 Joining us from Hollywood, California is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America pack, which raises money for progressive candidates all around the country. And he writes the down with tyranny blog Howie Klein. Howie Klein, Paul Ryan is making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows defending the Republican health care plan. How does he sleep at night? He may be a zombie and doesn't sleep. I don't know. But before we get into Paul Ryan and his hideous appearance yesterday with George Stephanopoulos, I mean on Sunday, I just wanted to mention to you that I've never lived in Hollywood in my entire life. Do you live in North Hollywood? No, I don't. I live in Los Feliz. Right. But to most people, that's Hollywood. Why is that? Because Hollywood is Hollywood. This is not Hollywood. You know, that's where Madonna lived and that's where all the young hip, I think John Ham lives there. It's a very hippie. People who don't want to live in Hollywood basically. But Hollywood isn't a geographic space. It's a state of mind. Oh, okay. I mean, it happens to, Hollywood happens to be a geographic space. It also, you know, West Hollywood is a separate city from Los Angeles, part of Los Angeles County, but its own city with its own mayor and legislative body and police force, et cetera, kind of police force. And then East Hollywood is what it is. And then Los Feliz is separate and really not even contiguous. I guess you're right. I'm sorry. That's all right. You know, I just want to say that so in the future, when you introduce me, you can say, and now we have how we client from Los Feliz, or you could say Los Angeles. Right. By the way, I know we want to talk about Paul Ryan. One of the stories that is not getting covered that you really have been staying on top of, and I noticed by looking at the Los Angeles Times it's being covered, is the oppression of Mexican Americans, the breaking up of families, especially in Los Angeles. ICE is working overtime destroying lives in Los Angeles. That's right. And is Los Angeles cooperating with ICE? The city of Los Feliz is not cooperating with ICE. The city of Los Angeles or Los Feliz? Sorry? Did you say Los Feliz or Los Angeles? Los Feliz is a neighborhood. It doesn't have its own police force. And they're not cooperating with ICE? I can guarantee you that Los Feliz is not cooperating with ICE, but Los Angeles is not breaking the law, but they're not doing anything more than what the law requires, and that's it. Right. I was on the subway in New York yesterday, and I saw a sign that says, if one of your loved ones is missing, call this number, and it's from Governor Cuomo, the state of New York. A lot of people are reporting their loved ones missing because they've been rounded up by ICE, and they can't find them. It's pretty incredible, isn't it? It is amazing, and there was a big story about a bunch of Trump voters who suddenly saw that someone who was a pillar of their community was just gone, and he didn't commit any crimes. He was not what Trump calls a bad ombre. Exactly, described him as a good ombre, and he was just summarily rounded up and deported, and these are Trump supporters who are aghast. My guess is that they are completely turned off and lost to Trumpism completely now. They're being rounded up, put on planes, sent to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, where they're rounded up and forced into gangs. It's a mess. It is just an absolute mess. It is a mess, and if Trump was serious and he wanted to do a good thing, that people, at least in Los Angeles, would appreciate, he would really go after not people that they have been rounding up, easy target to, because they can just follow school buses home and grab, but they would round up the really bad gangs, many of whom are from El Salvador, as a matter of fact, and there's that one really, really bad gang that everybody hates and everyone would like to see them gone, but that's hard. I just do that instead, but they don't want to do that, because that's dangerous. They could get shot back at. If you go after some poor, struggling parents by following their child's school bus home, if chances are, no one's going to shoot at you. If you go after one of these really terrible gangs, you get into a firefight. They're not doing that. They talk about it. They say they're going to. Sessions was on Long Island the other day claiming he's going after this gang, but they haven't. I mean, maybe they have on Long Island, but they sure haven't in Los Angeles. MS13 is in Long Island, which I found that kind of really MS13 is in in Long Island. I found that a little bizarre. Okay, let's talk about Paul Ryan and the healthcare bill. Yeah, like I said, he was on this week with George Stephanopoulos yesterday, and he was just giving his litany of lies. Just one after the other. They've got their talking points. They focus group tested them to make sure they had all the right words. And the only problem is they're not true. It's just one fallacy after another about how great this is. And this Trump care bill is going to be better for everybody's health. And it's going to be cheaper and more wonderful. And it just lie after lie after lie. And then when you dispute it, you know, Trump or Ryan or whoever starts carrying on about fake news. Well, the thing is, you know, they're not just attacking the New York Times and the Washington Post. They're attacking the March of Dimes and the American Medical Association and the American Cancer Society. I mean, they're the AARP. I mean, every professional medical group, every consumer group, all the groups that are interested and are nonpartisan that are interested in health care are disputing these lies that Ryan and Trump are spewing. And they just think if they can just repeat them over and over and over, Ryan and Trump think if they can repeat them enough times, there will be at least some people who will listen to them and believe them or at least question the evidence. I mean, there has been a concerted effort by the Republicans to discredit science and to discredit the media and to try the best they can to create a system where there is no alternative to what they say. Their alternative facts, they want to be accepted as facts. And they won't ever be accepted as facts unless you're on opioids and they're a Trump voter. That's interesting. You bring up opioids because we have Sam Kinyonez on the show today and he wrote Dreamland about the opioid epidemic. May I read something that a friend of mine wrote? It's Mary Ann Williamson. I think you know her, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. A Course in Miracles. That's right. And she wrote an essay over the weekend at HuffPo and it was about, she didn't mention Ryan per se, but it goes right to what we're talking about. So what I'm reading now is her words. Political propaganda seeks to affect the way people perceive the world in order to affect the way they behave. Political propaganda is the biggest tool in the extremists' arsenal. It's at an all-time high today in terms of sophistication and effectiveness as Madison Avenue Public Relations acumen has become insidiously and nefariously applied to the political sphere. Our problem is not just that some politicians flat out lie. Our bigger problem is the power of their propaganda to dismantle the ability within many people's minds to even realize they're being lied to. People are vulnerable to extremism not because they like extremism, but because in too many cases today extremism is usually successful at posing as something else. Whether or not a big lie has been proven to be false seems to have minimal bearing on whether or not it is believed. It is the conviction and consistency with which the big lie is stated, not the proven accuracy or inaccuracy of its claim that determines its effect on the voter's mind and thus the way they vote. And that goes a long way to explaining the persistence of the support that people like Trump and Ryan are still getting. And it's why a lot of these Republicans felt that it was worth taking the gamble of this vote. Remember, 217 Republicans voted for this bill, only 20 voted against it. And those 217 Republicans, many of whom hadn't read the bill, many of whom felt the bill actually was a bad bill. I mean, I was just doing a story when you called just now about a guy in Florida or a Congressman, Mario Diaz Ballart down in the Miami area, who voted, who said he was wavering, wasn't sure if he wanted to vote for it or not, got his arm twisted, voted for it, and then was asked afterwards if he felt he voted for a bad bill or a good bill. He said he voted for a bad bill, but thinks maybe the Senate will make it better. I mean, that's a Congressman? Yes, that is a Congressman. That's a Republican Congressman. That's what they are today. That. Were they kicking the can down the road, hoping that the Republicans in the Senate would save them from this bill? Does Paul Ryan really want this bill passed? Paul Ryan doesn't want this bill. Paul Ryan, unlike what many people think, is a dangerous ideologue and always has been. People don't realize, you know, he's been painted so benignly by the media as a, what are they, like a wank or something like that, a policy wank. He's never been that. He's never, I've watched this guy's career from the very beginning from the first time he ran for Congress. This guy was nothing but a PR stooge, you know, he was like a sort of basically nice looking gym teacher. And they, they, they just thought, oh, we could put anything in his head and get him to repeat it. And that's what they got with him. You know, similar in some ways to, to Ronald Reagan, but I might add, but they just, just fill this guy's head up with a bunch of bullshit. He already, you know, he started off well enough for them because the only book he's ever admitted to reading is, is The Fountainhead by Anne Rand. He's a big Anne Rand supporter and he, and his intellectual growth was stunted in high school after reading some Anne Rand books. And he, yes, he very much believes in this. This is his dream. Paul Ryan, who, who only was able to go to college because of benefits from Social Security after his father passed away, right. And decided once he got up to the top to pull the ladder up after him, typical of many Republicans like him who come from your Republicans who come from working-class families, I've got mine, screw you. Right. That's him. And he very much wants to turn the clock back and destroy everything that came out of the new deal. That's Paul Ryan. Getting into his head should be pretty easy because it's empty. What is he thinking? You know that he doesn't believe he's a hateful human being. I would assume that he believes Obamacare is a disaster because the premiums have gone up. It has been pretty tough. Premium gone up on Obamacare because it's been sabotaged. The Republicans, the governors of Republican states like Wisconsin, his state have refused to do the Medicaid expansion without the Medicaid expansion, which, which the government has put huge subsidies behind thinking that they would get Republican governors to back it. And, and many did. They did get a lot of Republican governors backing it because it was the best thing for this state guy who I do not respect like John Kasich. I don't, I don't like John Kasich. I don't buy his bullshit. But, but he had the good sense to do the right thing in this case for the people of Ohio, even though he's a Republican, even though he had a Republican, completely Republican dominated legislature, he still passed Medicaid expansion. And several other, and Christie did as well. Several other Republican governors did it in their states, but in a state like Wisconsin, where you've got another crackpot ideologue, Scott Walker, they didn't pass it. So yes, that's the reason why the premiums have gone up, because of that. And that's the only reason why. You're saying that if all 50 states accepted the Medicaid, then premiums would not go up because why? Well, first of all, I want to correct a misapprehension about premiums going up. Premiums may go up because the cost of healthcare goes up. That's why premiums have gone up. But they've gone up at a much, much slower rate. Even under what I'm, even under, even with Republican sabotage, they've gone up at a much slower rate than they had been going up. So that's one thing to remember. The other thing is the way insurance can be explained is that you take the people who have the biggest risk. So in other words, people with preexisting conditions, people older people who are likely to get sick, you take them and you put them in as big a pool as possible with people who are healthy and people who are young and people who are likely not to get sick. And you put them all together and then the cost goes down for the people who have to use healthcare. That's the whole idea of spreading out the risk and that's what insurance is all about. And with the Republicans, what they're going to do is take the people with preexisting conditions, remove them from the pool and create a separate pool and lead it up to the states as to whether they're going to be funding that pool, right? Well, the federal government, no, they're going to have to fund the pool. In order to, in order, in other words, in order to get the waiver to create the pool, they have to agree to fund it. And the federal government has some money to do that as well. However, it only covers the plan that the Republicans have in Trumpcare, only covers about 20% of the people who will be thrown into those pools. So whenever those pools have been tried in the past, first of all, it takes between six months and a year or a year and a half sometimes to even get into them. So then you're stuck, you know, say for an average of about a year with no insurance, you can't get anything. And then, and then once you get in, there are still very, very high costs, which the subsidies are not going to cover. So, so the Republicans like to talk about where you have access, you have, everyone's going to have access. Okay, well, you have access to buy a jet plane. Did you know that? Yeah, sure. Yeah. If you want, you can buy a jet plane. If you can't afford it, it might be hard. You still have access. That's when they say that everybody is going to have access to healthcare. That's true. If you have $150,000 to pay an annual premium, if you have a preexisting condition like breast cancer, that's what it's going to cost. If a woman has breast cancer, her annual premium is $150,000. How about that? That's access? Yeah. When they talk about access, that's what they're talking about. Well, they're saying that people with preexisting conditions didn't take care of themselves properly. That's right. Or bad people, and you know, the implication being that God is punishing them. So, you know, that's why they were so freaked out by what Jimmy Kimmel had to say about his newborn son being born with a congenital heart disease. Wow. I read something in the Washington Times the day after Jimmy gave that speech about his son. And there's this well-respected conservative, I'm not going to even mention his name, I don't want to give him any publicity. He wrote a piece in the Washington Times attacking Jimmy Kimmel for being political, taking his sick son and rolling around in the dirt by making it political, how unseemly and ugly it was, so hateful in the tone. And as I'm reading it, I'm thinking, this is a death cult. The Republicans, the conservatives just want to see people die. I mean, they're that hateful. It doesn't seem that way, doesn't it? I might say, though, in defense of some Republicans, although this one was an ex-democrat who's a Republican senator from Louisiana now, he said he's not voting for anything when it comes in front of the healthcare bill when it comes to the Senate. He's not voting for it unless it passes what he dug the Jimmy Kimmel test. How much do you blame Obama for not doing the public option? Wouldn't a public option have put these insurance companies out of business? And isn't that the big issue? We have to put these insurance companies out of business. That's right. And the public option would have eventually done that. It would have led to that. And I suspect that the Democrats, the Democratic establishment, had lots and lots of reasons, green ones with large denominations, to not do that. And they didn't do it. And it's not like they passed Obamacare with any Republican support anyway. So in other words, who are they negotiating with? Who are the Democrats negotiating with? By killing the public option, it didn't give them any Republican support. So what was the purpose of it? Of course, they were negotiating with their own donors. That's what it came down to. My contempt for Pelosi and the Democrats has been born out of conversations with you. And when I heard them singing, hey, good-bye after they voted to pass that in the House. And Pelosi saying you will forever have this mark on your forehead. And it will be lit up. Yeah. As though good luck being reelected in two years. And so many people who are immune to this stuff say to me, well, this is good for the Democrats. And I said, how come the Democrats never say this is good for the American people? It's not a game. Who cares if it's good for the Democrats in two years? The American, well, they care because the main thing they care about are their careers. That comes way before any kind of policies. But the problem is the majority of House Democrats, 108 now, have cosponsored John Conyers' legislation for Medicare for All. So the Medicare for All bill is in committee. There are 108 Democratic cosponsors. But when you look at who's not a cosponsor, you find Pelosi. Unbelievable. You find Steny Hoyer. You find the number three Democrat who is, you know, their pick to succeed them, Joe Crowley. You find basically the whole Republican wing of the Democratic Party. And by Republican wing of the Democratic Party, I mean the blue dogs and the new Dems. Almost all of them are opposed to this. So here we're talking about a policy, Medicare for All, which something like 75% of Democrats, grassroots Democrats love a majority of independent voters love and even a plurality of Republicans like and accept. Even Hillary had nibbled around the edges of that. Kind of. She was forced into it. But that end of the party, that establishment end of the party that gets so much money from the insurance companies, they're very leery of this and they don't want to see it happen. My point is, can't the Democrats offer something to get people enthusiastic? No. They just want to campaign on Trump as a boogeyman. Ryan is evil. Both of which are true. But why not offer something to get enthusiasm up, to make people want to vote for Democrats instead of saying, well, you know, Trump is so bad, you know, even if the Democrats are bad, there's a lesser of two evils. That's all that that's all that the triple C ever does. The Democratic campaign, Congressional Campaign Committee, triple C, DCCC, they're all about lesser of two evils politics. And that's a shame because there are things that they could offer that would be inspiring, that would make people believe and make people want to vote for Democrats. And perfect would be Medicare for all. Everybody wants Medicare for all. Why won't they do it? Because they're more concerned about their own power, which is paid for by insurance companies. They're more concerned about their own career trajectories. That's what they care about, not about the American people. So don't ask that question again. They don't care. This country has turned into Manhattan, where there are no rules. It's every human being for themselves. Corruption is the norm. Trump has pretty much sealed the deal that America now is Manhattan, where there are laws but only fools obey those laws. Dishonesty, I have never seen the country. LA soon? Huh? Are you coming back to LA soon? I miss it. I obviously from what you just said, one can sort of glean a little something there. I think that Donald Trump has brought Manhattan to America. I think Ronald Reagan brought the worst parts of California to America. I think Trump has brought the Manhattan mindset to the country. Lie, cheat, rip somebody off. Just sell, you know, build something. And then if you get caught, bribe the building inspector. You need the mafia, get the mafia. That's what this country kind of sort of was under the Bush administration and, yeah, during Obama. But now it's just accepted. It's out in the open. Right? It's just out in the open. It does seem that way. I think there's going to be reaction to it. I'm hoping there is. But you certainly have a situation. I mean, that you probably saw this weekend where Kushner's sister was in Beijing selling visas, basically saying, invest at least $500,000 in the Kushner company, and you will get a visa to come live in America. And, you know, and there are slides with Kushner on the slide. There was one slide that I ran on my blog with Trump and then Chinese under his picture said, this is the guy that decides. And everybody knows that Kushner is his son-in-law and they're selling visas. I have gone to Canada on numerous occasions. And while I'm going through customs, my shoulders drop. I'm happy. I'm suddenly in Canada. I don't have to worry about getting shot. If I get sick, I know I'll be taken care of. And I always ask, what does it take for me to be allowed to live here? And that's the number. They say, if you put $500,000 into a bank account in Canada, they will let you stay there. So when I read that number, I said, I remember being told, you can't come here unless you give us $500,000. Why is that so wrong for Kushner to say that? I don't think that that's the case. I don't think that Canada does anything about that. I mean, it seems weird to me. Maybe you need that to stop the process of becoming a citizen. I don't know. But I mean, I taught at McGill and no one ever said that to me. And American friends of mine who taught at McGill, who lived there full time, never got any kind of hassle about that. I mean, they didn't put any $500,000 in any bank account. Why is it wrong? Because Trump is chasing immigrants out of the country and not allowing people who need sanctuary to come to the country. And then they're allowing rich people, many of them, mostly Chinese rich people, but also rich people from Arab countries and from India and a few other places, Russia, who, you know, I hate to say this, but a lot of these people have gotten their money by being crooked. And so if you're rich and you could throw on, you could throw $500,000 to Jared Kushner's company as a quote investment, you're welcome to come to America with a visa and stay for the rest of your life. Whereas if you're poor, you're not welcome. So they're saying if you invest in the Kushner family, that's what they were doing. They were there. They advertised. They got a room full of millionaires. They grabbed this woman who was reporting for the Washington Post and dragged her out of the room because she was taking pictures of these slides, which are now circulating on the internet. And yes, that's what it was. It was not like, you know, invest in America. It was no, it was invest in Kushner. But is that legal? No. That was that's the point of what we're talking about. I'm saying that there's going to be a backlash that this can't go on. All right. I'd be curious. And this is what I'm talking about. Down with tyranny.com. I got a story. Got the slides up. You'll find it. All right. The Kushners will say, no, no, it's perfectly legal. If you invest $500,000 in an American company, you can get a visa. Yes. There is a program to do that. Is it legal for them to do it the way they're doing it? They didn't think so, which is why they kicked the media out of their little, their little meeting. It's unsamely. Give me marching orders. What do we need to do? What do we do? Tell us what to do. We need to, there's only one way to go about this. I mean, we have to, you know, keep up our vigilance, do what we can as individuals. And eventually it all is going to lead to the 2018 congressional midterm elections, where we have to defeat every Republican we can and replace them with good Democrats. That's not good enough. That's what it is. Tell, we need call Nancy Pelosi and say Medicare for all. You can do that too. Yes. Call Nancy Pelosi and say Medicare for all. I like that idea. But waiting till 2018 seems kind of passive, Howie. Not waiting. You know, we've got to keep up the excitement level in the grassroots. There are special elections. There's one coming up in Montana in two weeks. There's, and then there's, of course, the really important one in Georgia. You know, these kinds of things are, you know, all going to hopefully lead to the Democrats taking back the Senate. I'm sorry, taking back the House, maybe the Senate too, but not likely, but certainly the House. Howie Klein is the founder and treasurer of the Blue America Pack. Go to Down with Tyranny. I'm going to go there right now and read that story about the half a million dollar bribe to the Kushner family. Thank you, Howie. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.