A collection of opinionated commentaries on culture, politics and religion compiled predominantly from an American viewpoint but tempered by a global vision. My Armwood Opinion Youtube Channel @ YouTube I have a Jazz Blog @ Jazz
and a Technology Blog @ Technology. I have a Human Rights Blog @ Law
"Before we get to the songs, I wanted to discuss the 2016 U.S. presidential election with you. Much has been made of Trump’s cozying up to Putin. He’s complimented his leadership, has close business ties with Russia, and was forced to dismiss his old campaign manager due to his shady financial links with the Kremlin. It seems Putin wants Trump to win.
It’s pretty interesting that Donald Trump refused to release his tax returns. It speaks for itself. What Putin is doing right now with information connected to the American election doesn’t surprise me at all because don’t forget that he comes from the KGB and was trained as a KGB agent, and used a lot of the information he culled there for creating his own wealth—which is why he’s one of the wealthiest men on earth right now. He doesn’t need more money right now, he just wants more power over the world.
What sort of similarities do you see between Trump and Putin?
It’s the so-called “strong man” psychology—but it’s not a “strong man” psychology, it’s an asshole psychology. They want to oppress people and don’t want them to raise their voices. Their reaction when it comes to people who try to criticize them is very similar: Putin put us in jail, and Donald Trump wants to put Hillary Clinton in jail if he’s elected President of the United States. So it makes perfect sense that Putin would want someone like Trump to take power. And it’s not just Trump. Putin is also in bed with Marine Le Pen in France, and is supporting Viktor Orban in Hungary. These are people who want to establish a new conservative right-wing oppressive order all around the world, and we need to do everything we can to stop them."
"You can draw a straight line from Jorge Ramos’s confrontation with Donald Trump to his new documentary Hate Rising, which premieres this Sunday night at 10 p.m. on both Fusion in English and Univision in Spanish.
“The documentary’s origin is precisely that press conference,” Ramos tells The Daily Beast in a new interview the morning after the third and final presidential debate. “Because that’s when I realized that hate is contagious.”
It was late August 2015, just two months after Trump launched his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and criminals, when the Univision anchor and Fusion host stood up at a press conference and tried to ask him about his anti-immigration rhetoric. “Go back to Univision!” Trump shouted at Ramos as his security guards removed him from the room.
Trump later said he was willing to sit down for an interview with Ramos, but never followed through on that promise. More than a year after their press conference clash, Ramos maintains that he was “right to confront Donald Trump right from the beginning,” unlike some other journalists who he believes came to that conclusion much too late in the election cycle.
In the film, Ramos meets with an Imperial Wizard of the KKK on a dark Texas night and watches silently as a group of neo-Nazis in Ohio burn an enormous swastika. Like the Trump supporter who told him to “get out of my country,” white nationalist leader Jared Taylor tells Ramos he doesn’t belong in the United States. “Unless whites are prepared to exclude people, then they will be shoved aside,” Taylor says. It is a position rooted in a deep fear about losing what he views as his rightful place in the social order, and is eerily reminiscent of Trump’s desire to “Make America Great Again.”
Though he did not speak to Ramos for the film, Trump dominates Hate Rising—especially in the exclusive clip below when the host visits a group of children in Texas who fear the prospect of their parents’ deportation should Trump win the presidency. “My dad is from Mexico and if Donald Trump wins, he’s going back to Mexico and we’re going to be separated,” one 8-year-old boy says. This, Ramos tells me, is “The Trump Effect.”
"SAN FRANCISCO — Major websites were inaccessible to some East Coast users in the United States Friday morning and to people across the country in the early afternoon after a company that serves as an internet switchboard said it was under attack.
Users reported problems reaching a range of websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.
Dyn, whose servers monitor and reroute internet traffic, said it began experiencing what security experts call a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. The company, based in Manchester, N.H., said it had fended off the assault by 9:30 a.m. But by 11:52 a.m., Dyn said it was again under attack.
A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, occurs when hackers flood the servers that run a target’s site with internet traffic until it stumbles or collapses under the load. Such attacks are common, but there is evidence they are becoming more powerful, more sophisticated and increasingly aimed at core internet infrastructure providers.
Going after companies like Dyn can cause far more damage than aiming at a single website."
“Another new accuser,” the most depressing three-word combination in the English language of late, is getting more play today, as the 13th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct has come forward.
Flanked by attorney Gloria Allred in the London Hotel in New York, 45-year-old yoga instructor Karena Virginia fought back tears as she described the fear she felt in coming forward, for herself and her family. In a nod to last night’s presidential debate, she remarked before describing the incident that she’d been told Trump would likely think of her as “another nasty woman.”
Virginia alleges that she was waiting for a car to take her home from the 1998 U.S. Open in Queens when Donald Trump lecherously glared at her and made comments about her appearance to his male companions. Then he allegedly grabbed her right arm and made contact with her right breast.
“I flinched,” Virginia said. “He said: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ I felt intimidated and powerless. I said yes.”
Virginia, who bears a slight passing resemblance to Trump’s wife Melania, said that the incident left her feeling embarrassed and that she blamed herself for what he did to her. She altered the way she dressed for years afterward, she said, opting for shawls and longer dresses."
"An NYPD officer who killed a mentally ill woman in her Bronx apartment on Tuesday was sued twice for excessive force before Tuesday’s fatal encounter.
Around 6 p.m. Tuesday night, Sgt. Hugh Barry and an unnamed officer responded to reports of Deborah Danner acting "in an irrational manner" in a the hallway of her apartment building. An NYPD spokesperson told The Daily Beast neighbors had made “multiple 911 calls” about her behaviour on previous date.
This latest call involved a pair of scissors, which Danner was allegedly wielding while acting erratically in the hall. When police arrived, Danner had returned to her apartment, still clutching the scissors. An officer persuaded her to put them down. Then, according to police, the scene grew chaotic. Danner allegedly picked up a baseball bat and approached Barry. Instead of using his taser, as police protocol suggests, Barry shot Danner in the chest twice, killing her.
"What is clear in this one instance, we failed. I want to know why it happened," Police Commissioner James O'Neill said during a Wednesday press conference. "That's not how it's supposed to go. It's not how we train, our first obligation is to preserve life, not to take a life when it can be avoided. We need to know why.”
The NYPD’s top brass is now investigating why Barry resorted to lethal force, but his service history suggests trigger-happy tendencies.
In 2012, Barry was allegedly part of a violent arrest on 25-year-old Gregory Peters. According to a 2012 lawsuit, Peters was lawfully outside a midtown Manhattan building when officers pepper sprayed him, and forced him to the ground, where they punched and kicked him.
Barry was the only officer named in the case, which also accuses him of booking Peters on false charges “to cover up the above mentioned acts of brutality and abuse of authority.”
City attorneys settled the 2012 case for an undisclosed sum without admitting fault."
"The Central Intelligence Agency’s torture of detainees, and the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ international communications, were two of the most controversial programs our government implemented after Sept. 11. Both are now widely considered to have been illegal, even though both were authorized by official legal analyses that were withheld from the public — a phenomenon known as “secret law.”
The notion of secret law is as counterintuitive as it is unsettling. When most of us think of law, we think of statutes passed by Congress, and we take for granted that they are public.
"It could have been a cold war drama. The world watched this week as accusations and counter-accusations were thrown by the American and Russian governments about documents stolen during ahack of the Democratic National Committeeand theemail accountof Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.
The notion that public figures have any right to privacy appears to have been lost in the furore surrounding the story, stolen correspondence being bandied around in attempts to influence the outcome of one of the nastiest, most vitriolic US presidential campaigns in history.
Some have argued that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton’s emails were fair game for hacking because had they not been held on a private server, they would have been subject to freedom of information requests and available to the general public.
There may be some truth to that, but it doesn’t change the fact that correspondence between public figures has allegedly been hacked by those acting under the direction of a foreign government and released for everyone to peruse, with little opportunity for the authors to offer context or even confirm that the contents of the leaks are accurate."
"Hillary Clinton hinted at a possible landslide in the 8 November election, exhorting several thousand supporters at a San Francisco fundraiser on Thursday to help her “have the kind of victory we need” to serve as a “rebuke” to Donald Trump.
On a day when Trump went on the attack – calling women who have accused him of inappropriate touching and kissing “horrible, horrible liars” – an increasingly confident Clinton encouraged her backers to double down on their efforts during the final weeks of the fractious 2016 campaign.
“Everything we care about is at risk,” she said. “If you can help me to have the kind of victory we need, that stands as a rebuke of all the bigotry and bullying we’ve seen, then together, together we will build the future that all of us, particularly the children of our country, deserve to have.”
We knew this was coming again. The racist is almost always a misogynist, and a religious bigot who traffics in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
"Donald Trump lashed out at global elites who undermine American sovereignty through “international banks” — and many observers couldn’t help but notice the underlying anti-Semitic message.
* * *
Throughout the speech, Trump used harsh language that evoked old and ugly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about international bankers who supposedly infiltrate national governments and control the global agenda. Citing recent Clinton campaign emails published by WikiLeaks, Trump told the crowd that "Clinton meets in secret with international banks in order to plot the destruction of US sovereignty." Echoing the rhetoric of Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists, Trump repeatedly referred to "globalists" as the true enemy and Clinton as their handmaiden.
"Donald Trumpdeliberately walked in on two young Miss USA 2001 contestants while they were naked and getting dressed for a rehearsal, one of the former beauty contestants has claimed in an interview with the Guardian.
The two women were putting on their outfits to rehearse the opening number, the former contestant recalled, when Trump, who owned the pageant at the time as part of the Miss Universe family of pageants, burst into the room without a word.
Just before he entered, the former contestant said, she heard the security detail outside the dressing room tell someone approaching the door that the women inside were naked."
"First, I am less struck by the words “dumb,” “stupid,” and “arrogant” than by the words she does not say: “police,” “racism,” “injustice,” or “death.” There is no reckoning with the reason why so many people feel driven to kneel in protest and raise their fist in the name of black lives. It’s as if she doesn’t take this seriously; as if Colin Kaepernick is taking a knee because he’s a bud of Ashton Kutcher and this is all just an elaborate reboot ofPunk’d.
I also find it disturbing that she would even broach the idea of arresting people for taking a knee, even if to say that she wouldn’t be for it, as if that should in any way be a legitimate part of this discussion.
It is stunning that a person who has demonstrated such erudition, thoughtfulness and, when necessary, righteous rage, can be so slapdash, condescending, and completely absent of empathy. As former NFL player Shannon Sharpe said, “I would ask Justice Ginsburg that when you see a man crying, don’t tell him to stop crying. Ask him, say, ‘Sir why are you crying?’
"During the second presidential debate, Donald Trump was asked whether he could be a president to “all the people in the United States.” He had a very specific answer: “I would be a president for all of the people, African Americans, the inner cities,” he replied. Later in the debate, he spoke again of how he was going to help “the African Americans,” who lived in “inner cities,” suffering from high poverty rates, bad educational systems, and no jobs.
There might have been a time when conflating inner cities and African Americans was appropriate shorthand, but it’s just not accurate anymore. The majority of African Americans are living both above the poverty line and outside of the inner cities, rendering Trump’s comments misleading and factually inaccurate."
"No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger"
Man-made climate change has doubled the total area burned by forest fires in the Western U.S. in the past three decades, according to new research.
Damage from forest fires has risen dramatically in recent decades, with the total acres burned in the U.S. rising from 2.9 million in 1985 to 10.1 million in 2015, according to National Interagency Fire Center data. Suppression costs paid by the federal government now top $2 billion."
"Warren E. Buffett is not running for president. But on Monday, Mr. Buffett, the billionaire investor, volunteered more detailed information about his income taxes than Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, ever has.
Mr. Buffett released the information after essentially being called out by Mr. Trump during Sunday night’s presidential debate.
Acknowledging for the first time that he had avoided paying federal income taxes for years by claiming nearly a billion dollars in losses in 1995, Mr. Trump then tried to shift attention to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, accusing some of her wealthy supporters of exploiting tax laws to their own advantage.
“Many of her friends took bigger deductions,” Mr. Trump said. “Warren Buffett took a massive deduction.”
Actually, he did not.
“I have paid federal income tax every year since 1944,” Mr. Buffett wrote in a letter released Monday.
“My 2015 return shows adjusted gross income of $11,563,931,” he revealed. “My deductions totaled $5,477,694.” About two-thirds of those represented charitable contributions, he said. Most of the rest were related to Mr. Buffett’s state income tax payments.
Mr. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the richest men in the world, went on to say: “My federal income tax for the year was $1,845,557. Returns for previous years are of a similar nature in respect to contributions, deductions and tax rates.”
Last year, Mr. Buffett paid about 16 percent of his reported income in federal income taxes.
“I have copies of all 72 of my returns,” Mr. Buffett added, “and none uses a carry forward,” the provision that allows taxpayers like Mr. Trump to use losses from one year to avoid paying personal federal income taxes both on some previous tax returns and in future years.
"With his purchase of the Miss Universe Organization, Mr. Trump was now in the business of young, beautiful women.
They craved his advice and approval, a fact he seemed to understand well.
Temple Taggart, the 21-year-old Miss Utah, was startled by how forward he was with young contestants like her in 1997, his first year as the owner of Miss USA, a branch of the beauty pageant organization. As she recalls it, he introduced himself in an unusually intimate manner.
He kissed me directly on the lips. I thought, “Oh my God, gross.” He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like “Wow, that’s inappropriate.”
–Temple Taggart, 1997 Miss Utah USA
Mr. Trump disputes this, saying he is reluctant to kiss strangers on the lips. But Ms. Taggart said it was not an isolated incident."
"During Sunday night’s debate, Donald Trump told Hillary Clinton that, “if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your [email] situation.” That would constitute an abuse of power. Presidents are not supposed to “instruct” their attorneys general to appoint a “special prosecutor” (now called an “independent counsel.”) The attorney general is supposed to make that decision apolitically, based on her judgment of whether the Justice Department can impartially investigate the case. By pledging that she would follow the advice of the FBI investigators looking into Clinton’s email controversy, Lynch tried to disentangle legal considerations from partisan ones. By promising that he will “instruct” his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor, Trump is pledging exactly the opposite.
But Trump didn’t stop there. He not only said he would make his attorney general appoint an independent counsel, he also vowed to determine the outcome of that counsel’s investigation. If he becomes president, Trumpdeclared, Clinton will “be in jail.”
Under the Constitution, presidents don’t decide who goes to jail. (Except insofar as they have the power to pardon). Courts decide who goes to jail based on their assessment of whether someone broke the law.But Trump’s indifference to the limits on presidential power last night wasn’t surprising. He’s been advertising it since he entered the race.
Last September, after National Review editor Rich Lowry said that Carly Fiorina had “cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon” at a GOP primary debate, Trump tweeted that Lowry “should not be allowed on TV and the FCC should fine him!” Legally, there’s a debate about whether the FCC can fine broadcasters for obscene or indecent behavior. But even if it can, the Commission is supposed to do so based on objective, apolitical criteria. Trump, by contrast, was proposing to use the obscenity laws to silence his critics in the press. Doing so would transform the FCC in the same way Trump last night proposed to transform the independent counsel: from an institution tasked with impartially interpreting the law into a weapon to be used against Trump’s political adversaries."
"Tax experts disputed Donald Trump's claim during Sunday night's debate that some of Hillary Clinton's supporters also took advantage of the tax code.
"Many of her friends took bigger deductions," Trump said. "Warren Buffett took a massive deduction. Soros, who's a friend of hers, took a massive deduction."
n Sunday night's presidential debate, there were more than a dozen falsehoods and inaccuracies. NBC News and our friends at PolitiFact checked out the candidate's claims, and here's what we found.
Trump said he didn't urge people to "check out a sex tape" about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. He did.
Trump said health care costs are going up by 68 percent, 59 percent, 71 percent. The national estimate ranges are far lower.
Trump said Clinton "acid washed" her private email server. She didn't. She used an app called Bleachbit, not a corrosive chemical.
Trump said Clinton doesn't know Russia hacked the DNC. U.S. intelligence has said they very likely did.
Trump said Clinton got a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl "off" his charges. She didn't.
Trump said Clinton laughed at a child rape victim. She didn't.
Trump called Obama's Syrian red line a "line in the sand" while Clinton said she wasn't secretary of state then. They're both wrong.
Trump said Clinton will raise the middle class' taxes. It won't.
Trump said Michelle Obama was in 2008 primary ads attacking Clinton. She wasn't.
Clinton said there's no evidence that her server was hacked. Sure, but the FBI noted that sophisticated hackers wouldn't leave any evidence -- even if they did hack the server.
Clinton said deleted emails were "personal, not official." They weren't all personal.
Trump said the moderators hadn't asked about Clinton's emails. They had just finished a question about them.
Trump said Bernie Sanders accused Clinton of exercising bad judgment. He did.
Trump said the federal immigration enforcement agency ICE endorsed him.They didn't, a union of some ICE employees did.
Clinton said she apologized for the way she talked about Trump's supporters. She said she was sorry for saying half his supporters were deplorable, not for saying they're deplorable.
"Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by 11 points, 46 percent to 35 percent, in a four-way race among likely voters, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey conducted immediately after a tape showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women was released Friday.
The survey, which was conducted before Sunday night’s debate, represents a 5-point jump for Clinton over the past month. "
"In the second presidential debate, Donald Trump once again relied on many dubious and false claims that have been repeatedly been debunked. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, on occasion made a factual misstep, but it didn’t even compare to Trump’s long list of exaggerations.
Here’s a round-up of 25 interesting and suspect claims. As is our practice, we do not award Pinocchios when we do a roundup of facts in debates.
“One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old, was raped at 12. Her client she represented got him off, and she’s seen laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl who was raped.”
— Donald Trump
Trump mixes up a story about a long-ago criminal case. Clinton did not laugh at a rape victim."
He lied about the growth rate of the American economy.
He lied about the state of the job market.
He lied about the trade deficit.
He lied about tax rates.
He lied about his own position on the Iraq War, again.
He lied about ISIS.
He lied about the Benghazi attack.
He lied about the war in Syria.
He lied about Syrian refugees.
He lied about Russia’s hacking.
He lied about the San Bernardino terrorist attack.
He lied about Hillary Clinton’s tax plan.
He lied about her health care plan.
He lied about her immigration plan.
He lied about her email deletion.
He lied about Obamacare, more than once.
He lied about the rape of a 12-year-old girl.
He lied about his history of groping women without their consent.
Finally, he broke with basic democratic norms and called on his political opponent to be jailed — because, in large part, of what he described as her dishonesty.
"Producers of "The Apprentice," the reality showDonald Trumphosted for more than 10 years, are sitting on bombshell footage of the GOP nominee using the N-word, an Emmy-award winning producer claimed Sunday.
In a series of tweets Sunday, producer Chris Nee said she's heard such tapes exist of Trump using the obscenity but isn't in possession of the footage herself.
Nee, who didn’t work on “The Apprentice,” also hinted that she, and many others, had signed a contract with Mark Burnett, the lead producer of the show, that would make anyone who leaks such footage liable to pay a $5 million fine."
Throughout his presidential race, Donald Trump has been the NASCAR candidate: The press and voters seem riveted by his campaign because there’s no telling when there might be a dramatic crash.
For anyone tuning in for that reason, Sunday night’s second presidential debate was just the ticket: a fiery, multi-car pileup. Trump meandered around the stage restlessly, delivered long strings of misleading statements, feuded with the moderators, and promised to prosecute a political rival if he won the race. He openly slapped down his running mate, Mike Pence, over Syria policy, saying, “He and I haven't spoken and I disagree.” In perhaps the most surreal moment of a surreal evening, moderator Anderson Cooper had to tell a major-party nominee for president, “You bragged that you had sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
"The Republican nominee threatened to jail his opponent and dismissed his lewd comments about women as ‘just words, folks’ in the strangest presidential debate America has ever seen."
"Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, already under siege for vulgar comments about forcing women into sex, also had crude, sexually explicit conversations in a series of radio interviews over the past 23 years, even noting how “voluptuous” his daughter was.
On a new batch of recordings from Howard Stern’s radio shows aired Saturday by CNN, Trump said that he would “have no problem” having sex with 24-year-olds, that he “couldn’t care less” if he satisfies the women he sleeps with, that “it’s checkout time” once women reach the age of 35 and that he had engaged in three-way sex.
“Haven’t we all?” Trump told Stern on his SiriusXM satellite radio show in 2008. “Are we babies?”
Trump also described barging in on nude Miss Universe beauty pageant contestants in their dressing room, characterizing his visits as inspections by the contest’s owner."
"When Donald J. Trump promised to turn Muslims away from American shores, they wagged their fingers.
When he mimicked a journalist for his lifelong disability, they tsked-tsked.
When he mocked the mother of a valorous soldier killed in combat, they threatened to walk away from him.
But Republican leaders never did. They justified his behavior, they minimized his offenses, they excused his insults.
So why this?
Why did a decade-old three-minute video provoke a sudden revolt by party officials against their nominee, an uprising that could very well destroy their chances of taking the White House?
Because the glee with which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, by forcibly kissing them and grabbing their genitals, turned a boorish man into an outright predator.
Because the voice captured on a microphone and the face caught on camera are indisputably Mr. Trump’s, breaking through to a distrustful public that doubts much news media coverage but believes powerfully in what it can see and hear for itself.
Because it turns out that even the most self-interested members of the political class, the true weather vanes swinging in the wind, have their limits."
"But if we knew on Friday night that this would be a big story, it’s become an even bigger story throughout the day today (Saturday) as dozens of GOP elected officials have either repudiated Trump, or unendorsed him, or called for him to resign his position at the top of the ticket. Trump had unusually low levels of support from these “party elites” to begin with, but we’d usually seen only a few prominent Republicans repudiate him at a time afterpast controversies. Now, the floodgates have opened, and the whole party is fleeing him. We’ve never seen anything like this in a modern American election campaign. Republicans in 1996 may have given up on Bob Dole to concentrate on saving the Congress, but they weren’t calling for Dole to drop out 30 days before the election."
"Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) on Friday called on GOP nominee Donald Trump to drop out of the presidential race after The Washington Post published an explicit recording from 2005 in which the New York businessman speaks about women in lewd and derogatory terms.
In a conversation with then-”Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush, Trump claimed he tried to have sex with a married woman and could grab women “by the pussy” because he was a celebrity.
Responding to the tape, Huntsman said it was time for Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, to assume the GOP nomination."
"JILL HARTH’S first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.
Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”
"Kids these days want more diverse teachers, a new study shows.
Middle and high school students of all races and ethnicities preferred teachers of color over white ones, according to a recent New York University study — significant considering an “overwhelmingly white teacher force is working with a majority nonwhite student population,” author Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng wrote."
"It’s understandable why critics of the law would leverage the remarks of a former Democratic president -- and spouse of the Democratic nominee -- for their cause.
But in context, it’s also worth noting that Clinton’s actual comments never mentioned the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. In fact, as we reviewed the transcript, we noticed that much of what Clinton said addressed issues that pre-dated the 2010 health care law, including concerns about high costs and a lack of guaranteed coverage.
We’re not fact-checking any of the claims from Clinton’s comments, but we did want to provide his entire remarks. The whole speech can be seen here, with the relevant portion roughly between 25:45 and 28:30.
Now the next thing is, we got to figure out what to do now on health care. Her opponent said, "‘Oh, just repeal it all. The market will take care of it.’" That didn’t work out very well for us, did it? We wound up with the most expensive system in the world and we insured the smallest percentage of people. On the other hand, the current system works fine if you’re eligible for Medicaid, if you’re a lower income working person, if you’re already on Medicare, or if you get enough subsidies on a modest income that you can afford your health care.
But the people that are getting killed in this deal are small businesspeople and individuals who make just a little too much to get any of these subsidies. Why? Because they’re not organized, they don’t have any bargaining power with insurance companies, and they’re getting whacked. So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden, 25 million more people have health care and then the people that are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.
So here’s the simplest thing ― you raise your hands and you think about it ― here’s the simplest thing: Figure out an affordable rate and let people use that ― something that won’t undermine your quality of life, won’t interfere with your ability to make expenses, won’t interfere with your ability to save money for your kid’s college education. And let people buy in to Medicare or Medicaid.
Here’s why. You can let people buy in for just a little bit because unlike where you are now, if you were on the other side of this, if you were an insurer, you’d say, ‘Gosh, I only got 2,000 people in this little pool. Eighty percent of the insurance costs every year come from 20 percent of the people. If I get unlucky in the pool, I’ll lose money.’ So they overcharge you just to make sure, and on good years, they just make a whopping profit from the people who are least able to pay it.
It doesn’t make any sense. The insurance model doesn’t work here. It’s not like life insurance, it’s not like casualties, it’s not like predicting flooding. It doesn’t work. So Hillary believes we should simply let people who are above the line for getting these subsidies have access to affordable entry into the Medicare and Medicaid programs. They’ll all be covered. It will not hurt the program. We will not lose a lot of money. And we ought to do it. That’s what’s in it for you.
Clinton later clarified his remarks at an event in Athens, Ohio, according to NBC News.
"Look, the Affordable Health Care Act did a world of good, and the 50-something efforts to repeal it that the Republicans have staged were a terrible mistake," Clinton said. "We for the first time in our history at least are providing insurance to more than 90 percent of our people."
