BY PRIYANKA ARIBINDI, BRIAN BEUTLER

& CROOKED MEDIA

Friday, December 14, 2018

—Very good law person Rudy “Broken Windows” Giuliani

MAKE HEADS ENROLL

The deadline to sign up for a 2019 health plan on Healthcare.gov is Saturday. That’s TOMORROW for those of you who read this newsletter as soon as it hits your inbox. Which is all of you.

If you need health insurance next year, go to healthcare.gov and shop for a plan. Chances are you will qualify for a generous subsidy, which will make the plan you choose affordable. If you can’t enroll online, or demand causes website outages, the healthcare.gov call center will take your name and number, and you will be allowed to complete the enrollment process even after the deadline lapses. (800) 318-2596.

Why do we keep reminding you about this? Mostly because the Trump administration has taken extraordinary and immoral steps to hide the deadline from you. And that mole on your neck is weird looking and you should get it checked out.

They’ve done this for a number of reasons:

• The most important reason is that Republicans do not believe the government should help people afford their health care. They hate that rich people are taxed to provide non-rich people the peace of mind that comes with being insured. They hate that Affordable Care Act rules guarantee that sick and healthy people pay the same price for the same plan. If you’re eligible for a subsidy under the Affordable Care Act, or you have a pre-existing condition, they’d rather you not get covered.

• Relatedly, these Republicans don’t want the Affordable Care Act to work well. If it works well, its political success will make it difficult to dislodge, and all of that political success will accrue to Democrats—it is called Obamacare after all. One way to make it not work well is to shrink and destabilize the marketplaces.

• The fact that President Trump is personally obsessed with Barack Obama’s legacy, and wants to tear it down, only intensifies the GOP’s sabotage.  

In essence, we are stepping in to do a job that your government should be doing for you. We don’t want you to go without health insurance unnecessarily, because being uninsured is extremely risky; and we don’t want Republicans to succeed at sabotaging the marketplaces, because that will hurt millions of people, and may even set back the cause of further improving American health care next time Democrats control the government.

So does that mean you can expect more servicey/annoying emails about health care around this time next year, too? That probably depends on how effective Democratic oversight proves to be in the coming months. And Trump officials are super nervous about it.

Thanks to emails Huffington Post obtained, we now know that the Trump administration knew cutting the ACA’s advertising budget by 90 percent would harm enrollment, then lied to the public about it.

On the day open enrollment began this year, Seema Verma, the Trump official in charge of administering ACA benefits, wrote a tweet literally trying to scare people out of shopping for and buying comprehensive health insurance, like the kind taxpayers provide her.

With the House soon to be in Democratic hands, Verma is singing a much different tune: “TOMORROW is the FINAL DAY to shop and enroll in a 2019 Marketplace plan. If you haven’t done so already, get to Healthcare.gov and sign up for a plan today!”

The Bottom Line: A few hours of pretending to do her job faithfully won’t erase the paper trail she and her staff left as they set about to sabotage the law. If and when Democrats bring that plot to life, Verma’s agency might shape itself up, and Democrats can insist on increasing the ACA’s outreach funding in negotiations over the federal budget. Elections have consequences, one of which is putting this sabotage behind us.

Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala who was taken into Border Patrol custody last week after crossing into the United States from Mexico, died of dehydration and shock, reportedly after not drinking or eating for days. They killed a child. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whose job it is to oversee Border Patrol and the well-being of the children in its custody, blamed Maquin's death on her family, saying it was “a very sad example of the dangers of this journey.” We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again—Kirstjen Nielsen is a disgrace.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has responded to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s requests for leniency in sentencing by disputing Flynn’s suggestion that FBI investigators tricked him into lying: "A sitting National Security Advisor, former head of an intelligence agency, retired Lieutenant General, and 33-year veteran of the armed forces knows he should not lie to federal agents.”

Facebook says a bug exposed the public and private photos, including ones that had been uploaded but not posted, of up to 6.8 million users to developers, but don’t worry—they’re “sorry” again.

Johnson & Johnson knew for decades that its baby powder contained asbestos—a known carcinogen—but continued to insist that the product was safe for use, concealing information from the public and regulators. Big tobacco, meet big talcum powder. You’ll be great friends. Here’s hoping Goldbond secretly contains crushed up Juul.

President Trump was a primary beneficiary of the unprecedented amounts of money his inaugural committee raised and spent, including through overpayments to his Washington, DC, hotel. Ivanka Trump, who was a Trump Organization executive at the time, was reportedly in charge of negotiating the venue rental prices the hotel charged for inauguration events. At this point it’s truly impressive that one man could commit so many crimes so quickly.

The details of how actress Eliza Dushku was sexually harassed on the set of CBS’s Bull by lead actor Michael Weatherly and others, along with the $9.5 million confidential settlement she received afterwards, have become public. This latest high-profile harassment claim follows the termination of CBS’s disgraced former CEO Les Moonves.

Turns out that none of the campaign donors who asked for refunds from Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), after her remarks about wanting to attend a “public hanging” became public, have received a single dime. Her campaign told at least one company (Walmart) that it did not intend to return the money.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-NV) regrets saying he doesn’t care if President Trump committed crimes, saying now that “no one is above the law.” Too late, dude. Enjoy retirement.

Trump has found a (temporary) chief of staff: Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney will become the Acting Chief of Staff, according to Trump’s very trustworthy and very cool Twitter feed. That’s my Mick in a Box.

Apparently George Papadopoulos has big plans to run for Congress in 2020. Can’t wait to see what his wife’s burner accounts have to say about this. Running as a Russian operative is in!

Kanye and Drake are fighting on the Internet.

Lame-duck Republican lawmakers are working overtime to overturn the will of the voters who rejected their candidates and agendas:

• In Wisconsin, outgoing Republican governor Scott Walker signed legislation to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general by transferring it to the state legislature, which is still led by Republicans, thanks entirely to partisan gerrymandering. The legislation also limits early voting to two weeks throughout the state.
• In Michigan, outgoing Republican governor Rick Snyder signed GOP-backed bills to delay and scale back citizen-initiated measures to increase the minimum wage and improve paid sick leave. To prevent voters from approving these by ballot initiative, Republican lawmakers enacted them legislatively earlier this year, so they could be changed more easily (read: taken away from the voters who wanted them) after the election.
• In America, we’re all fucked.

 Most people know Trump is a liar—even his biggest supporters.

Turns out there’s more to Dick Cheney’s story than that time he shot his friend in the face, and it’s all coming to the big screen. Vice shows the never before seen side of George W. Bush’s Vice President. Starring Christian Bale as Cheney himself, plus Amy Adams, Steve Carell, and Sam Rockwell, the comedy-drama has been nominated for six Golden Globes. Plus, the Christmas release date makes it a perfect activity for the one week a year when your office is closed and you have free time →

Some Twitter threads are worth reading →

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