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Trump's White House; World Reaction to Trump; Putin and Trump Make Contact;
Trump & Executive Orders; Hypocrisy of the Left; Fight Against Fake News - Part 1>
Foster, Jonathan Hoenig>
Government; Politics; Media; Internet; Immigrants; Welfare>
LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY, FBN HOST: Tonight, President-elect Trump says he wants to chop up ObamaCare and toss most of it out the window but was it purposely designed to make that job impossible? Michael Cannon from the Cato Institute is here just a moment to explain what could happen next.
Plus, liberals love President Obama's executive orders but now that Trump might have that same power, they're freak out. Libertarian hero Kmele Foster has the scope.
And Should Mark Zuckerberg get to decide what you can and cannot read? Why his new plan over the internet are fake news sounds a lot like a plan to limit free speech. Grab your glasses, it's time to see the light.
ObamaCare breathe new life into Donald Trump's presidential hopes and reanimated what many thought was an electoral corps but now the signature piece of quackery from our lame duck president could throw healthcare into a death spiral as key provisions are left in precarious place.
President-elect Trump expressed his compassion for those with preexisting conditions and his verbal valley with "60 Minutes'" Lesley Stahl.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LESLEY STAHL, HOST, 60 MINUTES: Are you going to make sure that people with preconditions are still covered?
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes. Because it happens to be one of the strongest assets.
STAHL: You're going to keep it.
TRUMP: Also with the children living with their parents for an extended period, we're going to --
STAHL: You're going to keep that?
TRUMP: -- very much try and keep that in.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KENNEDY: All right. The problem is this tentacle bureaucratic entitlement is now so deeply linked with our economy, it's impossible to pull out one of the gooey arms without eviscerating an entire sector and bleeding to death.
Mr. Trump wants to keep the alluring but expensive preexisting caveat, forcing insurance companies to provide service to the sickly and genetically inferior but without coercing healthy pajama boys into buying insurance they don't want to need and the price becomes too damn high.
Why? Force. It's like forcing someone to settle down and have a baby when all they want to do is fool around as much as possible with strippers and crew ship workers and Perkins waitresses.
Permit me to explain. ObamaCare got us pregnant. And now we are found out, we're not just a little bit pregnant as we were led to believe, we thought we could be just pregnant-ish where cute maternity clothes maybe get a flattering spread some pregnancy magazine and at the end of the day still wear our skinny jeans and keep our doctor. Well, now, we're stuck with a baby who has special needs. He will not sleep. And we are chased from nursing a bloated and (calogi) entitlement program.
Meanwhile, our new boyfriend just got elected president and he's going to be too busy and tired to give the baby a midnight bottle and our old, stupid lame duck boyfriend who promised to always be there has saddled us with he's crying, teething infant while he's already perusing the Perkins menu for a gal named Candy.
There is no easy fix here. Some people say just leave it to the free market. We wanted to do that on a Vegas girls' weekend but no, just when you were ready to pull out of this horrible entitlement program, you sweet talked us with your silver tongue promises of play dates and greater, more affordable choices.
Well, now we have a baby. And we can't give it away. Lord knows we can't sell it, can we? And we can't pretend we never got pregnant in the first place. I guess we will all just have to buy a guaranteed renewable future insurance contracts, practice abstinence and hope our new baby daddy is a little more hands on than the deadbeat who's leaving the Oval Office. Babies are one hell of a preexisting condition. Glad you're here. Let's start the show. I'm Kennedy.
KENNEDY: President-elect Trump has pledged to repeal and replace ObamaCare. But that's a lot easier said than done. What should we do? Why I think we should turn to Michael Cannon, his Cato Institute's director of health policy studies. Welcome to the show, Michael.
MICHAEL CANNON, HEALTH POLICY DIRECTOR, CATO INSTITUTE: Thanks for having me, Kennedy.
TRUMP: So President-elect Trump had talked about keeping that preexisting condition, caveat and the ACA. Can you possibly do that and not have the individual mandate? And what does it do to the health insurance market?
CANNON: Well, if the whole point of repealing ObamaCare is making coverage so we can enact real reforms that it is more secure for people with expensive medical conditions. That's the whole ballgame right here.
The problem is, ObamaCare is not doing that. Those provisions that President-elect Trump says he wants to keep that supposedly ban discrimination against people with preexisting conditions don't end discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. Instead, they are causing a race to the bottom where a coverage is available for these people continuously degrade year after year.
There's a coalition of patient groups that said that this ongoing discrimination against people with preexisting conditions completely undermines the promise of the ACA. I mean, in spite of ObamaCare, it's happening because of ObamaCare, that's why we need to get rid of all of ObamaCare including these supposedly popular provisions, supposedly banning discrimination against patients with pretesting conditions.
KENNEDY: Yes. And that's what Donald Trump says he doesn't want to do. He doesn't want to discriminate against those people. But if you just sort of weed out the bad parts of the ACA that you don't like, you're left with the status quo. That's what Hillary Clinton wanted. You could argue that it was the impending failure of ObamaCare that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.
Let's say you do what you just suggested. Let's say you scrap the whole thing. What do you do for the 20 million people that have insurance now because of ObamaCare and how can you create a system in a short amount of time that fixes the ailing healthcare market?
CANNON: Well, the first thing you do is you stop the bleeding. The ObamaCare and other government leaders are exacerbating this problem of preexisting conditions. So what you want to do is you want to put in place reforms that allow people to have secure access to care when they get sick. And where that was happening was in the individual market that ObamaCare pretty much abolished.
If you allow people to purchase insurance without tax penalties, tell them to buy insurance from an employer or some place else, allow them to purchase insurance directly from an insurance company, that insurance is more secure -- will be more secure than ObamaCare, than employer-sponsored insurance. It will do a better job of what we want to do which is giving access to care for the sick.
Now, again, there are so many people who are victims of ObamaCare and other government failures that there's going to have to be some form of transitional assistance for people who are currently in the exchanges and will not be able to afford coverage in a market where ObamaCare has been repealed.
KENNEDY: OK. Let me ask you a quick question.
CANNON: For the people, we needs to provide assistance but it needs to be transitional and only transitional.
KENNEDY: I understand the transition. But was the law designed so there wouldn't be a transition, so there was really no way of taking out major parts of the law and dismantling it so you had to keep the entire thing or scrap it completely, was it designed that way?
CANNON: Well, people who design this law (other) designing health care nirvana but what they were actually designing was a three-legged stool. And between the community rating price controls, what we mistakenly call the ban on discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. And the individual mandate and the subsidies, you have the three legs of that three-legged stool.
And what Donald Trump is saying is that he can knock out two of those legs but the stool will keep standing. That's not how it works. The entire insurance market collapses which is why you need to get rid of that.
KENNEDY: Not unless you got great balance and a unicycle.
CANNON: Which is why you need to get rid of all of ObamaCare. For the vast majority of people in the exchanges, their premiums will fall. Their health insurance will become more affordable, it will become more secure. For the people who were the victims of ObamaCare, you need some sort of transitional systems like a high risk pool or giving states more flexibility with their medicaid funds.
And that solves that transitional problem and we build a healthcare, health insurance system that provides secure access to care for people once they develop the --
KENNEDY: All right. Well, we will see who's going to take care of the baby. Michael Cannon, thank you so as much.
CANNON: Thank you, Kennedy.
KENNEDY: Very good. American healthcare may be racing down the drain but not my buoyant party panel. Look who it is tonight, it's Harris Faulkner. She is the anchor of "Fox Report" and co-host of "Outnumbered" on the Fox News Channel. Tonight, we've also got Observer columnist, Michael Malice, North Korean pop culture expert. And Democratic strategist, Steven Sigmund. Welcome everybody.
STEVEN SIGMUND, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Thanks.
KENNEDY: It's so nice to have you here. So are you going to admit that it was ObamaCare that leveled the fatal blow to Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations?
SIGMUND: It didn't help. I mean, look, I think -- two things. Well, I think politically, actually, getting rid of ObamaCare will help Democrats in the long run. Because it's been an enormous albatross around them, no question.
From policy perspective, I may have to disagree with your guest that the notion that throwing 20 million people off of healthcare and, you know, people who --
KENNEDY: I don't think that's what he's saying. I think he's talking about a transitional program.
SIIGMUND : -- and people who are actually sick not being able to get coverage, you know, I think that (you're sort of) one cancer diagnosis or traffic accident away from bankruptcy was a gigantic problem that ObamaCare did help with.
KENNEDY: But you bring up the idea of a traffic accident. And on some level, perhaps every insurance company is not morally obligated to cover every person who comes to them. And someone made the analogy that if you get in a fender bender and you don't have insurance, can you then call Geico and say -- hey, I wreck my car, please insure me.
MICHAEL MALICE, COLUMNIST, OBSERVER: Well, maybe you would've been able to under Hillary Clinton administration but this was much very intentional. When FDR had Social Security passed, he knew it was something that people couldn't repeal. It's not as easy to repeal these laws, not in terms of the actual votes but in terms of practice. Because once you pull them out, you're left with nothing and it becomes a calamity.
So what Trump and the Republicans would have to do is kind of like Indiana Jones, they're going to have to repeal it and replace it the exact same moment otherwise you get that boulder of economic problems coming down the hall at you. So it's going to be very, very tricky and this aspect of ObamaCare is extremely popular. Although, frankly, just because something is popular, it's disastrous economically.
KENNEDY: It is. And it creates what they call a death spiral where our healthcare premiums become so high in cost prohibitive, the market collapse.
HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX ANCHOR: The phone is ringing, it was Harrison Ford (inaudible) because he hadn't heard it in 30 years.
KENNEDY: It's been that long?
FAULKNER: Goodness gracious, no. I was taking notes actually as you were interviewing and as I heard you, Kennedy, you were wondering if whether or not the system were designed to be tinkered with. I agree with you. I think that's where Hillary Clinton was trying to go.
I mean, look, her husband said on the campaign trail that it was the craziest thing he'd ever seen, he had to walk that back. But the truth was his wife had planned to try to fix it much in the same ways that we may eventually see it fixed anyway.
I think this is great opportunity for Donald Trump to do as double flip back handstand, gymnastics move and do a real great bipartisan move here. I mean he could do it. He may have to.
Remember the IRS is tasked with collecting the revenue stream here? So --
KENNEDY: That's how they got away with saying the individual mandate was a tax.
FAULKNER: Right. See, that's how it's being paid for. So you can't just rip off the band aid, you're going to have to come up with some --
KENNEDY: OK. I'm going to give you each 5 seconds.
MALICE: This is how you (wrote) the band aid by having the supreme court do the dirty work for you.
SIGMUND: You have a Republican congress who didn't repeal it 60 times for nothing. They don't care about the policy aspect of it The politics are good for them, they're going to vote to repeal.
KENNEDY: All right. Well, we will see what happens. It certainly a story that's not going anyway.
And coming up. Leftists are enraged that Donald Trump will make former Breitbart chairman Steven Bannon his chief strategist. But what makes him so controversial? We really don't know that much about him. The party panel returns to discuss his flaws and his (back), that's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KENNEDY: All right. One of President-elect Trump's first appointments was naming former Breitbart News Executive Steven Bannon as his chief strategist. And many analysis (inaudible) Bannon with helping Trump stay on message on message in the home stretch of the campaign, a move which may have helped him win.
But critics claimed Bannon is a dark cloud (many) administration accusing him of using Breitbart to spread races, nationalistic propaganda. The party panel is here to discuss the intrigue: Harris Faulkner, Michael Malice --
FAULKNER: Hello.
KENNEDY: Hello -- and Steven Sigmund. So Malice, I will start with you because a lot of people on Twitter are confused, the alt-right. And Steve Bannon is associated with the alt-right and Libertarianism. What is the difference?
MALICE: They're next door neighbors, I hate to tell it. They're both part of this whole new right. But I had a lot of friends after this Bannon thing call me, the leftist friends after his (inaudible), should be worried about the Trump presidency? And if Bannon is there, they should be very worried.
Because Bannon is not like a typical Republican, he understands the left, he understands how they think and he wants to destroy them. He doesn't want bipartisan discourse. He wants these people to be if not in jail, at least driven out of office. And he's going to be gunning for them. And the first thing he's going to be gunning for, I would bet, are the universities because that's where the poisoning starts. So he's really shopping for blood.
KENNEDY: All right. So do you think that's dangerous to have someone with access to the most powerful person in the federal government, you know, cracking down on universities?
MALICE: I think, dangerous is the greatest thing ever. I think mean these people are the devil. Their jobs --
(LAUGHTER)
KENNEDY: And universities?
MALICE: Their jobs are to proselytize and brainwash a young college students and to make them into the shock troops for the progressive militia; they're disgusting people and they can't compete in the market place of ideas and that's why they have to teach instead writing books like myself.
KENNEDY: Wow. I never have you really -- Steven, you're shaking your head so much I thought you are --
SIGMUND: Well, my father was a college professor for six years.
MALICE: (Someone) can hear you.
SIGMUND: So it's pretty sensitive to me.
MALICE: Boohoo. Do you need safe space?
SIGMUND: Enough. No, I don't need a safe space. I need somebody who's a little more honest about --
MALICE: That was very honest.
SIGMUND: Honest about thousands of people who work in university (entirement) and having them all --
MALICE: Parasites. Yes, and villains. You can handle it all you want, it's the truth.
SIGMUND: Give me a break.
KENNEDY: OK.
SIGMUND: Steve Bannon. When your chief cheerleaders are the American Nazi party and David Duke, you have a little bit of a problem.
KENNEDY: I wouldn't say they're their chief cheerleaders, you can't control necessarily who endorses you.
SIGMUND: And in terms of who reacted positively to his appointment, those were the people who reacted positive to his appointment and everybody else reacted negatively.
But look, I don't think it matters to Donald Trump, to his supporters.
KENNEDY: Hillary Clinton was hugging (Robert Berk).
MALICE: (Inaudible) economy.
SIGMUND: I don't think it matters to Donald Trump supporters, right? I mean, it's been very clear that the people who surrounds him --
KENNEDY: Do you think he's dangerous?
SIGMUND: Steve Bannon?
KENNEDY: Yes.
SIGMUND: I have no idea if he's dangerous. I don't know him. I know his web sites, you know, headlines --
KENNEDY: But he (inaudible) around the oval office with an arm band and --
SIGMUND: His headlines at his web site are pretty gross. But, you know, and he also has absolutely no experience to be that close to the president of the United States.
MALICE: (Inaudible).
But again, his supporters -- that's my point, Donald Trump supporters don't care. All they want him to do is deliver on his promise to have jobs and change Washington.
KENNEDY: You know what, and it's no longer supporters, it's about Americans and jobs and prosperity which would be great foe everyone.
SIGMUND: And if he doesn't deliver on bringing back manufacturing jobs that have been gone for the last 40 years, he's going to have a problem.
KENNEDY: OK. So, Harris, you've got a counterbalance with Reince Priebus. And that seems to be very deliberate like the feeling --
FAULKNER: By the way, don't think that's the truth, counterbalance. I mean, there is no level lost between Paul Ryan -- the new speaker of the house, by the way, as of about a few hours before the show tonight. There's no level lost between him and Steve Bannon. So that's really your counterbalance.
But I would say this. So that's one fact. I mean,I know you guys are kind of going back emotionally between a lot of things that have been said by Steve Bannon in places where he's stepped in and stepped out of and his track record as a conservative, so an and so forth.
But he is very tightly yoked to the military. And military families across the country will tell you that they have longed for and even thought Michelle Obama did some of this, they've long for somebody who actually serve as he did as a naval officer to speak up big and bold.
We have a shrinking military. It was one of the things that Donald Trump ran on. This is a good fit for him with Steve Bannon in terms of that and I think a lot of people don't know that. And I made a note of this so I want to look down, served as a special assistant to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon. So that's a fact about Bannon that many people don't know. So he's not single faceted although he does have, let's just say, a colorful past.
KENNEDY: All right. And we will see how this plays out and how important that proximity to power is and what elements of your own personality and experience you bring to the White House.
A little later on, Google and Facebook are working to (express) fake news sites. But whether there's a link between fake news and disagreeable facts remains to be seen. And what does this mean for your free speech? The panel returns in a bit.
But first, Europeans drawing up defense plans that don't include America. So what could a Trump administration mean for our allies and the current world order, (Angola)? Stay here.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KENNEDY: Donald Trump will not be in office for another two months but it looks like he's already flipping the world order on his head. We're told the president-elect yesterday spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that they reportedly discussed bringing the two countries closer together economically and militarily.
That prospect has freaked out a lot of people including some fellow Republicans and Pentagon officials. It also has leaders in Europe on the edge who have been very worried about Putin's aggression. And now, Europe with their cheese and baguette apparently considering building their own military separate from NATO.
Here with more, it's Bryan Suits. He's the host of KFI radio show `Dark Secret Place' in Los Angeles on KFI AM 640. Bryan, of course, is also a combat veteran of Iraq and Bosnia, two areas that could be very much affected by this new world order. Welcome back, Suits.
BRYAN SUITS, RADIO HOST, DARK SECRET PLACE: Thanks for having me, Kennedy.
KENNEDY: I'm very glad you brought the pipe. So what should the U.S. do about NATO in regards to Europe saying their going to build their own damn army?
SUITS: They should remind the Europeans that Trump in the first debate did say he gets NATO. That he's going to support NATO bigly. It will be huge. But they're still reacting to what he said in July when he said -- well, I don't know if we will come to your defense. They're reacting like a mistress who overheard her sugar daddy talking to his old girlfriend, Marylou isolationism.
This is something that the United States post World War II. We love hearing our politicians saying why are we sending our boys overseas? But the reality is the world without the United States involved in Europe is a bad world. We've seen it twice in the last hundred years. It's not a good world.
And the Europeans now, they know they're incapable of cutting off their addiction to generous social programs and actually pay for what would be a hundred billion dollar defense --
KENNEDY: But that's not really the worst thing for us, is it? If they have that sort of self-examination and figure out that maybe they need to buy some new kevlar vests and some pointy guns.
SUITS: Yes, and they have. They have woken up. And they had their (come to peer) moment. And they realized, we can't afford to do what the United States does with just one of its 13 carrier battle groups. The countries that are paying their two percent, Poland and Estonia, love the United States. They're the newest members of NATO. And they're the ones most directly threatened by Putin's muscle flexing, right?
KENNEDY: Poor Poland.
SUITS: The French, the others, the Germans especially, have no room to caterwaul when they're spending 1.2 percent. And yet, they have maintained these very generous social programs for the past 60 years.
KENNEDY: Yes. I think it is worth looking into that, how much they're spending and what we're responsible for. Hey, how is this Putin-Trump souffle forming up for you?
SUITS: I'm still very leery of some of the connections behind the scenes that Trump has with Putin like General Michael Flynn being on the payroll of Russia Today, of RT, sitting at the head table with Putin, you know, at their 10th anniversary. I don't like that.
But when I hear the name John Bolton being thrown around. That guy is a realist. He knows the cut of Putin's jib and I need someone who knows that kind of someone's jib.
KENNEDY: And that's one thing. We've only got about 30 seconds but I'm curious about Ambassador Bolton's name still being floated because of the connection he's got with Steve Bannon, they are close. Do you think the fact that he has ruffled feathers over Russia still keeps him in the running?
SUITS: I hope so. I mean I think he's Trump's kind of buy. And if Bannon says so, then he will be Trump's guy. And, you know, Steve Bannon also is a guy who knows what we're dealing with in the Kremlin. And if he has Trump's ear then a lot of my concerns are assuaged.
KENNEDY: Interesting. All right. Bryan Suits, put the pipe back in, let's see it. Very, very good. Very handsome and classy. Thank you for being here, Bryan, as always.
SUITS: Thank you.
KENNEDY: Yes. Coming up, liberals doubled down on executive orders under Obama. Did they set the stage for more powerful President Trump? Kmele Foster joins me with his concerns about current and future administrations. Please join me as well.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KENNEDY: Hello, sassy sailor. Over the last eight years, President Obama has used executive orders to make all sorts of new and often controversial decisions from targeting and killing people with drones to committing America to the Iranian Nuclear Deal and the Paris Climate Accord all without involving congress.
But now, the shoe is on the other foot and Democrats are crying foul, waiting to see if and how Donald Trump will make the same kind of unilateral decisions, it seems they forgot the pendulum swings both ways, yes. Kmele Foster is here. He's a partner at Freethink Media and he's also one of the co-hosts of `The Fifth Column' podcast. Welcome back, Kmele.
KMELE FOSTER, PARTNER, FREETHINK MEDIA/FIFTH COLUMN CO-HOST: Thank you for having me, Kennedy.
KENNEDY: So let's talk about this a little bit because the concentration of presidential power should be unsettling for both sides. But it seems as though Democrats and leftists have forgotten that when your philosopher king is no longer in power, some of the power that you have given him or her remains.
FOSTER: Yes. And in this particular case, one particular philosopher king, Barack Obama used to talk about these issues a lot. When he was the senator preparing to run for president, one of his most scathing criticisms of the Bush administration was their secrecy and the concentration of power.
He used to talk about repealing the authorization for use of military force in Iraq which he passed back in 2001 and 2002 because he said that the Bush administration was abusing its authority by going to war in all sorts of areas, places without consulting congress. He promised that he would change things when he got into the White House.
In fact, he did the exact opposite. He doubled down on what the administration was doing before him. He took advantage of those same things and he went even further in all of those various areas that you talked about, with respect to immigration reform, with respect to trade policy.
Some of those things we might have even liked like immigration reform. Having a broader, more comprehensive immigration policy that actually gives people some peace of mind who happens to be in this country is a good thing I think but you have to go about it in the right way.