Social Media President?

I don’t want to talk about him, I never should have to talk about him, but we HAVE to talk about Donald Trump.

“FDR was the first “radio” president. JFK emerged as the first “television” president. Barack Obama broke through as the first “Internet” president. Next up? Prepare to meet Donald Trump, possibly the first “social media” and “reality TV” president.” He’s everywhere from Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram, and Vine! He’s an unstoppable force that has more press than the Kardashians and that’s saying something.

The billionaire presidential candidate had 6.8 million unique visitors on Facebook just in the last week – crushing his nearest Republican opponent, Jeb Bush, who had 964,000, according to figures provided by the site. Trump also tore it up on Twitter, gaining 100,000 new followers compared to Clinton’s new 45,000 in one week, according to Twitter. Clinton still has more Twitter followers at 4.1 million, compared to Trump’s 3.75 million. But she’s choosy about what to post — with less than 1,400 tweets.

PHOTO: Social Media Today

Now looking back through history in every generation, the triumphant politician is the one who first masters his era’s media tools. “FDR’s “fireside chats” are now legendary. And yet we forget how innovative they were. Here was a president using the most cutting-edge technology of the day to speak directly to millions. His radio persona did not simply mask his physical limitations. You could argue that his physical limitations forced him to develop the rhetorical genius perfectly suited to a radio era.”

“Polished, handsome and energetic, JFK first captured America’s heart through the power of television. He was only outdone when an actual screen actor rose to the highest office in the land: Ronald Reagan. The Gipper’s televised charisma helped earn him the moniker “the Great Communicator.””

So it’s really no surprise that Trump is smashing polls because he has taken over the media. Yes, we do see Hilary in the paper, we do hear about Sanders on the radio; yet is it at the ferocity in which we see Trump? I also believe it has to do with his attitude towards everything; he has a bulldog like attitude in which he’s not afraid to say what he wants when he wants without thinking twice about it. And it’s THAT mindset that is the driving force behind his campaign.

“We thought the billionaire was leaving the world of Entertainment, climbing over a wall and joining us in the sober domain of Politics. But in fact, the opposite happened. “Trump, The Entertainer” stayed exactly where he was. Instead, he pulled the political establishment over the wall and into HIS domain. The political class is now lost in the world of reality television and social media.”

“In the old system of carefully controlled images, going wildly off message with bombastic statements would terminate a campaign. But not on a reality TV show. There, saying and doing crazy stuff just makes you more famous. Under the old system, extreme narcissists turn voters off. On reality TV, braggarts get sky-high ratings.” It’s the entertainment aspect that keeps us coming back, we want to know what insane thing Trump will say next, what meme will go viral in the coming hours on the internet, who will “endorse” Trump next; it’s all just a waiting game to gossip about.

PHOTO: Meme.com

Under the old system, scathing attacks on individuals and ethnic groups would scare away voters. But on Twitter, insulting people and throwing rhetorical bombs doesn’t cost you followers. It usually gains you followers. Lots of them. Under the old rules, retweeting an attack on the sanity of early state voters would send a campaign into a tailspin. In Trump’s world, he can simply blame a phantom “intern” and move on. Nobody even demands to interview the “intern.”

“No wonder almost every time we predict Trump will collapse, he only grows stronger. Trump is not breaking the rules. He is playing by a new set of rules. These are rules that everyday Americans have been living under (and adapting to) for more than a decade. The American pundit class, apparently, is late to this kind of a party.” I find Trump’s racist fear-mongering and anti-worker economic policies horrifying. And I truly hope that the juvenile tone and terrible substance of what he is saying will bring him down, eventually.

“But every political era is shaped by the media environment of its time. The most successful politicians have an innate understanding of that environment and the skill to act on it. In our era, that could be Trump. The reality-show president could soon become reality.”

I really could do without more reality television. But talk to you all next week!

Hugs Xoxo

With the new President around the corner, what is going to happen to our Health Care?

When President Barack Obama became our president he prided himself on making sure every American Citizen was given proper healthcare. But what is exactly Obamacare?

“ObamaCare (the Affordable Care Act) is a US healthcare reform law that expands and improves access to care and curbs spending through regulations and taxes.

The Affordable Care Act’s main focus is on providing more Americans with access to affordable health insurance, improving the quality of health care and health insurance, regulating the health insurance industry, and reducing health care spending in the US. The law contains hundreds of different provisions that address different aspects of “the healthcare crisis” in the US.”

PHOTO: Obamacare Website

Sounds decent right but there are a lot of cons to Obamacare that aren’t making some Americans happy.

• In order to get the money to help insure all these people, there are new taxes (mostly on high-earners and the healthcare industry). The taxes that may affect you directly are the individual mandate and the employer mandate.
• Medicaid expanded using Federal and State funding. Not all States have to expand Medicaid.  The states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid leave 5.7 million of our nations’ poorest people without coverage options.
• Employee health benefits can be expensive. Lower wage workers may end up getting better value through the marketplace, but having employer-sponsored coverage means that they can’t get cost assistance. Also, dependents of employees with coverage are unable to use the marketplace.
• Young people tend to be healthy and to not need coverage as often as older Americans. However, due to low premiums and the benefits of having a plan, young people have some of the best deals of everyone under the ACA when purchasing care.
• Retaining a for-profit healthcare system has economic benefits, but it also means that every aspect of the system requires profit. Americans have higher healthcare costs than other countries, which have more “universal” healthcare systems.

These are only a handful of things but still pretty important. Now Jeb Bush at the last debate, “unveiled his plan Tuesday to repeal and replace Obamacare with a system that he believes will cut back on regulation and lower health care costs. The Republican presidential candidate echoed a recurring theme of Republicans in the 2016 presidential race knocking the President and his signature health insurance law for what Bush described as an egregious example of government overreach that’s wreaked havoc on the economy.”

PHOTO: RIGHTWINGWATCH

It seems he’s one of the many unhappy Americans… but he doesn’t want to do away with everything in the current law. He supports the continuous coverage guarantee provision for people with pre-existing conditions, and previously Bush has said he favors allowing kids to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until the age of 26.

“But he would also employ some familiar conservative ideas, including transferring responsibility to the states to run their own insurance markets and administer their health care safety net. Bush favors capping federal funding to the states — a policy Democrats and consumer advocates say would leave the vulnerable stranded during tough economic times, when applications for Medicaid traditionally soar. Bush would also require able-bodied Americans to work while receiving Medicaid.”

“Instead, Bush said he envisions a system that allows the state exchanges to continue to exist, if they so choose, but would not be mandatory. He wants to enable access to affordable, catastrophic plans and provide a tax credit to purchase policies that protect Americans for costly medical events.

Bush also wants to expand Health Savings Accounts, one of his elder brother’s pet programs. He would increase contribution limits and uses for these accounts, which must be paired with high-deductible health plans. Enrollees can use the funds in their accounts to pay for medical care.

His plan focuses on ending mandates and encouraging incentives. “We won’t force people to buy coverage they don’t want either because they don’t need it or it violates their conscious,” he said.

Though lets talk about the elephant in the room. How do you exactly get rid of Obamacare? You can’t just go POOF and magically replace it with something completely different it does not work that way.

“Repealing Obamacare will not be a simple task. There are more than 10 million people enrolled in the federal and state Obamacare exchanges. Some 87% of them are receiving federal subsidies — averaging $272 a month — to lower the cost of their premiums. And 56% of them receive separate subsidies to reduce their out-of-pocket expenses.”

Now we know Healthcare reform is a big topic and Obamacare may never go away but this is definitely something to think about and put in your back pocket. I’m just happy I can go to my own health center and not worry about the many fees and co-pays.

But I’ll talk to you guys next week!

Hugs Xoxo

 

“One Person, One Vote.”

According to the A.C.L.U (American Civil Liberties Union) on the big Supreme Court voting case in Washington last month said, “states should be allowed to count everybody in drawing election districts, including unauthorized immigrants, rather than only people eligible to vote.”

PHOTO:THE FEDERALIST

To me and probably a lot of others; this is a highly controversial claim. Saying that illegal immigrants should count in drawing election districts is preposterous! I understand that some are working towards becoming legalized United Stated citizens but until that is complete I do not believe you should have the right to vote. Even though I was little when it happened I became a naturalized citizen after being legally adopted from Guatemala; even I, a small child, underwent a process which involved lots of paperwork (my parents did that), along with paying a lawyer here in the United States to garner my citizenship (my parents did that too), and eventually learning the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a small feat but it still counts as something.

But the A.C.L.U is spouting something completely different, “in a pair of recent lawsuits it filed in Rhode Island and Florida, in which it objected to counting prisoners when drawing voting districts. Counting prisoners in one district, the lawsuits said, “dilutes the voting strength and political influence” of eligible voters in other districts.”

Um…what? Are we detecting a bit of hypocrisy here? “There may be good reasons for treating prisoners differently from other people who cannot vote. But it is also true that counting prisoners, often housed in rural areas, tends to amplify the power of Republican voters. Counting unauthorized immigrants, who often live in urban areas, generally helps Democrats.” So it’s a two way street for either party- get the votes from everybody and it’s a completely different ballgame.

In the Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940 (a voting rights case) neither side has given much mind to the millions of people behind bars. “They are not concerned about the counting of ineligible voters, only certain types of ineligible voters,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford who filed a brief supporting the state. “It seems to me a pretty strange constitutional argument that would say that noncitizens should be subtracted from the redistricting calculus but prisoners should be included.”

PHOTO: REUTERS

Persily also added, “that when this comes up at oral argument, they will quickly admit that prisoners, too, should be subtracted from the apportionment count.” The case is set to be argued Dec. 8.

So quick to back down after being confronted on how ludicrous it is.

“In a brief filed in April urging the Supreme Court to consider their appeal, the plaintiffs did quote, a little gleefully, a passage from the A.C.L.U.’s Florida lawsuit. “The ‘one person, one vote’ principle of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment mandates that each person’s vote shall be equal to that of his or her fellow citizens,” the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuit said, in language that could have come from the Texas plaintiffs.”

Since this next section is gonna be hard to break down, I’m taking the next few sections from a NY Times article to address what is really going on.

“Dale Ho, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s voting rights project, said the group had not addressed the prison suits because lawyers also involved in the Rhode Island case had filed a separate friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court devoted to the question of “prison gerrymandering.”

Mr. Ho said the A.C.L.U. believed that prisoners, who are generally ineligible to vote if convicted of felonies, should indeed be counted in drawing election districts — but in the places where they used to live. He made the argument at length in a 2011 article in the Stanford Law & Policy Review.

Brenda Wright, one of the lawyers who filed the separate Supreme Court brief, said: “The basic distinction is that we’re addressing a problem that is based on where the population is counted. It is not based on an assertion that populations that can’t vote shouldn’t be counted.”

The brief, filed by Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative, rejected what it called “false parallels” between the prisoner cases and the Texas appeal. “The goal of reforming prison gerrymandering,” the brief said, “is not at all comparable to appellants’ goal of entirely excluding nonvoters from the population base.”

And it’s in the last paragraph that says it all. “The goal of reforming prison gerrymandering,” the brief said, “is not at all comparable to appellants’ goal of entirely excluding nonvoters from the population base.” 

Just food for thought for everyone to think about.

Talk to you guys next week!

Hugs Xoxo

 

 

One in a Thousand

California is experiencing recording breaking forest fires, the Northeast is preparing for another cold winter, but the South was not ready for the amount of rainfall the past week.

“South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley didn’t mince any words Sunday about just how dangerous a situation the weather had become in her state.”We haven’t seen this level of rain in the Low country in 1,000 years,” Haley said at an afternoon press conference. “That’s how big this is.” It wasn’t hyperbole. Certain areas of South Carolina had never before been deluged with such eye-popping rainfall tallies: more than 24 inches in Mount Pleasant, nearly 20 inches in areas around Charleston and more than 18 inches in the Gills Creek area of Columbia, according to CNN meteorologist Taylor Ward.”

With the rain heavy-hitting areas for already twenty four hours, city officials are issuing extreme flash flood warnings for already effected areas. “”This is an extremely dangerous situation in those areas.” What is worrying the city the most is the now the state’s roadways; the historic rainfall and flooding had been responsible for three deaths and more than 750 roadway rescues in one 12-hour stretch, according to Haley.

The weather services have issued a public service announcement video reminding people not to drive through rushing waters, no matter how shallow the water appears to be. “Do not attempt to drive into flooded roadways … it takes just 12 inches of flowing water to carry off a small car. Turn around, don’t drown,” it said. I understand people need to get to work, have things to do, or maybe oh I don’t know get food? But you have to have at least some sense to not go out in this type of weather, it’s like asking for a death sentence.

I hate rain so I wouldn’t be outside in the first place, but knowing it only takes TWELVES inches of water to carry my own car away is terrifying. The most I’ve ever experienced in regards to lots of rain would be having my basement flood and accidentally leaving my car door windows open.

“Haley announced Sunday that in addition to the eight swift water rescue teams and 11 aircraft, 600 National Guardsmen had been deployed to assist in rescues and evacuations, and that hundreds more were on standby. The day before, President Barack Obama signed a statewide emergency declaration retroactive to Thursday, authorizing federal aid in anticipation of more rain. This declaration means federal aid will be available to help local response efforts. The Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will be authorized to coordinate disaster relief. This order applies to all 46 counties in South Carolina and the Catawba Nation. Haley also said several fellow states, including North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida had lent resources as well.”

Unfortunately the South is not out of the woods because this weather is to continue for at least another twenty four hours. With such a foreboding forecast Southerners are expecting the worst.

The worst could be anything

“The wet misery isn’t just limited to South Carolina; as of Sunday evening, both Carolinas, New Jersey and Virginia were under states of emergency, and the weather service has issued flood watches stretching from Georgia to Delaware. But Hurricane Joaquin, downgraded to Category 3 strength earlier in the day Sunday and only expected to continue to weaken, isn’t necessarily the culprit — it’s coming from two sources.The low pressure area associated with the rain soaking the Carolinas is funneling heavy tropical moisture into the region, creating the torrential rainfall, the CNN Weather Center said.”

The moisture the storm is pulling in is also associated with Hurricane Joaquin, but the two systems shouldn’t be confused.

Joaquin inched northward in the Atlantic on Sunday, but luckily away from U.S. shores. However, the storm is expected to push in a storm surge in the Northeast as it passes, resulting in a one-two water punch.

“Life-threatening rip currents, high surf and coastal flooding, mainly at high tides, will stretch nearly the entire eastern U.S. coast,” CNN meteorologist Michael Guy said.

I still don’t understand how they name these hurricanes but Joaquin? All I think of is this when I hear that name.

Anyone get the joke? Anyone? No just me? Alright hahah.

Well I hope everyone is safe and sound down in the Carolina’s (and every other Southern state); make sure you have plenty of supplies! Amazon sells water online, and food, and blankets, and literally everything! You’ll be okay!

I’ll talk to you guys next week! Enjoy your Columbus Day weekend!

Hugs Xoxox