Some world leaders are bypassing the White House and dealing directly with blue state governors like California's Jerry Brown.

Courtesy of WaPo:  

Nearly a year into the Trump presidency, countries around the world are scrambling to adapt as the White House has struggled to fill key government positions, scaled back the State Department and upended old alliances. Now some nations are finding that even if they are frustrated by President Trump’s Washington, they can still prosper from robust relations with the California Republic and a constellation of like-minded U.S. cities, some of which are bigger than European countries. 

Brown’s 10-day trip to Europe, which ended Tuesday, was just the latest in a growing transatlantic back-and-forth that bypasses the Trump-era White House. In July, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio headlined a protest in Hamburg against the Group of 20. Several European countries have stationed ambassadors in Silicon Valley to boost trade ties.

Meanwhile, state and municipal governments are expanding or building new offices to help them manage the increased interest in Europe and Asia. This year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) created the position of deputy mayor for international affairs to better manage relations with foreign governments. 

Last week Garcetti huddled in Los Angeles with the Israeli president and Armenian defense minister. The latter stopped by on his way to a peacekeeping conference and briefly described his country’s ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region. 

The mayor’s motives for taking the meeting were simple. “We have a big Armenian population in Los Angeles that cares about events in Armenia,” said Nina Hachigian, who filled the international affairs position and previously served in the Obama administration as U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

Many world leaders say they have no illusions that they can avoid the White House on critical issues at the core of global stability, especially those related to security. But they have embraced efforts by Democratic governors and mayors to present a different face of U.S. power to the world, albeit at a lower level than the White House or State Department. 

“There is an impression by politicians here that President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world,” said Christian Ehler, a German lawmaker who heads the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States and helped broker Brown’s visit to Brussels. “We are much more carefully looking now to the diversity of what is being discussed in the United States, and we see that California is one of the powerhouses of the world economically.”

Typically I would think that overall this would be a bad idea, because even though states do indeed make individual economic deals with foreign governments, the main negotiations have always been the work of the White House.

However since we have a White House that is currently critically understaffed, and in constant disarray, I am not sure what other options exist for keeping things moving forward.

One has to wonder however if this may devolve into a kind of quiet economic civil war where blue states continue to make trade deals and negotiate exchanges of information with foreign governments, which inflates their coffers, while red states sit on their hands waiting for the Republican White House to lead the way, and slip further and further into abject poverty?

Of course the solution to this is to elect a Democratic President next time and the entire country will have the opportunity to prosper as one.

Jerry Brown seems to already be doing the job, so maybe he really will be the best bet in 2020.

Red states preach family values, but blue states are better at putting that into practice.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

According to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey of 32 states, those with the highest percentage of high school students who say they have had sex are Mississippi, Delaware, West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas. All but Delaware voted Republican in the last presidential election. 

Meanwhile, the five states with the lowest proportion of high school students who have had sex were New York, California, Maryland, Nebraska and Connecticut. All but Nebraska voted Democratic. 

When evangelical kids have sex, they’re less likely to use birth control — and that may be a reason (along with lower abortion rates) that red states have high teen birthrates.

Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen birthrates voted Republican in 2016. And nine of the 10 states with the lowest teen birthrates voted Democratic. 

“Red regions of the country have higher teen pregnancy rates, more shotgun marriages and lower average ages at marriage and first birth,” Naomi Cahn and June Carbone wrote in their important 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.” 

The liberal impulse may be to gloat: Those conservatives thunder about “family values” but don’t practice them. But there’s also perhaps a measure of hypocrisy in the blue states. As Cahn and Carbone put it: “Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.

”Liberals, in other words, may be wary of strict moral codes, but they want to make damn sure that their own kids don’t have babies while in high school. It helps that they believe in comprehensive sex education and reliable birth control.

If this surprises anybody then you simply have not been paying attention. 

These same conclusions have been reached by a variety of studies over the years.

Preaching at kids that sex is wrong and that they should never partake of the forbidden fruit, did not work in the Garden of Eden and it does not work in modern times.

And demonstrating the family values of love, respect for others, and personal responsibility, is far more effective than calling somebody a sinner for engaging in normal human interactions.

Progressive states are just better, that is why I am working to turn mine into one.

Anti-Obamacare ads may have helped to increase enrollment in blue states. Oops!

Courtesy of the Indy Channel:  

Congressional candidates opposed to the Affordable Care Act have spent $450 million on commercials attacking the controversial health care plan, but the effort seems to be backfiring in blue states. 

Anti-Obamacare advertisements in some liberally inclined states are actually helping health care exchange enrollments, according to a new Brookings Institution analysis. 

The study, done by Brookings fellow Niam Yaraghi, compared ACA enrollment data released by the Department of Health and Human Services in May to a map by Kantar Media CMAG that tracks anti-Obamacare ads across the United States. 

Yaraghi calculated a ratio based on the number of Obamacare enrollees divided by the number of people who potentially could have enrolled, and concluded that negative ads kept a lid on enrollment in red states and had the opposite effect in blue states.

The study  goes on to suggest that the ads led to increased awareness about the existence of a governmentally subsidized service and its benefits for the uninsured.

Or to summarize:

In other words, the commercials effectively acted as a PSA for the ACA.

Not only that but for those conservative Republicans who DID sign up for the program, despite advertisements warning them not to, the vast majority of them are quite happy they did: 

The survey, from the Commonwealth Fund, a research group, a research group, came to similar conclusions as other surveys about the expansion of health insurance. It found that about 15 percent of adults younger than 65 now lack health insurance, down from 20 percent before the Affordable Care Act rolled out in January. 

What was more surprising is that people who got the new coverage were generally happy with the product. Overall, 73 percent of people who bought health plans and 87 percent of those who signed up for Medicaid said they were somewhat or very satisfied with their new health insurance. Seventy-four percent of newly insured Republicans liked their plans. Even 77 percent of people who had insurance before – including members of the much-publicized group whose plans got canceled last year – were happy with their new coverage.

Overall I would say that the Republicans got their asses handed to them.

And not only that, but I would think that they lost a whole lot of potential voters who do not appreciate the fact that they were lied to about Obamacare, or have Republican governors who have not expanded Medicaid in their state, leaving them disillusioned with their party and with few options to receive the kind of coverage that they see other people enjoying in states with more reasonable administrations.

We are not the only ones who think that Texas is ready to go blue. So does former Texan Rand Paul.

Currently the Senator from Kentucky, but still so Texan he wears roadkill on his head.

Courtesy of Politico:  

Sen. Rand Paul on Saturday predicted that Texas would turn blue within a decade if the Republican Party doesn’t become more inclusive. 

“What I do believe is Texas is going to be a Democrat state within 10 years if we don’t change,” Paul (R-Ky.), who grew up in Texas, said at a dinner held by the Harris County GOP. “That means we evolve, it doesn’t mean we give up on what we believe in, but it means we have to be a welcoming party.” 

Paul, who is heavily weighing a presidential bid, noted that his assessment was shared by the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas. The Lone Star state, currently the largest Republican bastion in the country, is nearly 40 percent Hispanic — a demographic that has overwhelmingly supported Democrats in recent elections. 

I rarely listen to anything Rand Paul says because you know he's crazy, but this time I think he is speaking the truth for a change.

There is a lot of Democratic energy in Texas to take back their state, and electing Wendy Davis as Governor could just be the tip of the iceberg. 

However I disagree with Paul over one thing.

There is NO way the GOP is going to get their act together fast enough to attract the Hispanic vote or more female support anytime soon.

Not when the majority of their policies seem to focus on stripping women of their reproductive rights, militarizing the border with Mexico, and pushing a religious doctrine into our public schools.

Obstructionist Republican lawmakers would rather see the people suffer or die unnecessarily rather than implement the Affordable Care Act in their state.

Courtesy of Alternet:  

The latest sign of the Republican Party’s increasingly secessionist tendencies comes as Obamacare passed a major milestone in California, which late last week announced lower-than-expected healthcare premiums for its 5.3 million uninsured, less than many small businesses now pay in group plans. 

“Covered California’s Silver Plan… offers premiums that can be 29 percent lower than comparable plans provided on today’s small group market,” the state’s new insurance exchange announced Thursday, referring to the least-expensive option of four state-administered plans and posting this price comparison chart. 

In contrast, the refusal by red-state America to create these health exchanges, which would be more local control—a supposed Republican value—and to accept federal funds to expand state-run Medicaid programs for the poor, means that about half the states are turning their backs on their residents, especially millions of the poorest people. 

The federal government plans to step in later this summer and offer uninsured people in recalcitrant red states the option of buying plans via federally run heath care exchanges. But the poorest people can’t afford that, meaning the refusal to expand Medicaid programs will leave them in the cold. They will see ads selling new federal healthcare options that will be unaffordable for them. 

The New York Times reports that local healthcare advocates in red states are predicting a backlash once Obamacare is rolled out and the poor realize that they cannot take advantage of it because Republicans are blocking it. However, that does not change the bottom line in state-run Medicaid programs: the GOP is again penalizing the poor.

To me this smacks of desperation on the part of the Republicans.

They are desperately trying to keep the benefits of Obamacare from reaching their constituents because they well know that once the people of their state start to understand how the program will dramatically affect their access to healthcare, that ANY Democrat challenger would only have to point that out in a campaign, and that the Republican tried to deny that access. in order to defeat them in an election.

Ultimately to me it seems that they are playing a game that they cannot help but lose ultimately, which perhaps helps to explain why the Republicans hate President Obama so very, very much.