With the health care system threatened, Obama speaks up

In the American tradition, former presidents tend to say very little about their successors. And with this in mind, while Barack Obama has no doubt been tempted in recent months to condemn Donald Trump and his actions, Obama has been restrained, giving the new president a wide berth.

But just a couple of days before Trump's inauguration, Obama acknowledged that while the White House and Congress would make their own determinations about the nation's direction in the coming years, and he intended to stay out of it, that principle is not absolute.

"There's a difference," Obama said, "between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake."

Less than two weeks after leaving office, this led Obama to issue a statement responding to the Trump White House's proposed Muslim ban. This afternoon, with the American health care system in peril, the former president spoke up again, this time via social media.

The Democrat's 1,000-word statement is worth reading in its entirety, and it clearly has more than one audience in mind. Part of Obama's message clearly intends to encourage health care advocates and their allies to remain engaged and fight to prevent the nation from falling backwards.

But the other part of the message appears to be a challenge to Republican policymakers to do the right thing:

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Donald Trump comes clean, admits he doesn't have tapes

Six weeks ago, Donald Trump had one of the more consequential Twitter tantrums of his career. The president, for reasons that have never been explained, wrote in a warning to the former director of the FBI, "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

This 19-word missive, which came shortly before Comey's scheduled testimony on Capitol Hill, sparked a chain reaction that included, among other things, the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump's Russia scandal.

But against the dramatic background, there's been an open question as to whether or not the "tapes" Trump referred to exist in reality. Asked at a press conference two weeks ago, the president said, cryptically, "Well I'll tell you about that sometime in the very near future." Evidently, he decided to come clean this afternoon.

President Donald Trump on Thursday tweeted that he did not record his conversations with then-FBI Director James Comey, putting to rest one of the biggest lingering mysteries surrounding the drama between the president and the FBI head he later dismissed.

Specifically, the president wrote in another pair of tweets, "With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are 'tapes' or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings."

Note, the first half of this message seems designed to suggest some nefarious forces may have recordings of Trump, while the second half is his carefully worded -- no doubt lawyer approved -- denial.

Why it took the president six weeks to bring clarity to this simple question is something the White House has not yet explained.

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The GOP's political incentives on health care are a mess

The Senate Republicans' secret health care bill is, as of this morning, no longer a secret. Though the website GOP senators created for the proposal doesn't appear to be working perfectly, the bill is now available for public scrutiny -- with only a week to go before a scheduled floor vote.

But as we start digging in on the blueprint, and await a report from the Congressional Budget Office on its impact, it's worth taking a moment to think about the strange political incentives surrounding the entire initiative.

Because, frankly, I find them baffling.

Senate Republicans have kept the bill-writing process secret, in large part because they recognize how deeply controversial and unpopular their efforts are. GOP leaders have been reluctant to even talk about their own policy ideas, effectively telling their own members, "We better pass this now before anyone realizes how horrible the plan is."

But then what? What exactly do Republicans expect to happen once their regressive ideas are imposed on the nation?

In 2009 and 2010, Democrats wanted the public to know as much about their health care proposal as possible. Dems were desperate for Americans to learn the details, in part because Democratic officials believed people would like what they saw, but also because Dems wanted the facts to counteract the nonsensical rumors and brazen lies touted by the ACA's opponents. What's more, once "Obamacare" was law, Dems were confident that the law's popularity would eventually grow -- which is largely what's happened.

In 2017, however, all of this is reversed. Republicans plainly don't want Americans to get too close a look at their unpopular legislation, and have no real confidence that the public will actually like what GOP officials came up with behind closed doors.

All of which leads to a question that isn't asked often enough: why in the world are they doing this? Or more to the point, why aren't they concerned about a political backlash? As Vox's Ezra Klein put it the other day, "If their plan is so unpopular they can't defend it in theory, how will they defend it in practice? Each day this goes on, it seems less like a legislative process and more like a form of madness."

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Ford's production decision causes a political headache for Trump

In early February, just a couple of weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and boasted about Ford Motor Company's decision not to expand production at a new plant in Mexico.

"We're losing our jobs to Mexico," Trump argued, adding, "And I have to tell you I've turned it around, already I've turned it around, you see that. Ford has been phenomenal. They canceled the plan."

What the president neglected to mention is Ford's new plan. The New York Times reported that the American auto giant will "build its next-generation small car in China rather than in the United States or Mexico."

Last year, the company said it planned to shift Focus production to a plant under construction in Mexico, primarily because of lower labor costs. But Ford canceled the project in January after it met stiff opposition from President Trump, who had repeatedly criticized the company for investing in Mexican jobs at the expense of American ones.

Now Ford, the nation's second-largest automaker, after General Motors, is centralizing much of its small-car production in China, where it has available capacity.

This appears to have been a straightforward business decision, unrelated to political pressures. A Wall Street Journal report noted that Ford expects to save $500 million by building its next-generation Focus in China, as compared to the original Mexican plan.

And while it wouldn't be fair to blame the White House for the auto maker's latest move, it does create a political headache for the president who was a little too eager to boast about Ford scrapping its plans south of the border.

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