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Stated another way, that’s $34,200 per year.

UPDATE: I was at a meeting in Manchester and ran into a old friend of the ‘Grok and without prompting, he brought up that his Obamacare plan, bought on the exchange, is mirroring my aquaintance’s below: it has just from about $1,000/month for his family to over $2,000 / month.  He makes too much as an independent engineer to receive any kind of tax subsidy – he has to float his own boat.  He’s now wondering if he has to go bare.

Commenter Jeemo has called me a liar and that I’m making this up – sorry Jeemo, but life is sucking badly when Government actions have all but destroyed the individual healthcare marketplace and made life miserable for million whose only purpose, in the Saul Alinsky word of wealth transfer from Haves to Have-Nots, is to fund others.  For the recipients of the tax subsidies, life is now better.  For the rest of us that were happy with our plans, life sucks.  And Jeemo makes fun of my friends.

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I’ve known him for years and have had him come over to house as a contractor on a number of cases; he was here a couple of days ago.  Usually I leave contractors alone to let them do their work and only wander in just because I like to admire peoples’ skills to do work that I can’t do (being a software engineer, I can build castles in my mind but you never want to put a saw, hammer, and a screwdriver into my hands at the same time).  However, he smiled as I greeted him coming out of his truck and he exclaimed “great, a fellow conservative to talk with!” as he deals with a lot of public housing projects owned by “public service organizations” that trend rather liberal.  One of the topics that came up, as he is self-employed”, was the cost his Obamacare plan; his frustration was BEYOND frustration.

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That’s apparently what CNN was doing when it published a story Monday under the headline, “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.” How is that newsworthy? Well, it’s newsworthy if Trump acted like a boor and pounded the precious koi with an overabundance of food. Such appears to be the case if you look at the video below, which starts with a shot of Trump, alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, flicking spoonfuls of food from a wooden box into the koi pond below. Then the shot narrows to Trump himself, and he empties the entire box.

Another instance of presidential boorishness abroad? As Mediaite pointed out, that’s how it played out among some media types. There’s that CNN headline, for starters, which places outsize significance on the president’s handling of the box. Jezebel headlines, “Big Stupid Baby Dumps Load Of Fish Food On Japanese Koi Pond.” The New York Daily News: “Photo of Donald Trump dumping fish food into koi pond during Japan visit draws Obama comparisons.” And more than one prominent journalist wrote tweets fixated on the fish-food box-dump.

However, what the MSM is portraying is, once again, not quite the real reality.

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“They’re evil, we’re the good guys” state Sen @BarbaraFavola on Virginia Republicans to a packed hall of Arlington Democrats #VirginiaWay pic.twitter.com/8DuUE5T81j

— Fenit Nirappil (@FenitN) November 1, 2017

And what’s worse is that the Democrat nominee for Virginia Governor won’s disavow it:

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And since the 49ers (team colors) are in the cartoon, don’t forget THAT THE WHOLE TEAM is going to work against our Second Amendment rights.

I just reread the accounting of the now infamous NFL meeting in NYC where some of the owners met with some of the players (along with some other NFL staffers and union flacks) ostensibly to “fix” their self-induced problem.  Yes, self-induced and self-propagating issue of “taking a knee” during the national anthem and what it is doing to their Public Relation reputation, their ticket sales, their TV ratings (yes, all in the toilet); the owners are now scared – they have to stop the hemorrhaging and start protecting their substantial investments. In reading the post, this stuck out – a message of surrender to the players (emphasis mine):

It was a very good session; the players were passionate and very impressive; we’ve got a lot of work to do to address their concerns and to use the NFL platform to address these difficult social, racial and justice issues.

So what IS their business model now – lecturing us while only throwing a football once in a while?

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From the NY Post:

Adam Lanza expressed his desire to commit the Sandy Hook massacre years before the tragedy took place — and when a witness alerted police, cops said there was nothing they could do, newly released FBI documents reveal. In 2008, the witness, whose name has been redacted, heard Lanza (inset) say that he had access to assault weapons and planned to kill students at the elementary school, along with his mother, Nancy Lanza, according to a cache of documents released this week.

“Lanza allegedly [said] that he planned to kill his mother and children at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut,” the document reads.

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under the proposed Tax Reform that is now in movement in Congress.  And the Democrats / Progressive Totalitarians are losing their minds – the HORROR of it that those evil RICH people get to keep more of their money!  The SHAME that Government will get less!  How DARE they!  It oesn’t make any difference that poor people pay very little in income taxes! The explanation from former Congressman and now head of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney (reformatted, emphasis mine):

OMB later cited internal data to the Washington Examiner that said the top 20 percent of people to pay income taxes account for 94.8 percent of those taxes in 2016. That appears to be a jump from just a few years ago. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 20 percent of income earners paid 84 percent of income taxes. Mulvaney explained:

If you break the income tax universe into what we call quintiles, so equal sized 20 percent columns, the first two columns, the first quintile and the lower quintile, don’t pay any taxes at all. In fact they net positive. We pay them when they file a tax return.

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As the Democrats are always saying, society suffers from Power Inequalites.  Colt’s distant cousins, Heckler & Koch, made it equal (reformatted, emphasis mine)

Good Samaritan Stops Kidnapping With Gun
“If I didn’t have a firearm, I don’t think there’s much I could have done.”

On October 5, a vigilant Las Vegas resident, Justin Pearson, noticed a BMW zooming through his neighborhood and abruptly stopping in front of a neighbor’s house where a 6-year-old boy was playing in the front yard. As Pearson watched in horror, the driver quickly hopped out of the vehicle and grabbed the boy. While the kidnapper’s height was similar to his own (over 6 feet), Pearson could see that the man had a much larger build — Pearson would not be able to take him on pound for pound.

As the Las Vegas Journal Review notes, “Fortunately, Pearson had a trump card — a Heckler & Koch VP9 pistol legally resting on his right hip.”

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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY

October 23, 2017 

Guidance for President Donald J. Trump’s Remarks on Combatting the Opioid Epidemic

What:  President Donald J. Trump’s Remarks on Combatting the Opioid Epidemic
Where: The White House – East Room
When: Thursday, October 26, 2017 at 2:00PM EDT

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Yeah, one has to pass a background check to be able to attend after receiving the invitation to attend.  That information was given to them on Tuesday when I first received the invite.  Now at 7:42am this morning, I finally got the authorization that says “come on down”!

Good morning  —

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When I first received the invite, I thought it would be the regular Presser / Briefing that they have every day at the White House.  Briefings – questions!  So I thought, hey, they wouldn’t have asked the ‘Grok to come all that way down without a slight chance of being able to ask a question, right?  So the original invite came in Monday evening – and the left over part of what used to be my mind started racing.  There’s my task for tomorrow!

You all know what its like to lay down for your evening’s sleep – the body says “sure” but the mind goes “eat my dust, dude” and goes off to the races.  Well, at 2:30am, I finally gave up and started in on 4 questions so as to make sure I’d be ready: an obligatory one, the real one, a serious one (that I’ve NEVER heard any of those High and Mighty Cream-of-the-Crop Pompous Journalists that inhabit that place as if they owned it, and then an amusing one. Hey, gotta be ready for anything, right?

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PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP IS TAKING ACTION ON DRUG ADDICTION AND THE OPIOID CRISIS

“The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first
place. If they don’t start, they won’t have a problem.” – President Donald J. Trump

DRUG ADDICTION AND OPIOIDS ARE RAVAGING AMERICA: Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost their lives to drug abuse, and it will only get worse unless action is taken.

• In 2016, more than two million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids.
  • Since 2000, over 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids.
• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.
• In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdose deaths – 33,091 of those deaths, almost two-thirds, involved the use of opioids.
  • According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics, the national age-adjusted rate of opioid overdose deaths in 2015 was 10.4 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
• The situation has only gotten worse, with drug overdose deaths in 2016 expected to exceed 64,000.
  • This represents a rate of 175 deaths a day.
  • This exceeds the number of Americans killed during the Vietnam War.
  • The rise in overdose deaths is largely due to the proliferation of illicitly made fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, and fentanyl analogs.
• In 2016, more than 11.5 million Americans ages 12 and older reported misuse of prescription opioids in the past year, and nearly 950,000 Americans reported heroin use in the past year.
• In 2014, the number of babies born drug-dependent had increased by 500 percent since 2000, and children being placed in foster care due in part to parental drug abuse is going up – now it is almost a third of all child removals.

A PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY: President Donald J. Trump is mobilizing his entire Administration to address drug addiction and opioid abuse by directing the declaration of a Nationwide Public Health Emergency to address the opioids crisis.

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