It’s true that just over 23 percent of the CPB’s budget (nearly entirely derived from the federal government) goes toward the development and acquisition of television and radio programming. And, yes, losing that stipend will hurt PBS and NPR on some level — though the difference will probably be covered by private funding, whether thanks to corporations, grant foundations, or the famous “viewers like you.”

But most of the federal government’s dollars to CPB (just over 65 percent) go toward one thing: keeping rural PBS and NPR stations alive. These stations only continue to operate due to funding from the federal government. If Trump’s proposed budget becomes law, PBS and NPR themselves will continue to exist, on TV, on the radio, and on digital platforms. So will local affiliates in major urban areas. But many of those rural stations will be shuttered.

The rural areas served by those stations backed Trump heavily. He received 62 percent of the vote in rural counties. Thus, his budget’s proposed defunding of CPB is yet another way that a policy proposed by Trump seems as if it will have the most adverse effect on those who voted for him.

–Todd VanDerWerff
Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Won’t Kill PBS

Christopher Ruddy, the CEO of the right wing site Newsmax and a personal friend of Trump’s, weighed in Tuesday with seven suggestions for Trump to revive Trumpcare, including the following: “Reject the phony private health insurance market as the panacea. Look to an upgraded Medicaid system to become the country’s blanket insurer for the uninsured.”

Converting Medicaid from a safety net for the poor into a safety net for anyone who finds themselves uninsured is an idea that would be very popular with Trump supporters, and is thus under consideration by nobody with any power. Where Trumpcare is practically optimized to screw over Trump’s base, replacing Obamacare with a Medicaid-for-all option would eliminate the ACA’s narrow disincentive to work harder while continuing to free motivated workers to voluntarily leave their jobs.

It would be genuinely liberating. Not in the sense proffered by GOP Congressman Jason Chaffetz, that people would be free to forgo buying iPhones until they can afford bad insurance; or in the sense that it would give millionaires a big tax cut; but in the sense that the fear of injury or bad health would no longer be a tool the government uses to scare people into keeping jobs they’d otherwise leave.

Trumpcare, by contrast, enshrines indenture as a facet of personal liberty. As a governing philosophy, it is the freedom to work until you die. And if it weren’t for Medicare, it may well be the freedom Trump and Ryan would bestow on all of us.

–Brian Beutler
Trumpcare Is the Opposite of Freedom

House Republicans’ proposal to rewrite federal health-care law would more than reverse the gains the Affordable Care Act has made in the number of Americans with health insurance, while curbing the federal deficit, according to a widely-anticipated forecast by congressional budget analysts.

The analysis, released late Monday afternoon by the Congressional Budget Office, predicts that 24 million fewer people would have health coverage over the coming decade, nearly doubling the share of Americans who are uninsured from 10 to 19 percent. But the GOP legislation, which has been speeding through House committees since it was introduced a week ago, would lower the deficit by $337 billion during that time, primarily by lessening spending on Medicaid and government aid to help people buy health plans on their own.

The report predicted that premiums would be 15 percent to 20 percent higher in the first year compared with the Affordable Care Act and 10 percent lower on average after 2026. By and large, older Americans would pay “substantially” more and younger Americans less, the report said.

The 37-page report provides the most tangible evidence to date of the human and fiscal impact of the House GOP’s American Health Care Act. It also undermines President Trump’s pledge that no Americans would lose coverage under a Republican remake of the ACA…

Democrats used the report’s finding to continue attacking the House GOP plan. “The CBO score shows just how empty the president’s promises, that everyone will be covered and costs will go down, have been,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E Schumer (D-NY). “This should be a looming stop sign for the Republicans repeal effort.”

Specifically, the analysis predicts that the number of people without health coverage would rise to 52 million by 2026, compared with 28 million if the ACA remains intact. That erosion would mean that fewer than one in five US residents would be uninsured by 2026 — compared to one in 10 uninsured now and one in six who were uninsured before the ACA was enacted.

The reduction would result from three factors. A provision rescinding the penalty imposed on the uninsured would prompt many Americans to drop their health plans. After that, tax credits that are less generous than current subsidies would make insurance unaffordable to many more. Finally, some states may undo the expansion of their Medicaid programs…

The measure derives most of its budget savings through cuts to Medicaid, while nearly all of its cost comes from the proposal’s system of tax credits, which would replace the ACA’s federal insurance subsidies.

While the deficit would be lower, the analysis says, the legislation also would reduce federal revenue by $592 billion by 2026 by repealing several taxes that the ACA created to help pay for more people to get insurance — notably taxes on high-income Americans, hospitals. and health insurers.

“I would hope that this would make the Republicans say ‘we can’t do this,'” said Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), a member of Democratic leadership.

“Twenty-four million people lose their coverage, it is total chaos to the country and I hope they pause, say ‘This is not what we should be doing,’ and move on.” …

The Affordable Care Act has increased coverage by 20 million to 22 million — almost half of those through the insurance markets the law created for people who cannot get affordable coverage through a job, and the rest through an expansion of Medicaid in 31 states and the District of Columbia.

According to the report, an estimated 52 million people would be uninsured in 2026, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under the current law…

The estimates projected a significant drop in Medicaid enrollment. Next year, the forecast says, about 5 million fewer people would be on Medicaid. By 2026, the program’s rolls would shrink by nearly 15 million — almost one in four of the 68 million currently in the program.

The CBO also predicted substantial disparities in the effect the legislation would have on insurance premiums for younger versus older consumers.

If the GOP plan is enacted, a 21-year-old making $68,200 would pay an average of $1,450 for a year’s worth of insurance premiums after the new tax credits, compared with $5,100 under current law.

On the other hand, the cost of a year’s worth of premiums would stay about the same for a 64-year-old at the same income level. For a 64-year-old making $26,500, the cost would rise sharply from $1,700 to $14,600…

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) recalled Trump’s promise that the healthcare plan would insure everyone.

“President Trump said that he wants as many people covered as under Obamacare,” Cassidy said. “He said that healthcare should be affordable. If there’s 14 million people losing insurance — of course it’s concerning. I try to avoid hyperbole and adjectives, but it’s concerning.”

–Amy Goldstein, Elise Viebeck, Kelsey Snell, and Mike DeBonis
Obamacare Revision Would Reduce Insured Numbers by 24 Million, CBO Projects

The value of bitcoins plunged more than 15 percent on Friday afternoon after the Securities and Exchange Commission rejected an application to create the first exchange-traded fund (ETF) for Bitcoin. The proposal would have made it easier for ordinary investors to buy bitcoins, but the SEC is worried that these investors could be cheated in the largely unregulated Bitcoin marketplace.

The ruling has been closely watched in the Bitcoin world. A favorable ruling would have given the cryptocurrency a stamp of approval from an influential regulator, and it also could have sparked a surge in Bitcoin’s price as it provided an easier way for people to invest in this exotic new asset class…

The proposed Bitcoin ETF was the brainchild of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin brothers who once sued Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea behind Facebook from them when they were all students at Harvard. After settling that lawsuit for millions of dollars worth of Facebook stock, the brothers began investing in Bitcoin startups. They announced plans to create a Bitcoin ETF in 2013, and their proposal has been working its way through the SEC ever since.

But the SEC wasn’t impressed with the proposal. The law requires the SEC to make sure that a newly traded asset existed in a well-regulated market that adequately protects people from manipulation and fraud. But the SEC saw little evidence that these conditions were met. Bitcoin is primarily traded in unregulated markets located overseas, especially in China, and as a result, the price of bitcoins is extremely volatile. In the SEC’s view, Bitcoin exchanges are not yet mature enough to justify opening them to the general public…

The ruling hammered bitcoin’s value. In the minutes after it was published, the value of one bitcoin fell from $1,290 to less than $1,000. As I write this, it’s back up to $1,100, about 15 percent below its value before the ruling was announced…

–Timothy B Lee
Why Bitcoin Lost 15 Percent of Its Value in a Few Minutes

According to residents of the village of al Ghayil, in Yemen’s al Bayda province, the first to die in the assault was 13-year-old Nasser al Dhahab. The house of his uncle, Sheikh Abdulraouf al Dhahab, and the building behind it, the home of 65-year-old Abdallah al Ameri and his son Mohammed al Ameri, 38, appeared to be the targets of the US forces, who called in air support as they were pinned down in a nearly hourlong firefight.

With the SEALs taking heavy fire on the lower slopes, attack helicopters swept over the hillside hamlet above. In what seemed to be blind panic, the gunships bombarded the entire village, striking more than a dozen buildings, razing stone dwellings where families slept, and wiping out more than 120 goats, sheep, and donkeys.

Three projectiles tore through the straw and timber roof of the home where Sinan slept. Cowering in a corner, Sinan’s mother, 30-year-old Fatim Saleh Mohsen, decided to flee the bombardment. Grabbing her 18-month-old son and ushering her terrified children into the narrow outdoor passageway between the tightly packed dwellings, she headed into the open. Over a week later, Sinan’s aunt Nadr al Ameri wept as she stood in the same room and recalled watching her sister run out the door into the darkness.

Nesma al Ameri, an elderly village matriarch who lost four family members in the raid, described how the attack helicopters began firing down on anything that moved. As she recounted the horror of what happened, Sinan tapped her on the arm. “No, no. The bullets were coming from behind,” the 5-year-old insisted, interrupting to demonstrate how he was shot at and his mother gunned down as they ran for their lives. “From here to here,” Sinan said, putting two fingers to the back of his head and drawing an invisible line to illustrate the direction of the bullet exiting her forehead. His mother fell to the ground next to him, still clutching his baby brother in her arms. Sinan kept running.

His mother’s body was found in the early light of dawn, the front of her head split open. The baby was wounded but alive. Sinan’s mother was one of at least six women killed in the raid, the first counterterrorism operation of the Trump administration, which also left 10 children under the age of 13 dead. “She was hit by the plane. The American plane,” explained Sinan. “She’s in heaven now,” he added with a shy smile, seemingly unaware of the enormity of what he had witnessed or, as yet, the impact of his loss. “Dog Trump,” declared Nesma, turning to the other women in the room for agreement. “Yes, the dog Trump,” they agreed.

–Iona Craig
Death in al Ghayil (The Yemen Raid)

In the current political climate, the biggest threat is to Earth science, which is increasingly devoted to climate change. It may not be a coincidence that conservatives in Congress have been systematically trying cut NASA’s Earth Science budget in favor of planetary exploration, albeit unmanned exploration. They argue that the goal is to refocus NASA on its traditional mission. But that’s a smokescreen, because research in climate science has become a major part of NASA’s mission. They’re really displaying their hostility to research that could undermine the fortunes of their patrons, the fossil fuel industry. If Trump’s call for manned planetary exploration is another puff of that smokescreen, it would hardly be surprising.

Sending humans into space would give Americans a sense of mission and grandeur, but that’s mostly a sign of civic immaturity. Take the same sums and spend them on curing disease — whether the biological malady of cancer or the social maladies of poverty and hunger — and pride will surely follow. Keep the astronauts at home, and there will be much more money available to send robots farther out than humans could ever go, and to bring back immeasurably more knowledge.

–Michael Hiltzik
Trump’s Call for Human Space Exploration Is Hugely Wasteful and Pointless

Before health reform, 1 out of every 6 Californians was uninsured. By 2016, only 7.4% lacked coverage.

Because it expanded its Medicaid program, California has provided insurance to its most vulnerable residents. An additional 1.6 million people get coverage through California’s exchange, where premiums are among the cheapest in the country and the average rate increase for 2017 was just 5%, a strong sign of a stable market…

All of this progress is now in jeopardy, and even congressional Republicans seem to understand that their Obamacare “fix” is folly. That’s why the bill delays the harshest spending cuts until 2020, when the 2018 midterm elections are behind them.

But the Republican bill would set chaos in motion because it would immediately eliminate the individual mandate — that is, the tax penalty imposed on those who don’t purchase insurance. Without that mandate, some healthy people will choose to forgo coverage, knowing they can always enroll later if they get sick. Those who keep their insurance will therefore be less healthy than average. Insurers will have to jack up their premiums to cover those sicker enrollees.

That means California’s stable market will start to teeter. Large premium spikes are likely; in some rural areas, insurers might pull out altogether. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that 1 out of 4 people on the exchanges would lose their coverage…

California has a shot at preventing that collapse, however, as do other states where Democrats are in charge, including New York, Connecticut, Washington, and Oregon. For 2018 and 2019, almost every part of Obamacare except for the individual mandate will remain intact. California can patch that hole by replacing the individual mandate at the state level. Call it the Golden State Mandate.

–Nicholas Bagley
The GOP Obamacare Replacement Would Help the Rich, Hurt the Poor and Unleash Chaos

Until Tuesday, President Trump and Stephen K Bannon did a good job of keeping their base happy. They threw out red meat on immigration, ruthlessly attacked the press, cooked up an anti-Barack Obama conspiracy (to replace the birther conspiracy) and continued to talk tough on trade. If his actions and rhetoric horrified all Democrats, most independents, some thinking Republicans and the press, he did not care. Keep the base happy, stick to the nativist, protectionist Bannon hymnal.

Then on Tuesday, Trump embraced the GOP healthcare bill, which will keep or even expand the “administrative state” and which has been vilified by conservatives. He tweeted, “Our wonderful new Healthcare Bill is now out for review and negotiation. ObamaCare is a complete and total disaster — is imploding fast!” Trump also said after a meeting with members, “We’re going to do something that’s great. And I am proud to support the replacement plan released by the House of Representatives.”

Now, whatever you think of the merits, it won’t pass as currently designed. Moreover, it is especially harmful to Trump’s lower-income, older Rust Belt supporters.

The Kaiser Foundation has a user-friendly map and calculator which shows which states (most of them) and which counties specifically would pay more under the GOP American Health Care Act and which pay more under the Affordable Care Act. In almost every single county in Iowa, Michigan and Ohio, a 60-year-old with $30,000 in income would pay more for coverage… Congratulations, House Republicans and Trump, you’re on the side of rich New England millennials. Seriously, this would be a tragedy for the “forgotten” Americans and hence a political disaster for Trump.

From a political and policy standpoint, the smart move would have been to deplore the bill and tell the House to go back to work. Instead, Trump tied himself to the mast of a sinking ship…

Democrats considering a run in 2020 must be delighted. “Trump’s no friend of the working man,” they will claim. “He’s just as mean-spirited as every other Republican,” they will say. Democrats will hang the GOP healthcare bill around the necks of Republican incumbents. GOP voters who will be enraged [that] the party did not do what it promised may sit home, or vote for challengers…

I find it hard to believe that in the end Trump won’t hang the House Republicans out to dry. (That would please Bannon, who has had a temporary truce with [Paul] Ryan.) He will need to distance himself from the impending disaster. We’ll have to wait and see how he does it.

–Jennifer Rubin
How Trump Blew It on Healthcare

Afterword

Do check out the KFF interactive graph. It’s amazing. Compare how the the House bill will affect people making $20,000 per year with people making $75,000 per year. This will not make Trump’s base happy — assuming they notice.

That we do have evidence of Americans having actual contact with Russians — quite a lot of evidence about quite a lot of Americans in Trump’s orbit — ought to be a clue that “McCarthyism” is not the most apt analogy. Indeed, it is a much closer description for the methods used by Trump himself.

Since “McCarthyism” means different things to different people, a brief reminder of just what Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy did may be helpful. During and after World War II, conservative Republicans considered Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic and foreign policies socialistic and un-American. Conservative critics linked the two criticisms together: Roosevelt had enlarged the role of the federal government, and he and his successor, Harry Truman, had cooperated with the Soviets during and after the war. At times his coalition included some communist spies, a fact that gave enough surface plausibility for McCarthy to claim that the New Deal under Roosevelt and Truman was fundamentally a communist conspiracy.

McCarthyism was a series of specific lies in service of the larger conceptual lie. The specific lies insisted that the federal government was honeycombed with Soviet spies who were colluding openly with the Democratic Party. The larger lie was an attempt to erase the distinction between communists and New Deal Democrats, whose points of contact were short-lived and minimal, and by the postwar era had grown deeply estranged as Harry Truman confronted the USSR, McCarthy and his allies, of course, viewed it just the other way around. To them, the partnership between the New Deal and communism was a larger truth, which justified McCarthy’s smaller lies.

There are certainly some parallels between the charges made by McCarthy then and the charges made against Trump now. Both involve accusations of improper ties to Russia, and both rely on parsing evidence that is not wholly public. And it is also true that, if you search the internet, you can find some unfounded or even silly claims being made against Trump. This is a big country, after all.

That said, the differences overwhelm the similarities. The differences begin with the factual basis. If McCarthy had limited his accusations to cases where he had some solid basis for suspicion — like Alger Hiss, a State Department employee who really was a Soviet spy — then “McCarthyism” would not be a word. To apply the term “McCarthyism” to any suspicion of hidden or inappropriate relations with a hostile foreign power is to dilute the term beyond any useful meaning. The case for concern about Trump’s relationship with Russia does not rely on conspiracy thinking. There is an extensive public record.

It is the parallels between McCarthy and Trump, rather than McCarthy and Trump’s adversaries, that are most compelling. As some have noted, Trump was literally mentored by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man. Trump, like McCarthy, alleges the existence of a shadowy cabal of government bureaucrats to which he attributes near unlimited power. Representative Steve King’s plea for Trump to “purge leftists from executive branch before disloyal, illegal, and treasonist acts sink us” is indistinguishable from McCarthy’s plan…

Trump, like McCarthy, uses reckless accusations to whip his supporters into a frenzy and disorient his foes. A White House official, speaking to Mike Allen, inadvertently let slip Trump’s most McCarthyite quality: his indifference to truth. “The president just has a great nose for these things,” the official told Allen. “It’s the bureaucratic leaks — the deep state — that bother him most. Even if it turns out not to be true that they surveilled Trump Tower, he will have a very good point to make about the level of sabotage coming from Obama holdovers.” The giveaway is “even if it turns out not to be true.” Trump didn’t float this scenario as a possibility, he asserted it as fact. But like every conspiracy theory he has floated — from Obama’s allegedly forged birth certificate to Rafael Cruz’s alleged role in the Kennedy assassination — the facts of the case have no relevance to Trump.

–Jonathan Chait
Donald Trump Is the Perpetrator of McCarthyism, Not the Victim of It

One of the main ways that Obamacare increased insurance coverage was by expanding the Medicaid program to cover millions more low-income Americans. Prior to the health law, the entitlement was restricted to specific groups of low-income Americans (pregnant women, for example, and the blind and disabled).

Obamacare opened the program up to anyone below 138 percent of the poverty line (about $15,000 for an individual) in the 31 states that opted to participate.

Initial GOP plans would have ended this coverage expansion outright — but in a big reversal, the replacement bill will allow Medicaid expansion to continue through January 1, 2020. States will be able to continue to enroll people in the program. States that haven’t expanded yet but are considering the option could join the Medicaid expansion, and enroll people over the same time period as well.

In 2020, enrollment in the Medicaid expansion will “freeze” and states will no longer be able to sign new enrollees up for the program. Legislators expect that enrollment would slowly decline, as enrollees’ incomes change and they shift off the program…

There are significant changes to Medicaid in the American Health Care Act outside of the expansion, too. This bill would convert Medicaid to a “per capita cap” system, where states would get a lump sum from the federal government for each enrollee.

This is different from current Medicaid funding. Right now, the federal government has an open-ended commitment to paying all of a Medicaid enrollee’s bills, regardless of how high they go.

Previous analyses of different version of this proposal suggest it could lead to very deep cuts to Medicaid. It’s unclear, at this point, how much this new version of the policy would reduce Medicaid spending.

–Sarah Kliff
The American Health Care Act: The Republicans’ Bill to Replace Obamacare

President Donald Trump’s White House hunkered down unexpectedly Saturday to formulate a response to the president’s bizarre, unhinged tweets that morning accusing former President Barack Obama and members of the Obama administration of illegally “wire tapping” Trump Tower telephones in the weeks before the election. Suspicion quickly mounted that Trump lashed out after reading a Breitbart article, which amplified right-wing radio host Mark Levin’s call for Congress to investigate “Obama’s ‘Silent Coup’” against Trump.

Considering the explosiveness of Trump’s allegations, and the likelihood that they were created from whole cloth, his aides would have been well advised to begin the followup process by asking Trump, “Why did you tweet that? Was Breitbart your source?” Instead, Trump and his retinue have decided that the wisest course of action is to pretend the accusations may have merit, and ask Congress to get to the bottom of them.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t anywhere close to prepared to rebuff Trump, and have decided instead to pretend Trump’s allegations might be well-founded. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes promised in an official statement to “make inquiries into whether the government was conducting surveillance activities on any political party’s campaign officials or surrogates.” …

It is alarming for Trump to seek an investigation of the Obama administration on the basis of right-wing agitprop and raw impulse. Under slightly different circumstances, it is easy to imagine Trump and his Republican supplicants ruining the lives of innocent people with this kind of behavior, corroding the rule of law in the process. But in this specific case, what he’s actually asking for is an expansion of the various investigations into Russian campaign meddling and the Trump campaign’s connections to it. Democrats should happily oblige.

As Nunes noted in his statement, his interest in Trump’s allegations stems from the fact that “one of the focus points of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation is the US government’s response to actions taken by Russian intelligence agents during the presidential campaign.” In other words, to the extent that House investigators are taking orders from Trump, they will be digging further into the question of whether the Trump campaign and the Russian government conspired against Clinton. In light of the strenuousness of Obama’s denial, and Comey’s extraordinary interest in clearing the FBI’s name publicly, it is likely that Nunes’ inquiry will either reveal serious probable cause for investigating Trump or that Trump’s accusations don’t have even tenuous connection to reality…

When that investigation is over, it will either clear Trump and his team or it won’t, but in either case it will almost certainly reveal that Trump is willing to abuse the megaphone of the presidency to smear his political enemies and seek recriminations against them. The question for all the Republicans humoring Trump right now will then be: What are you going to do about it?

–Brian Beutler
Trump Has Royally Screwed Congressional Republicans