Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

House Republicans got crunk last week and threw themselves a kegger over finally agreeing to replace Obamacare with something way shittier.

They were celebrating an ability to agree with each other over something besides hating Obama. They were able to bridge the divide between the two biggest House Republican fraternities, the Freedom Caucus and the Tuesday Group.

The Freedom Caucus thinks Americans, unlike the citizens of every other First World nation, should have the freedom to drop dead of random diseases without government interference.

The Tuesday Group worries that when people drop dead because they don’t have health insurance, somehow the people who took it away from them will get blamed and not re-elected. The Tuesday Group folded when the Freedom Caucus said, “The trouble with you guys is you don’t hate Obama enough, and the Tuesday Group replied, “Aw, jeez, you’re right about that,” and the bill passed.
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Now, Obamacare is not dead yet. The new healthcare bill still has to pass the Senate, and many Senate Republicans are already looking at the plan and saying, “Hey, I didn’t order this turd sandwich. Take it back. But leave the fries.”

But, let’s face it, Obamacare has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, and I mean a banana peel situated on an oil slick, so we might as well explain the differences between the programs.
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First off, a few popular features of Obamacare will be preserved under the Republican plan, plus ALL the unpopular ones. The $10,500 family deductible? It’s still on, mofos. The high co-pays and having only six doctors that will take your plan stays, dude. What’s different is not everybody has to be covered.

People with pre-existing conditions, conditions that many Americans suffer from irreversibly, like being fat, may have to get coverage in a high-risk pool.

High risk pools, in case you have forgotten about them, mean you get to pay more money than you actually have for health insurance.

If you are healthy, you will be able to get cheaper health insurance, because you will now be able to buy a plan that covers everything except being sick. Insurance companies will now be able to offer drug coverage that includes all drugs except expensive ones, like those $50,000 dollar-a-month cancer pharmaceuticals, so if you make the poor decision to have cancer, it’s on you. Take some Vitamin C.

Even conservatives are saying that the Republican plan is so twisted and awful that the nation is eventually headed for single-payer insurance for all. That’s a euphemism for socialized medicine, and it might well be the end of the Union, because then health insurance companies would be out of business, throwing thousands of people whose job it is to deny your claims out of work. Also, anyone could go to any doctor they wanted, which means white people would have the same coverage as minority people.

The Freedom Caucus will never stand for that. They hark back to the beginnings of the nation, which means they think that if you’re too poor or too sick to have health insurance, and you are suffering from some disease that would have killed you in Colonial times, it will kill you nowadays, too.
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That’s how the Founding Fathers would have wanted it.

Now that the Republicans' efforts to repeal Obamacare have sunk like a Philippine ferry, where is their path forward? I put that to a high-ranking Republican staffer, who agreed to answer questions on a promise of anonymity.

“It’s easy,” he insisted. “We got burned on healthcare because it’s a real problem. We discovered too late that the thing people hated most about Obamacare is that it began with 'Obama.' Otherwise, people were good with having health insurance. We're going to return to our Republican roots by only solving imaginary problems.”

Like allowing mentally ill people to buy guns?

“Good example. Delusional people have Second Amendment rights, too. Who pays attention to an unarmed crazy? Having a chiller under your bed when you go off your meds is the American way. Problem solved.”

Another imaginary problem is that the American military doesn’t have enough money, right?

“You bet your britches we’ll be fixing that one. That’s an easy lift. We just have to make sure we spend those extra billions on expensive hardware built in Republican home districts rather than any more benefits for the troops.”

Transgender bathroom rapists, of which there are currently none?

“And none better show up, pard. Republicans will make sure those sex-crazed trannies have to use the bushes outside of the 7-11 when they have to make tinkle.”

How about problems that actually affect your base? Like opioid addiction?

“That’s a real problem, buster. We Republicans will always understand that when opioid addiction meant black people on heroin, it was a crime problem. Now that it’s white people on oxycontin, it’s a health problem. But it’s still real, so ix-nay on solving it. Give me voter fraud any day. Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, voter fraud will be wiped out across this great nation.”

Because there almost isn’t any?

“There will be almost even less when we’re done.”

Don’t you think voters will notice the GOP doesn’t solve any real problems eventually and vote the Democrats back in?

“Of course. And the Democrats will try and fix real problems, like they always do. If they fail, we’ll dog-whistle to American people that they’re candyasses. If they succeed, we’ll start screaming about the deficit. But right now, while we’re on top, you can say goodbye to all of the USA’s imaginary problems, from billionaires crumbling under their tax burdens, to women getting their birth control covered by insurance, to baking gay cakes. All will vanish under bold Republican initiatives.”

Sounds like you have it all planned out.
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“Like the song says, these are the good old days.”

The Lord appeared to me again last weekend. The place was a mess, as usual. I was torn between sponging it up a bit or just cracking my first coldie of the afternoon when suddenly He was sitting on my La-Z-Boy.

“Oh Lord,” I said, hoping I hadn’t left a pizza crust on that chair, which is something that can happen on weekends at my place.

“That's Me,” the CEO of the universe replied. “Hope you’re not too busy to do My will, because I need you to ring up Pat Robertson and tell him to back off making commitments in My name.”

“You mean when Pat promised you would rescue Trumpcare?”
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“That’s right.”

“Why don’t You just appear to Pat Robertson?”

“He’s 87 years old. He might think I was coming to take him to Heaven, and I don’t want to give him the impression that he’s going there.”

“I understand that, My Lord, but why did Robertson think you were going to get involved in the healthcare debate anyway?”

“Well, I actually might have let slip to Pat that I was thinking about threatening the Freedom Caucus with a plague of boils and locusts if they didn’t get in line.”

“So, you were in favor of kicking 24 million people off their insurance?”

“Look at it from My point of view. I’m the one who sends people diseases and accidents, causing them to suffer and die. That’s all part of My plan. Doesn’t have jack shit to do with insurance, so why should I care?”

“But you changed your mind? Why?”

“Jesus.” I thought the Supreme Being was just using Christ’s name as an imprecation, but then he went on. “My Son is fed up with the Trumps. He spent His time on earth with whores, thieves and lepers, he says, but that family is all three. He's not touching any one of them with a ten-foot crucifix. All those Facebook memes which show him wrapping his arms around the President? Everyone who made or posted one of them is going straight to Hell.”

“But You created Trump.”

“I guess. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, except that maybe this guy will eventually give Alec Baldwin a good reason to sober up at least once a week. But Jesus is another story.  When He heard that Trump was going to eliminate maternity care from the bill, He actually stormed into My throne room and tossed a couple of My thunderbolts around, he was so pissed. You know how He feels about His Mother.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.”

“But you know how it goes. A one-night stand 2000 years ago shouldn’t lead to a relationship for eternal life, is what I thought at first, but all of the counselors we ever saw told us We have to think of our Kid. It was a rough couple centuries in the beginning, but now we mostly we stay out of each other’s way Up Here. But I digress. Get on the horn to Pat and tell him STFU for me.”

Then He vanished, off to spin a couple quasars, I guess. And he didn’t leave Pat Robertson's private line, and I think it’s a sin to call the 700 Club number and not pledge any money.
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So this is the only warning you're going to get, Pat. You’re welcome.

Political traffic is picking up at the Des Moines International Airport and Joe Redstate's cell phone has been ringing as Republican Presidential hopefuls seek his advice on navigating their way through Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses. As a Republican candidate myself, I wanted to get Joe in my corner, but when I called him, he was in an ugly humor.

"The Supreme Court," he answered when I asked what was making him so moody. "It's a one-two sucker punch from them right on the chin of the Republican party with Obamacare still being legal and gay marriage starting to be. I agree with Mike Huckabee—it's tyranny."

Joe, most people think tyranny is the secret police knocking down doors in the middle of the night or herding people into concentration camps. Obamacare was passed by Congress, signed by the President, and upheld twice by the Supreme Court. That sounds a lot like how the government is supposed to work.

"Until the Court unleashed its tyrannical forces by not giving Republicans what they wanted. We'll get ours yet, though—you heard Ted Cruz saying Supreme Court Justices should have to stand for election in the future. And another guy who's running—the one whose name I always forget..."

Bobby Jindal?

"Yeah, him. He said we ought to abolish the Supreme Court entirely.

I thought Republicans loved the Constitution, Joe. The Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, so getting rid of it would be unconstitutional, I think. I thought Ted especially was a Constitutional scholar and a strict constructionist. Electing Supreme Court justices is definitely not something the Founding Fathers had in mind.

"When the Justices you were counting on start letting you down, constructionism gets a lot less strict, bud. There's a hole in Republican hearts where our love for the Constitution used to be. It's time to get up under the Supremes' robes and light a fire there is what we Republicans think."

Interesting metaphor, Joe. The same Supreme Court was making the GOP happy, though,
when they decided corporations are people and could give as much money as they wanted to political campaigns, letting the Koch brothers buy all the politicians they want, and when they ruled that pretty much everybody should be allowed to own a gun.

"That's when they were not being tyrannical. And lawless—don't forget lawless. Ted said that about them, too."

Yeah, that puzzled me, Joe. Saying the Supreme Court is lawless is like saying Kate Upton is curve-less. It's kind of difficult to get your head around the idea.

"Well, Ted was mad. We all are. What's the point of winning elections and appointing Supreme Court justices if they all start thinking about what's fair and right instead of just following our lead? What kind of country are we bequeathing our kids if that happens?"

A heat-packing, gay marrying country where both politicians and health insurance are affordable, I guess. We'll just have to live there.

"Not if we win the next election, pal. We're going to crank that clock right back. And it's going our way.  Just today I heard from four new grass-roots pro-Republican groups, Mexican-Americans for Trump, Atheists for Huckabee, Iraqi War Veterans for Bush and People Stuck in Traffic for Chris Christie."

Wow, that is an impressive upsurge in support.

"Actually, they were all the same guy. Dude is just a genius at putting together a Facebook page."

I made a connection at this gigantic skyport over the weekend and was struck, as always, by the unrestrained hugeness of the place. It is the airport opposite of San Diego's airport, which sits so cozily next to downtown that you can look through the windows of the office buildings as you land and wave at people making copies. Denver's airport sits way away from Denver. You fly over downtown and land about fifteen minutes later. I have never driven to the Denver airport from Denver, but I imagine most Denverites pack a lunch when they do so. 

Whenever I land there, I remember the fuss people made over the place in the nineties when it was being built. It was having cost overruns like a fleet of stealth bombers, and I mean a fleet of stealth bombers being built in Nigeria. The baggage system chewed up luggage like a T Rex with an appetite for Samsonite. If you read the accounts of it in the press of the day, you figured the place would sooner or later be written off and abandoned to coyotes and tumbleweeds and the people of Denver would just have to drive to Albuquerque or Salt Lake City if they wanted to go to an airport.

That didn't happen, of course. Today the place operates entirely efficiently. Not that it is perfect. Its existence spawned the creation of Frontier Airlines, which brought me there. It was my first time aboard Frontier, a low-cost carrier. In fact, it is more than merely that; in the continuing effort to make flying the American skies as nasty and uncomfortable as possible, Frontier is the industry leader. Frontier's abundant economies were made clear from the moment of the safety announcement that all veteran air travelers try to sleep through. “There are no life vests on this aircraft,” the flight attendant said.

That got my attention. “In the event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device.” That was fine with me. It was always what I planned to do anyway, since it seemed that it would be easier to do in a state of naked terror than figuring out how to put the life vest on. Besides, apart from a little spurt out over the Pacific when you take off, there are few opportunities for water landings between San Diego and Denver.

“Child life jackets are available for children in the event of a water landing," the flight attendant continued. "More information regarding child life jackets is available on the safety card.” Ordinarily, I would rather look at a book of textile swatches or even naked pictures of Chris Christie than the safety card but this announcement was so unusual it made me look. On Frontier Airlines, the child life jackets are boxed up at the rear of the plane, where you are expected to grab one if you feel you need it. So once you have landed on the water, amid the mad rush of people quite understandably concerned with getting off the aircraft before it comes to rest on the bottom, you are expected to nip back there with no more than a polite “Pardon me—need to get one of those child life jacket things before the plane sinks. Have a nice day.”

Frontier charges for everything that it might occur to you to want on the flight. They don't need free coffee and sodas and expect you not to need them, either. There is a TV screen the size of a pack of cigarettes on the seat in front of you. You can pay seven dollars to watch tiny TV or just stare out the window. The flight attendants watch you moodily, like perimeter guards at an honor camp. Towards the end of the flight, they got busy hustling a credit card that once you charged something on it, would give you two free Frontier flights anywhere in the country. Some people signed up, but I suspect those people would sign up for a free weekend in jail, too.

So I expect that Obamacare will eventually work, just like the Denver airport eventually worked, thanks to frantic last-minute restructuring, but there will be unexpected consequences. The Frontier Airlines of the healthcare industry may come to pass.

So when you have to get your medical tests done at The Colostomy Depot, or MRI's R Us, don't say I didn't warn you.

I caught up with my old pal, veteran Republican political operator Joe Redstate, at the Des Moines airport bar, where he usually hangs out between Presidential primary seasons. It was cold in the heartland, but Joe was glowing with an optimism that was positively warming.

"Obama has finally, definitely, completely screwed up," he said. "It's time for the GOP to rise again."

Have to admit you're right about that, Joe. Obamacare has been a disaster so far, at least public relations-wise.

"And it couldn't have come at a better time. After the government shutdown, the GOP was polling lower than dengue fever and identity theft. And we were staking out a position as the Party of Personal Responsibility That Urges You Not to Have Health Insurance. Now we're the Party That is Pissed Off That You Can't Get Health Insurance Online Like Obama Promised You Could."

That's kind of a mouthful, Joe. And don't you think that admitting Obamacare would be okay if people were just able to get it is pretty much a direct contradiction of your earlier position that it is the worst government program ever proposed?

"People will forget about that once they see a few error messages. I smell Republican votes in the air. We get back in and we repeal Obamacare and replace it with the Republican healthcare reform program."

What exactly is that, Joe? Nobody seems to know, especially the major Republicans who get asked about it all the time.

"Details are still sketchy, but mostly it's going to be about tort reform. As long as ungrateful patients are still entitled to sue surgeons who accidentally sew up their golf cart keys inside of them, American health care will be in an unhappy place. Republicans will fix that."

What about those 40 million plus Americans who still won't have health insurance?

"They can go to the emergency ward. Have you been there lately? Even if all 40 million go at once, the wait times can't get much longer. I don't see a problem."

I don't think you'd see a problem with an asteroid strike today, Joe. I've never seen you so happy.

"You're right, pal. It took nearly six years, but Obama has now officially screwed up, and it's about time. We tried to tell you he was screwing up the economy, but the economy kept improving. We tried to tell you he was weak on terror, but people noticed he kept killing terrorists. We tried to tell you that Benghazi was the worst attack ever on Americans, but people insisted on remembering 9-11. Now that he has unquestionably screwed up health care, we feel the American people will want us back in power so we can screw up everything else again. We've had eight long years to plan. We start two more wars in Muslim countries to satisfy the McCain wing of the party. Syria and Iran, baby! We loosen regulation on Wall Street so a new generation of thieves can figure out a new way to make everyone's IRA evaporate! And tax cuts! Are we going to have tax cuts? You bet we are!

Followed by sound fiscal reforms, like getting Social Security under control, right?

"Are you kidding? We just talk that talk, baby. As soon as we're back, we're not cutting a dime from Social Security. Those old folks are natural Republicans. The deficit is something we're only desperately worried about when we're not in charge, if you haven't noticed. All that pious talk about the monstrous debt we're leaving our grandchildren evaporates as soon as we get our hands on the budget. Let those unborn kids open their wallets, baby! They owe us for keeping them from getting aborted is what we figure."

Wow, Joe. And we're getting all that because a website doesn't work?

"It's like a Christmas present for the GOP, dude. Joy to the world!"

In this single Web page on Yahoo, the casual surfer can find links to stories about Kraft planning to take the orange dye out of its macaroni and cheese and Hallmark omitting the word "gay" from its "Deck the Halls" Christmas sweater, replacing it with "fun" instead.

Both of these stories contain the seeds of fine posts. Personally, I think Kraft macaroni and cheese should be dyed a deeper orange, possibly matching the color of a safety cone, as a warning to anyone who eats it in the mistaken hope that it will taste good. Taking the word "gay" off your Christmas sweater now means that Christmas sweater enthusiasts can now wear them into biker bars without worrying about being bullied. Or possibly not.

But the headline is the main story here. Kanye West, whose ego was recently misidentified by the Hubble Space Telescope as an extrasolar planet, told Ryan Seacrest that he and his main squeeze, the extravagantly breasted Kim Kardashian, were a more influential couple than President Obama and the First Lady, and went further by criticizing Michelle Obama for not posting more pics of herself in a bathing suit on Instagram.

There's nothing this column enjoys more than a sober analysis buttressed by well-researched facts, so let's examine the Kanye claim below:

KANYE WEST VS. BARACK OBAMA

ADVANTAGE--Obama

ADVANTAGE--At first glance, Obama, but let's face it--he had Seal Team Six on his side. West went after Taylor Swift alone and unarmed, even though everybody knows those country girls can really throw down. Even.

ADVANTAGE--No evidence for either. Even.

MOST EGREGIOUS FAILURE BY BOTH MEN:

ADVANTAGE--Even, and it goes to show Obamacare wouldn't be doing any better if it was delivered by truck.

THING EACH MAN HAS DONE THAT EVERY BOY DREAMS OF DOING:

KIM KARDASHIAN VS. MICHELLE OBAMA

ADVANTAGE--Kardashian. A clear example of walking the walk instead of merely talking the talk

ADVANTAGES--Even

ADVANTAGES--Kardashian

ADVANTAGE--Obama, grudgingly. I mean, what's really better-some musty old degree or having unlimited credit since you were fourteen?

CONCLUSION--West's claim proves surprisingly robust even under this intense scrutiny. What did you expect? He's a god. He's a god. He's a god. Yeesus.