Inside the Trumpcare meltdown - Axios

When the balky hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus
visited the White House earlier this week, this was Steve Bannon's
opening line, according to people in the conference room in the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building:

Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.

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334 words

• Bannon's point was: This is the
  Republican platform. You're the conservative wing of the Republican
  Party. But people in the room were put off by the dictatorial mindset.
• One of the members replied:
  "You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18
  years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn't listen to him, either."
• Started on the wrong foot:
  Repeal-and-replace was always snakebit. Ryan had begun the process
  before Trump's inauguration. "He boxed us in," said one person close to
  the fight. "We didn't have any choice."
• Was always wobbly: Trump
  relied too long on assurances from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and
  HHS Secretary Tom Price that they had the process in hand. And "Ryan was
  telling him it was fine, and they'd bring it together at the end."
  Instead, the bottom fell out.

Inside the Trumpcare meltdown - Axios

Two-thirds of cancer mutations are random and unavoidable, scientists claim - ScienceAlert

 “Almost two-thirds of cancer mutations are caused by random DNA-copying
errors during cell division and are impossible for us to avoid,
regardless of lifestyle and the genes we inherit from our parents,
according to new research. . . . If the findings end up being accepted
by other cancer researchers, the idea that randomness – in other words,
bad luck – is more significant in causing cancer than other contributing
factors could amount to what Tomasetti calls ‘a complete paradigm shift
in how we think about cancer and what causes cancer’.”



 http://www.sciencealert.com/two-thirds-of-cancer-mutations-are-random-and-unavoidable-scientists-claim

18 Major Scandals in Obama's ‘Scandal-Free’ Presidency - Breitbart

President Obama and his mouthpieces
have embarked on a bizarre scheme to hypnotize America into forgetting
the many scandals of his presidency. They seem to think that intoning
“this administration hasn’t had a scandal” over and over again
will make history disappear. It’s the lamest Jedi Mind Trick ever, and
is being pushed on people who know Star Wars is just a movie.

Here’s a short list of the many scandals Team Obama thinks it can make America forget:


The great “stimulus” heist: Obama
seems to think nobody will remember he grabbed almost a trillion
dollars for “stimulus” spending, created virtually zero private-sector
jobs with it, allowed a great deal of the money to vanish into thin air, and spent the rest of his presidency complaining that he needed hundreds of billions more to repair roads and bridges.


Vast sums of taxpayer money were wasted on foolish projects
that came close to the Keynesian economic satire of hiring some people
to dig holes, and others to fill them in. Obama added insult to injury
by appointing Vice President Joe Biden as the “sheriff” who would supposedly find all that missing stimulus loot.






Americans mostly ended up footing the bill for was an army of government jobs, and a lavish network of slush funds
for the Democratic Party and its union allies. We’re supposed to forget
about all that because years later, Obama’s weak economy finally
dragged itself to something like normal “official” employment levels…
with the U.S. national debt doubled, and our workforce rate reduced
to Carter-era lows. Sorry, Democrats, but that’s more than just failed
policy. It’s one of the worst government-spending scandals in our
history. Democrats will howl to the moon over far, far smaller abuses of
taxpayer money during the Trump administration, should any occur.


Operation Fast and Furious: Obama
partisans seem to think any given example of abuse or ineptitude by
their man stopped being a “scandal” the moment it seemed clear he
wouldn’t be impeached over it. Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama
administration’s insane program to use American gun dealers and straw
purchasers to arm Mexican drug lords, is a scandal with a huge body count, prominently including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata, plus hundreds of Mexican citizens. Agent Terry’s family certainly thinks it qualifies as a scandal.


It
is difficult to imagine any Republican administration surviving
anything remotely close to Fast and Furious. The media would have dogged
a Republican president without respite, especially when it became clear
his Attorney General was putting political spin ahead of accountability
and the safety of the American people. Remember, AG Eric Holder escaped
perjury charges by claiming he didn’t know what his own subordinates
were doing – a pioneering, but sadly not unique, example of an Obama
official using his or her incompetence as a defense.
For years afterward, we would hear some version of “I’m not a crook,
I’m just completely inept” everywhere from the Department of Health and
Human Services to the Department of Veterans Affairs.






But this was Barack Obama, so the media downplayed Fast and Furious news… to the point where viewers of NBC News learned about the scandal for the first time when Holder was on the verge of being held in contempt by Congress for it.


The relatively benign explanation
for the astounding Fast and Furious scandal is that Obama’s Justice
Department wanted to release guns into the Mexican wild, like so many
radio-tagged antelope on a nature show, and follow them to arrest the
big fish of organized crime. (In case you were wondering, no, the guns
didn’t actually have radio tags in them – that was tried in the much smaller, and utterly disastrous, Bush-era program Obama’s team used as a model for their vastly larger and more careless program.) This explanation becomes more difficult to believe, the more you know about how careless the program was, and how abruptly it was shut down after Agent Terry’s death.


The more sinister take on Fast and
Furious is that the Obama administration wanted to create gun crimes in
Mexico so they could complain about lax regulations on American gun
sales – “for the purposes of creating a narrative that they could use in
America to try and thwart our Second Amendment constitutional rights,”
as Andrew Breitbart put it during a 2012 interview.






No matter which interpretation you subscribe to, or how much you think Barack Obama knew about the program when he made scurrilous claims of executive privilege
to shut down investigations, it’s an insult to a large number of murder
victims to claim it wasn’t a scandal. Unfortunately, the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives hasn’t learned as much from the OFF debacle as we might have hoped.


Incidentally, the Border Patrol named
a station in southern Arizona in Agent Brian Terry’s honor. On New
Year’s Eve, persons unknown fired rifle shots at a Border Patrol vehicle near the station.


Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress: This
was a result of Operation Fast and Furious, but it merits distinction
as a separate scandal in its own right. Holder was the first sitting
member of a president’s cabinet in the history of the United States to
be held in contempt of Congress.






Of course, Democrats closed ranks
behind Holder, the White House protected him, and the media allowed
Holder to spin the contempt vote as mere “political theater.” In
reality, it was a difficult step that responsible members of Congress
didn’t want to take, and it was fully justified by Holder’s disgraceful
conduct in the Fast and Furious investigation. No reasonable person
could possibly review the way OFF was handled and conclude it was an
example of transparency and accountability.


ObamaCare: Everything about ObamaCare is a scandal, from the President’s incessant lies about keeping your old plan if you liked it, to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s “we need to pass it to find out what’s in it” dereliction of Congressional duty.


ObamaCare is a scam, pure and simple – sold on false pretenses by people who knew it wasn’t going to work the way they promised. It doesn’t feel right to dismiss it as a “failed” scheme when so much of the failure was intentional.
The bill was so sloppily crafted that Democrats were basically signing
blank sheets of paper when they rushed it through Congress in a
foul-smelling cloud of back-room deals. ObamaCare’s designers
precipitated a constitutional crisis by forgetting they left in a provision
to cut subsidies for states that didn’t set up health-care exchanges – a
provision that would have killed the entire program stone-dead two
years ago, if it had been enforced as written.


The Supreme Court rewrote ObamaCare on the fly twice to keep it alive, which is a scandal in and of itself. President Obama delayed and rewrote the law so often it was impossible to keep track of the changes, cutting Congress out of the loop completely. (Actually, someone did keep careful track of them, and the tally was up to 70 distinct changes by January 2016.)


That made some of Obama’s rewritten mandates and deadlines blatantly illegal
– but then, the Affordable Care Act isn’t really a “law” in the sense
American government understood the term. In practice it became something
entirely new, an enabling act that gave the executive unlimited power
to do whatever it thought necessary to keep the system running. If
subverting the American system of government isn’t a scandal, what is?


And let’s not forget the scandal of ObamaCare’s disastrous launch, foisted on the American people even though its designers knew it had severe flaws – the billion-dollar website that cost another billion dollars to fix
after it crashed, accompanied by a constellation of state exchanges
that blew up like Roman candles of bureaucratic incompetence. Let us not
forget the absolute zero accountability for this disaster, mismanaged
by everyone from President Obama to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who
treated the biggest new government program in several generations as
though it were a minor side project that could be handled by
subordinates with minimal supervision.


Spying on journalists: Establishment media came about as close to falling out of love with Barack Obama as ever when his administration was caught spying on journalists.


Why, if the reporter subjected to the most egregious surveillance, James Rosen, didn’t work for Fox News, the mainstream media might have started treating Obama like a (shudder) Republican. Rosen was treated so badly that even Attorney General Eric Holder eventually admitted feeling a bit of “remorse” about it. Apparently he felt so much anguish that he suffered temporary amnesia and forgot to tell Congress that he signed off on the request to wiretap Rosen while he was testifying under oath.


The IRS scandal: The selective targeting
of conservative groups by a politicized Internal Revenue Service was a
scandal grenade Democrats and their media pals somehow managed to
smother, even though the story began with the IRS admitting wrongdoing.


Democrats suffocated the scandal by acting like circus clowns
during congressional hearings, but at no point were the actual facts of
the case truly obscured: yes, pro-life and Tea Party groups were
deliberately targeted for extra scrutiny, their tax exemption
applications outrageously delayed until after the 2012 election without
actually being refused.
If anything remotely comparable had been done to, say, environmentalist
and minority activist groups by the IRS under a Republican
administration, the results would have been apocalyptic.


There’s also no question about the facts of the follow-up scandal, in which IRS officials brazenly lied about having backups of relevant computer data. The American people were expected to believe that multiple state-of-the-art hard drives failed, and were instantly shredded instead of being subjected to data recovery procedures.


Luckily for the politicized IRS, the Justice Department was hyper-politicized under Obama too, so no charges were filed, and scandal kingpin Lois Lerner got to enjoy her taxpayer-funded retirement after taking the Fifth to thwart lawful congressional investigation.



There are 12 more read the whole thing:



18 Major Scandals in Obama's ‘Scandal-Free’ Presidency - Breitbart