Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 69, Ed. 1 Saturday, December 3, 2016 Page: 4 of 10
ten pages : ill.View a full description of this newspaper.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
4 - SATURDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2016
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
Taylor Armerdina
Letters Policy
Trump and the
GOP Congress
The Gainesville Daily Register welcomes
your letter to the editor. We ask that it be
brief and to the point. All letters are subject
to editing for clarity and length.
One letter per writer will be published in
the same week.
Email should be addressed to editor©
gainesvilleregister.com.
All letters must contain a physical address
and daytime phone number, although only
names and hometown will be published.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Barack Obama
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
By all reckonings, the demographic group most
responsible for Donald Trump’s presidential victory
was working class white voters with no college
degrees.
They make up 42 percent of the population; 70
percent of them turned out to vote and Trump won
67 percent of their votes.
From one day to the next, it’s hard to know what
Trump’s policies really are. This is not a man with a
long and consistent policy record, nor a fealty to fact.
But much of what Trump wants will have to
be done in cooperation with Congress, a body
dominated by Republicans whose intentions do not
bode well for Trump’s working-class supporters.
Consider the Affordable Care Act, which Trump
has vowed to repeal and replace with “something
terrific.” He told the Wall Street Journal he’s
rethinking his position, but congressional
Republicans aren’t. And on Monday, Trump re-
waffled, naming two key health policy appointees
who want to make drastic changes in programs that
benefit Trump’s base.
Trump named Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., to head the
Department of Health and Human Services, which
oversees all government health care programs.
To head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, he named Seema Verma.
She is a consultant who advised several
Republican governors, including Indiana’s
Mike Pence, now the vice president-elect, on
modifying Obamacare to make it more palatable to
conservatives.
Only 70 percent of working-class whites with no
college degrees are actually employed, but not all of
them have access to health insurance through their
jobs.
Census Bureau data show that among families
with household income of $49,000 or less, the number
of uninsured Americans dropped by 8.6 percent in
the past two years.
Price, the HHS secretary-designate, is the author
of the 242-page “Empowering Patients Act,” one of
several GOP proposals that would gut the Affordable
Care Act. It’s an insurance-company friendly
measure that would make it cheaper to insure young
and healthy Americans and less affordable for the
older Americans who are more likely to get sick. In
both cases, policies would be less comprehensive.
And then there’s Medicaid, the health care
program for the poor and disabled. In states that
adopted Medicaid expansion plans — like Pence’s
Indiana — about 15 million more Americans gained
coverage through Medicaid. Under most GOP “repeal
and replace” plans, most of them would lose it.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., advocates
turning Medicaid funding over to state governments.
The feds would send states a block grant, possibly
for Medicaid (including nursing homes), food stamps,
supplemental Social Security for the disabled and
Pell Grants as well. States could divvy it up how they
want.
All of that, plus changes to Obamacare, could
mean a lot of Trump’s voters are in for an unpleasant
surprise. They can’t say they weren’t warned.
Reprinted from the St. Louise Post Dispatch
Distributed by Creators.com
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
Taylor Armerding is an independent columnist. Contact him at t.armerding@
verizon.net.
SAY THAT
THIS IS
FAKE NEWS
AS WELL.
NEXT
THINS
Vice President
Joe Biden
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@whitehouse.gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068, Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0124
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
z
K
/
/I
— isn’t doing this for herself. She’s doing it for Clinton. She
has raised more than $6.5 million from Clinton supporters to
pay for it.
The Clinton campaign has even signed on to participate —
although they contend that it’s just to make sure everything
is done fairly.
Sure. Are average voters really credulous enough to think
that Clinton’s fingerprints aren’t all over this? Stein is an
obvious straw for her.
Clinton’s silence speaks volumes. If she wasn’t being just as
reckless as Trump in seeking to cast doubt on the credibility
of the election, she would have called a press conference
immediately to excoriate Stein, demand that she stand down
and ask her supporters not to donate to the recount effort.
She has done none of that. Clearly, she wants what is
happening to happen. And no reporters are hounding her.
None of the mainstream TV network news operations has
reported trying to get Clinton to say whether she supports
the recount or not, and none is saying how awful it is that she
would, even indirectly, question the electoral results.
Beyond that is the general issue of presidential lies. Obama
has told some “whoppers,” too, although for some reason
nobody in the mainstream media thought to call them that.
The biggest, of course, was regarding his signature
legislative initiative, the hilariously misnamed “Affordable
Care Act,” otherwise known as Obamacare.
The president declared, multiple times while promoting the
bill, that under the legislation, “If you like your doctor, you’ll
be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan,
you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”
Then, after he was able to ram it through with the help
of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and the lie was
exposed, he claimed that what he had actually said was,
“You can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law
passed.”
PolitiFact rated it “lie of the year.”
There was further confirmation that this was a deliberate,
premeditated lie when a video surfaced of MIT professor
Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the bill, saying that
of course the promises being made were lies, but they had
to be told because of the “stupidity” of American voters who
wouldn’t have supported it had they known the truth.
After that the president tried to pretend he didn’t even
know Gruber — another obvious lie.
And the response from the mainstream media? A collective
shrug. They’re perfectly fine with lying if it is in behalf of an
agenda they support.
Those are not Obama’s only lies, of course. There is a long
list of them, compiled by credible, nonpartisan organizations.
You can look them up.
But then, he is very smooth when he lies. He doesn’t tweet
them. Which shouldn’t matter, but in a world of double
standards, it does.
7
Scrutiny of Trump hasn't been as
sharp for Clinton and Obama
Another week, another double standard.
It’s not that the scrutiny President-elect Donald Trump
is getting from the media is unwarranted. He ought to be
getting heat about how he is going to eliminate conflicts of
interest between his vast business operations and his duties
as president.
He ought to be confronted about why, after promising to
“drain the swamp,” some of his top administration picks are
clearly swamp-dwellers.
It is perfectly fair to compile a list of
the promises he made - according to the
Washington Post, there are 282 of them,
“many of which he will never be able to
keep” - although it would be nice if there
was a comparison of promises made and
not kept by previous presidents like Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush and outgoing
President Barack Obama.
It is perfectly fair to note that his recent
complaint about voter fraud — millions
of illegal immigrants allegedly voting in
California, Virginia and New Hampshire — is “baseless” and
“without foundation.”
Some commentators called it a “whopper” and claim that
Trump’s deliberate lies are “unprecedented” in an American
president.
Perhaps that will turn out to be the case. But he is not even
president yet. And that is where the double standard appears
— calling his problem with the truth “unprecedented” in
advance of him taking office is as big a whopper as any
Trump has told.
If the media were equally aggressive about Obama,
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Green
Party candidate Jill Stein, they would be saying some of the
same things about them.
So far, the general response is that Trump lies more than
Clinton or Obama do. What a comfort.
But specifically on the issue of questioning election
results, it is worth recalling that there was a massive media
meltdown after the final Clinton/Trump debate when Trump
refused to say in advance that he would accept the result.
Multiple outlets called it “an attack on democracy itself,” and
a direct threat to the republic. Clinton called it “horrifying.”
There is no such meltdown now over Stein’s recent filing
for recounts in three swing states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania
and Michigan. Nor is there any meltdown over Clinton’s
silence about it.
Stein’s argument for seeking the recounts is just as lacking
in credibility as Trump’s claim of illegal voting. While a few
computer experts noted some anomalies in voting patterns in
those three states, they offered zero evidence of hacking or
fraud — so her accusations are baseless, just like Trump’s. Is
the difference that she didn’t tweet about it?
Then there is Clinton, who knows how to tell lies or make
baseless accusations without getting her own hands dirty.
Obviously, Stein — who got all of 1 percent of the vote
THE tl
ONW
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Newspaper.
Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 69, Ed. 1 Saturday, December 3, 2016, newspaper, December 3, 2016; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1323857/m1/4/: accessed June 21, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cooke County Library.