College Safe Space Cartoons

'Suck it up': Lawmaker wants to cut funding for schools coddling students over Trump

Lawmaker wants to cut funding for schools with safe spaces

An Iowa lawmaker is looking to slash funding for public colleges spending money on grief counseling and other kid-glove treatment for students upset over last week’s presidential election results -- telling snowflakes everywhere: “Suck it up, buttercup.”
Since Donald Trump’s upset victory last Tuesday, colleges across the country have brought in therapy dogs, canceled exams and held “cry-ins” on campus.
But Republican state Rep. Bobby Kaufmann says he will introduce a “suck it up, buttercup” bill in January when the Iowa State Legislature resumes, in a bid to fight back against campus coddling.
The bill would hit taxpayer-funded state universities with a budget cut for double the amount they spend on such election-related activities. Kaufmann emphasized that existing therapy and mental health services are not being targeted.
“I saw schools with rising, skyrocketing tuition costs where they are also finding money and expenditures for things such as cry rooms. I heard reports of rooms where you can play with Play-Doh, where you can color on books and talk about your feelings, and I was hearing reports of some schools that were bringing in ponies to be able get students through the election,” he told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday.
After receiving hundreds of emails of support from across the country, Kaufmann also has set up a website where supporters can "Adopt a Trump protester" and get a "suck it up, buttercup" hat for $17.76. He says he hopes other states pursue similar legislation.
"I believe I'm the first," he told FoxNews.com, when asked if other lawmakers were following his example. "I wanted to fire a political warning shot."
The kind of creative counseling that concerns him extends well beyond Iowa campuses. Kaufmann isn't the only one worried about the post-election feel-gooderies either.
The University of Michigan law school canceled a “Post-Election Self-Care with Food and Play” event this week after inevitable Internet ridicule. The event offered students the chance to work out their Trump anxiety with “stress-busting self-care activities” including coloring, blowing bubbles, sculpting with Play-Doh and “positive card making.”
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CANCELS PLAN TO HELP STUDENTS 'COPE' WITH TRUMP
But Kaufmann says that’s a waste of money, and can actually hurt students as it doesn't prepare them for the real world.
“And in life, when your car breaks down, your kids get sick or you have to take a second job to pay your mortgage, you don’t get to go to a cry zone, you don’t get to pet a pony, you have to deal with it,” he said.
However, at least one state university has pushed back against the bill, saying it’s important for students to be able to express themselves about election results
“I think universities are the perfect place to have these types of conversations,” Scott Ketelsen, director of university relations at the University of Northern Iowa, told the Des Moines Register. “It’s where people learn. It’s where they share ideas. I don’t consider it coddling.”
The bill also establishes new criminal penalties for protesters who shut down highways. Kaufmann cited a recent anti-Trump protest that shut down a highway in Iowa City.
“I encourage protest, I encourage dissent. But you don’t have a constitutional right to block the constitutional rights of others,” he told "Fox & Friends."
Some lawmakers in other states have taken the opposite approach. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called on Monday for more disruption in the city, which has seen some of the highest-profile protests since Trump was elected.
“We have to recognize that all over this country, the more disruption that’s caused peacefully … the more it will change the trajectory of things,” he said in a radio interview on Monday.

Report: Medicaid enrollment, costs swell under ObamaCare expansion

To many apples on the tree..

Adult enrollment in ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion has more than doubled expectations in states across the country -- pointing to ballooning costs that threaten budget dollars for priorities like education and infrastructure, according to a report released Wednesday by The Foundation for Government Accountability.
Newly obtained data from 24 of the 29 states with Medicaid expansions show at least 11.5 million able-bodied adults have enrolled. The FGA says adult enrollment for all these states exceeds projections, by an average of 110 percent. Some states have signed up more than four times as many adults as they expected would enroll.
“A lot of folks on the left will say that this is a huge sign of success -- look at all of these people who need coverage and help,” Nicholas Horton, senior research fellow at FGA and co-author of the report, told FoxNews.com. “My response is that it is not success when you have able-bodied adults who are being trapped in welfare and reducing their incentive to work.”
The swelling enrollment also points to potential budget problems for the states.
TRUMP WILLING TO KEEP PARTS OF OBAMACARE
Starting in January 2017, states’ share of Medicaid expansion costs will increase to 5 percent and, as noted in the FGA’s report, those costs gradually will rise to 10 percent by 2020. With costs rising more quickly than ObamaCare advocates projected, the FGA expects state budgets to take a hit.
“We’ve used deficit spending to pay for these people in federal dollars, and come January, states are going to have to use state dollars to pay for the program,” FGA senior fellow Josh Archambault said. “The one caveat in this is that every state dollar spent on able-bodied adults in a Medicaid program is one less dollar that can be spent on other programs. This is essentially eating up tons of funds at the state level.”
The FGA report also claims that Medicaid expansion makes welfare for able-bodied adults a higher priority than services for the nearly 600,000 seniors and children with developmental disabilities, individuals with brain injuries and others on waiting lists for additional Medicaid services.
But according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a division under the federal Department of Health and Human Services, these waiting lists are unrelated to the Medicaid expansion and pre-date ObamaCare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act.
Before ObamaCare, Medicaid eligibility extended mostly to low-income, disabled adults and some pregnant women and children. Under the Affordable Care Act, the program now allows coverage for most low-income Americans under age 65 in states that OK’d the expansion -- while other families not qualifying for Medicaid can still receive premium subsidies on the ObamaCare exchanges.
House Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Bill Flores, R-Texas, told Fox News that ObamaCare as a whole “is a welfare program masquerading as health care reform.”
“Enrollment projections were nothing but fantasy, cost estimates little more than wishful thinking, and positive health outcomes were grossly overstated,” he said.
But according to CMS, the Medicaid expansion has had major positive health and economic benefits for citizens and states.
“Medicaid expansion does not trade off against coverage for people with disabilities,” CMS spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News. “In fact, Medicaid expansion has allowed many eligible individuals with disabilities to get coverage.”
The future of ObamaCare – including the Medicaid expansion and other myriad elements of the sprawling program – remains in doubt now that Donald Trump has been elected president. He has vowed to “repeal and replace” the law, and has the support of congressional Republicans who kept their majority in last week’s election.
“Our path forward is clear: we must repeal this unsustainable burden and replace it with real reforms that improve access to quality health care at lower prices,” Flores said.

Trump transition team announces five-year lobbying ban for appointees

Appointees to President-elect Donald Trump's administration will be asked to sign a form barring them from being a registered lobbyist for five years after they leave government service, officials announced Wednesday.
Republican National Committee chief strategist Sean Spicer said on a conference call with reporters that the prohibition would help to ensure people won't be able to use government service "to enrich themselves."
In addition, Spicer announced that Trump transition team members would be barred from lobbying about the issues they had worked on for six months after their departure. He did not immediately explain how either ban would be enforced.
The new Trump transition policy is one of several aimed at curbing the influence of lobbyists. During the presidential campaign, Trump vowed to institute a five-year lobbying ban for all departing members of Congress and their staff, in addition to executive branch officials.
His original transition team, assembled under New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, was packed with lobbyists and interest advocates. In recent days, Trump put Vice President-elect Mike Pence in charge of transition, and he is changing some of the people who are involved.
Pence is "making good on President-elect Trump's promise that we're not going to have any lobbyists involved with the transition efforts," Trump spokesman Jason Miller said Wednesday. "And this is, when we talk about draining the swamp, this is one of the first steps. And so, the bottom line is, we're going to get the transition team where we need it to be."
In a "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday, Trump said he'd had no choice but to initially rely on lobbyists in Washington because "the whole place is one big lobbyist." He vowed to "phase that out."
His White House predecessors have made similar promises.
On the campaign trail in 2007, Barack Obama frequently condemned the "revolving door" of Washington in terms strikingly similar to Trump.
When Obama won the presidency the following year, he banned practicing lobbyists from participating in transition activities and banned those who had been a lobbyist in the previous year from joining the administration to work on issues they handled as lobbyists. Obama's transition team participants were also barred from lobbying the White House for a year after their departures.
With government influencers still firmly entrenched, Obama won re-election in 2012 after a second campaign that included almost no talk about the revolving door.

Outgoing California Sen. Boxer introduces bill to scrap Electoral College

Retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., introduced long-shot legislation Tuesday to scrap the Electoral College, in the latest protest from Democrats following last week's election where Hillary Clinton appeared to win the popular vote despite losing to Donald Trump.
Trump, as with all presidential election victors, won the election because he garnered the most Electoral College votes.
But he likely will be the fifth president in American history to do so while losing the popular vote. The last president to win the presidency in such a manner was President George W. Bush, who beat Democrat Al Gore in 2000 despite Gore gaining more overall votes.
“This is the only office in the land where you can get more votes and still lose the presidency. The Electoral College is an outdated, undemocratic system that does not reflect our modern society, and it needs to change immediately,” Boxer said in a statement.
The legislation is almost certainly doomed in a Republican-dominated Congress. In the unlikely event it passed, the measure would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states within seven years of passage, as it would seek to amend the Constitution.
Boxer noted that in 2012, Trump had tweeted his dislike of the Electoral College. Trump said in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday that he would be fine seeing the college replaced by a vote that favors “simple votes.” He later tweeted that if that were the case, he would have campaigned differently and still beaten Clinton. He also called the Electoral College “genius.”The Los Angeles Times notes that Boxer has co-sponsored bills to abolish the Electoral College  before, and none have been considered by Congress.