He's back!
The same Obamacare architect who said in 2013 that the "stupidity of the American voter" helped pass the 2010 Affordable Care Act claims Americans "just don't understand what this law has done for them."
Jonathan Gruber, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Tucker Carlson on Fox News last week that concerns of health care clients who now have to pay for services they don't want or don't need are a "trivial distraction from the problem."
"They're being asked, fairly, to be in a pool with healthy and sick people," he said.
The problem was the healthy people were supposed to sign up in huge numbers to pay for the sick and older people. But the healthy people didn't sign up in the numbers architects anticipated and chose instead to pay fines rather than purchase insurance coverage they didn't want. That led to the annual high increases in premiums, well above 50 percent in many cases.
Republicans, Gruber whined, "shouldn't villainize the entire law over the small issues."
Small issues? Did he forget "you can keep your doctor," "you can keep your insurance policy" and the insured will be able to see their annual costs go down?
Even with a new president ready to take a hammer to parts of the law, the American people still say they don't want it. Indeed, a poll last month by the American Action Network said 70 percent of respondents would support a repeal of the law if a replacement were simultaneously enacted.
Teaching our children
A Dallas teacher in a classroom of students pointed a water gun at an image of President Donald Trump on a white board, squeezed the trigger and screamed, "Die."
Had a student done such a thing, he or she likely would have been expelled. The water gun would have been deemed to be akin to a real weapon. And the threat might have drawn federal charges.
Payal Modi, the art teacher at Adamson High School in the Dallas Independent School District, in time, was placed on paid leave. A representative of the Secret Service said the agency was aware of the incident.
The teacher had posted a video of the incident to her Instagram account, which she later made private, with the caption, "Watching the #inauguration in my classroom like. #no #stop #denial #squirtgun #hypocrisy #powerless #saveusall #teachthembetter #atleastitsfriday."
Subsequently, the video was posted to YouTube before Modi was able to change her settings.
Classroom leader? Tolerant? Example? Nope, nope and nope.
Who'll feed the hungry?
U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., is hoping to make school lunches great again (or at least palatable).
Former first lady Michelle Obama attempted to make school lunches healthier during her husband's first term, but her efforts resulted in more expensive meals, lots of waste and, worst of all, meals kids didn't want to eat.
The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which enabled part of the changes to public school lunches, proved to be a huge misnomer. Many kids wound up eating nothing when they couldn't stomach the supposedly healthier meals.
Meadows wants to undo segments of the school lunch program as part of a document that would reverse some 200 Obama-era rules and regulations.
Since 2010, an estimated 1.2 million students have dropped out of the school lunch program altogether. Although the program was supposed to add more fruits and vegetables to students' diets, a University of Vermont study found "children consumed fewer [fruits and vegetables] and wasted more during the school year immediately following implementation of the rule."
School districts said the regulations, which restricted fat, sugar, sodium, calories and whole grains, were difficult to implement, and some school districts left the program altogether because their compliance costs were greater than the federal subsidies they were given to implement the healthier foods.
It's all their fault
Missouri is on the verge of becoming the 28th right-to-work state in the country, and a Democratic state senator knows exactly who is to blame - union men.
Of course, it doesn't make sense to blame union men for a state that's about to make it harder to be in a union, but that's where state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed's thoughts ran last week.
She said Democrat union members voted "for Republicans, not even thinking about their own bottom line, but thinking about the fact that they didn't like Barack Obama and they don't like a woman ruling the world." She later doubled down on her comments, saying "we can't get with the fact of a woman controlling our destiny."
Like many delusional Democrats, she is unable to understand that voters - Democrat and Republican, union and nonunion, men and women - did not care for Obama's governance, no matter his race, and did not trust Clinton. Those were their bottom lines.
Advocates for right-to-work, which prohibits businesses from making union membership a condition for employment, have been trying to get Missouri in the fold for years. Now with a Republican governor and large Republican majorities in the state Senate and House, they are about to make it happen.
The Show-Me State would became the second state - after Kentucky - to vote for right-to-work since Jan. 1, and New Hampshire is poised to become the third.