare replacement bill. But it contains at least one excellent plank: its reforms to Medicaid, America's government-run insurance scheme for the poor.

Unsurprisingly, progressives have eagerly criticized the GOP's Medicaid reform as an attack on the poor. This is nonsense.

Medicaid is a disaster. It is, by a mile, the worst health insurance scheme of any kind in the developed world. A number of studies have suggested that people on Medicaid have no better, and often worse, health outcomes than those without insurance.

To take just one example, a landmark University of Virginia study suggested that people on Medicaid are 13 percent more likely to die from surgery than those without insurance. This study looked at 893,658 operations from around the U.S. from 2003 to 2007, and controlled for age, gender, income, geographic region, operation, and 30 medical conditions. Similarly, the so-called Oregon study (since it was done in Oregon) showed that Medicaid recipients are either no better off, or worse off, in terms of health outcomes, than those without insurance.

The problem with Medicaid isn't money. The United States government spends nearly half a trillion dollars a year on Medicaid. Maybe in a perfect world we'd be spending more, but surely if the net effect of all that money is that the health outcomes are exactly the same (or worse!) than spending zero dollars, the problem is not in the money. The problem is the way the program functions, which has barely been tweaked since 1965.

Conservatives have lots of ideas about how to fix this, and have been pushing them for literally decades. Now, maybe those ideas leave a lot to be desired. But when you consider the fact that Medicaid is on balance worse than doing nothing at all, if you cared as deeply about the lives and flourishing of poor people as progressives say they do, maybe you'd be willing to try anything.

The problem is that progressives have, relentlessly and consistently, demagogued this issue. Any conservative attempt at Medicaid reform is immediately portrayed as an attempt at mass murder. During the passage of ObamaCare, which achieves most of its coverage increases by expanding Medicaid, the Obama White House rejected all Republican attempts to "trade" Medicaid expansion (a progressive goal) for Medicaid reform (a conservative goal), inevitably justifying itself by claiming that any reform would hurt the poor, pretending not to know that they are already being hurt.

During the 2012 presidential race, the Obama campaign ludicrously described then-vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's proposal to "block grant" Medicaid as a 30 percent cut; given that the whole concept of a block grant is to spend the same amount of money, but administer it locally, this is like claiming that 10 equals 7.

As it happens, RyanCare 2.0's reform of Medicaid isn't exactly a block grant, but a per-capita allotment. (This idea was first floated by Bill Clinton in 1995. After all these years of being told conservatives couldn't criticize ObamaCare because it was "originally a Republican idea," I imagine now no progressives will criticize RyanCare's Medicaid reforms.) But the basic idea is the same: Give the states money to run Medicaid, and let them decide how to do it locally. This is a good idea.

Why? Because the problem is not how much money is spent on the program, it's how it's designed, so it makes sense to change the design. As is, Medicaid is a hybrid state-federal structure, which should be clarified. And more generally, when it comes to an incredibly complex field like health care, it's generally better to try several localized approaches at once rather than just one centrally mandated one.

Again, the current program is not even close to good. It is an abysmal failure. Many reforms don't achieve all they set out to do, but it's hard to imagine a reform that could do worse than the status quo. And, again, the political attitude of the progressive camp on this score is not to propose alternatives, but simply to decry any alternative as tantamount to a war on the poor.

There are many issues on which reasonable people can honestly disagree about what's best. This is not one of them. There are too many issues, Medicaid being a big one, public schools being another, where progressives are just so obviously, evidently, and objectively failing to adequately help the worst-off in society (while at the same time being infuriatingly self-righteous about it), simply because of their ideology, which dictates that public dollars spent, not results on the ground, is the criterion for successful public policy.

View original post here:
The bald-faced hypocrisy of progressives' refusal to reform Medicaid - The Week Magazine

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Well heres an interesting twist to the whole Russians hacked the election thing the Democrats led by the suggestive powers of the former President, Barack Obama have been trying to press into the public collective mind: The Russians are now accused of demanding hush money from progressive groups.

Those wascally wabbits. Theyre everywhere it seems, nowadays.

Heres how Bloomberg puts it: Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms.

Theyve demanded their blackmail bucks by Bitcoin, apparently. To the tune of $30,000 to $150,000, depending on the organization.

And what exactly does that amount of Bitcoin buy?

Good question. Heres the answer: It covers up funding information tied to the big-time anti-President Trump movement thats been riding high on liberal waves for months.

This is huge. Democrats and leftists have been trying to sell the idea for months that all these Hate Trump protests in the streets, on college campuses and so forth, have been completely of, by and for the people, and not staffed with paid agitators and facilitators.

Of course, the smart money has been on George Soros, and his leftist cohorts but Dems have gone out of their way to deny the connections.

Now, we may have clarity.

According to this Bloomberg report, a dozen or so left-leaning groups have reportedly faced extortion in just the few months since the presidential election. Most are unnamed. But one is not.

The Center for American Progress you know, that nonprofit that claims to be nonpartisan but is led primarily by pit-bull progressive defenders of Mr. Obama and former President Bill Clinton, like Tom Dashle and John Podesta is one of the groups allegedly asked to cough up hush money for the Russians. A CAP spokesperson said this to Bloomberg: CAP has no evidence we have been hacked, no knowledge of it and no reason to believe it to be true.

But what else would CAP say?

Painting a picture of impromptu, organic protests against the president has been a cornerstone of the lefts messaging against Mr. Trump from the get-go. On top of that, its not like CAP is this bastion of honest wheelings and dealings. The FBI has already pointed fingers at the group as the mastermind of the hacking into the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

Lucy, I think youve got some splainin to do.

Mr. Trump has been calling out the protest movement as bunk for months, saying in one tweet in late February: The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!

Insert the word paid in front of liberal activists, and were probably getting a bit closer to the truth.

Read more:
Russians hit progressives for anti-Trump hush money: Report - Washington Times

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Progressives once pushed eugenics - Tribune-Review

They didn't win all their Democratic primary races on Tuesday, but a movement of young progressives continued a steady creep in its quest to overtake city politics in St. Louis.

Candidates backed by liberal supporters picked up three seats, held onto one big one and scored a major upset in contests for the Board of Aldermen.

Green won a special election in 2015, but she was expected to have a serious fight when Florida returned this year to try to reclaim her old seat. Instead, she nearly doubled up her predecessor, according to unofficial results.

"I feel like in a lot of ways, I was kind of the tip of the spear," Green said Tuesday night. "I was the first kind of outsider candidate that got elected that wasnt supposed to get elected, and then did some unconventional things like standing with Black Lives Matters protesters, and then still managed to get re-elected."

Not too far way in south city, Dan Guenther became the latest newcomer to take out a longtime incumbent. He toppled Ward 9 Alderman Ken Ortmann, who had held the seat since 1999. The ward, which covers parts of seven neighborhoods across an ax-shaped swath, includes long stretches of the new progressive power center along Cherokee Street.

Guenther, who doesn't own a car and supports standard-bearer issues such as a $15 minimum wage, had the backing of the increasingly influential Ward 20 Alderwoman Cara Spencer. He was also supported by Mobilize Missouri, which endorsed a slate of progressives in St. Louis races.

Two of the organization's picks John Collins-Muhammad in Ward 21 and Sarah Wood Martin in Ward 11 claimed open seats. Martin replaces Tom Villa, who decided not to run again. Muhammad is the new Democratic choice in a ward opened up by Antonio French's unsuccessful mayoral bid.

But the old guard has not lost all its power. Longtime incumbent Alderman Joseph Roddy stomped challenger Joe Dierkemper in Ward 17, which covers parts of seven neighborhoods, including Midtown and the Central West End. Roddy had been criticized lately as the practice of granting generous tax abatements has come under fire, but it did not seem to hurt him in his own ward on Tuesday.

Tammika Hubbard also rolled to victory in Ward 5, despite a string of body blows to her politically powerful family in recent months. She emerged easily from a six-candidate race that included progressive favorite Megan Betts.

Incumbent Sharon Tyus also held onto her seat in Ward 1, and Alderwoman Marlene Davis won big in Ward 19.

Thomas Oldenburg defeated former state Representative Michele Kratky for state Representative Donna Baringer's old seat. Brandon Bosley won in Ward 3 to replace his father, Freeman Bosley Sr., who is retiring.

Aldermen Jack Coatar, Beth Murphy, Joe Vaccaro and Shane Cohn all ran unopposed.

Danny Wicentowski contributed to this story.

We welcome tips and feedback. Email the author at doyle.murphy@riverfronttimes.com or follow on Twitter at @DoyleMurphy.

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St. Louis Progressives Make Gains in Board of Aldermen Races ... - Riverfront Times (blog)