Obamacare Repeal Grateful Hospice Covered By Obamacare

On the list of off-putting things that people won’t let go of, we’re downgrading “attempts to repeal Obamacare” from number 124 to number 52, right between “their last relationship” and “Mason jars of urine.” President Trump says he wants to “let Obamacare fail,” because as the old saying goes, “Revenge is a dish best served while constantly whining like a child on Twitter.” And Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are tied in a 2020 poll, but that doesn’t account for the margin of error of +/- 100 percent when everyone kills themselves before Election Day. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Tuesday, July 18th, 2017:

OBAMACARE REPEAL DEAD FOR NOW, AGAIN...AGAIN - Stop us if you’ve heard this before. Jennifer Bendery: “Less than a day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the Senate will vote to repeal Obamacare without providing a replacement, his plan is dead. Three Republicans announced Tuesday that they won’t vote for a procedural step to take up the bill and that’s all it takes to kill it. Those senators are Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.). Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio) also raised concerns about a repeal-only plan increasing uncertainty in the marketplace and leading to higher premiums and deductibles. McConnell has now failed three times in the last month to pass a bill to gut Obamacare, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act, something Republicans have vowed to do for seven years. The crux of the problem: Moderate Republicans want to keep key pieces of the law in place and aren’t comfortable throwing millions of people off health care, while conservative Republicans want to throw out the whole law. There’s not a lot of middle ground. Democrats have been cut out of negotiations entirely.” [HuffPost ]

(Literal) girl power: “Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Shelley Moore Capito have a few things in common. They are all senators. They are all Republicans. They are all women. And they all near-immediately opposed Mitch McConnell’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act with a delayed replacement.” [HuffPost’s Emma Gray ]

TRUMP SPINS SO HARD WE’RE AFRAID HE’S GOING TO VOMIT - This year’s “Two Out of Three Branches of the Government and That Ain’t Bad” Award for Making Political Lemonade out of Lemons goes to President Trump. Daniel Marans: “President Donald Trump downplayed the Senate Republican leadership’s failure to line up the votes necessary to repeal and replace Obamacare, claiming that coming up two votes short was ‘pretty impressive.’ ... Trump said he was ‘very disappointed’ that several Republican senators did not get behind the bill…. Although he implied that repealing the Affordable Care Act would require a larger Republican majority, he also said that the growing problems in Obamacare’s individual insurance marketplace would create pressure for a bipartisan fix. ‘I’ve been saying for a long time: Let Obamacare fail and everybody’s going to have to come together and fix it and come up with a new plan and a plan that’s really good for the people with much lower premiums and much lower costs and much better protection,’ Trump said.” [HuffPost ]

“How do you do, fellow kids?” says Paul Ryan .

Haircuts: Ted Cruz (h/t Haley Byrd ), Whitney Snyder (h/t Jeffrey Young)

Like HuffPost Hill? Then order Eliot’s book, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A-Z Guide To Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

Does somebody keep forwarding you this newsletter? Get your own copy. It’s free! Sign up here . Send tips/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to eliot@huffpost.com . Follow us on Twitter - @HuffPostHill

HOUSE GOP WON’T LET THE DREAM DIE - Denial is a river in Egypt that really wants a bunch of poor people to die. Rachael Bade and Kyle Cheney: ”Dozens of Republicans emerged from a closed-door House GOP conference meeting Tuesday refusing to accept that their seven-year effort to gut President Barack Obama’s health care law appeared to have failed. The Senate, many of them predicted, would figure out a way to move the bill forward — even though Leader Mitch McConnell all but declared the effort to replace the law over. ‘No, this is not dead,’ said Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who is close to GOP leadership. ‘Because all the people back home are suffering because they can’t afford health care. We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to.’” [Politico ]

Retirement is fun: @jasoninthehouse : Meet the Dog Who’s Going Viral for Saving a Drowning Baby Deer | Fox News Insider https://t.co/nQt5wDZFQ4

THE HATEFUL EIGHT - Marina Fang: “There are now eight confirmed attendees of the June 2016 meeting that the eldest son of President Donald Trump took after being promised damaging information on his father’s presidential election opponent, Hillary Clinton. CNN and The Washington Post on Tuesday identified the previously unnamed eighth attendee as Ike Kaveladze, a senior vice president at Russian real estate developer Aras Agalarov’s company. Agalarov’s son, Emin, is a singer represented by Rob Goldstone, the music publicist who arranged the meeting via emails with Donald Trump Jr. After The New York Times uncovered the meeting, Trump Jr. tweeted images of the emails last week, which he said was an effort to be ‘totally transparent.’” [HuffPost ]

For those of you in the market for a book of Bart Stupak’s thoughts .

WHAT’S FARSI FOR ‘FLIP-FLOP?’ Peter Baker: “President Trump agreed on Monday to certify again that Iran is complying with an international nuclear agreement that he has strongly criticized, but only after hours of arguing with his top national security advisers, briefly upending a planned announcement as a legal deadline loomed…. That Mr. Trump’s actions will satisfy conservatives who have been urging him to rip up the Iran deal seemed unlikely.” [NYT ]

JEFF SESSIONS HAS STICKY FINGERS - Jon Schuppe: “This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions plans to release a directive ordering an expansion of the federal government’s use of civil asset forfeiture. He also said he’d undo an Obama administration order that prohibited local authorities from using the federal system to sidestep restrictive state laws…. With the expansion of forfeitures came allegations that police and federal agents are driven more by profit than by crime fighting. Many suspects have lost property without being charged with a crime, and many innocent people have found it nearly impossible to get their property back. Sometimes, critics say, police doing roadside searches simply take cash in exchange for not locking someone up.” [NBC News ]

EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN TEXAS, INCLUDING THOUGHTFUL, BUSINESS-MINDED REPUBLICAN MODERATES - LOL, no it’s not. We just enjoyed writing that. Manny Fernandez “When Texas lawmakers gather here for the start of a 30-day special legislative session on Tuesday morning, they will most likely decide the fate of the Texas version of North Carolina’s bitterly divisive legislation regulating the access of transgender people to public bathrooms . But something else will be on the line, too: whether moderate Republicans have a role to play in a state party increasingly dominated by far-right Christian conservatives, and whether the last powerful moderate Republican in Texas can keep his job and his influence.” [NYT ]

STEVE BANNON HAS NO RESPECT FOR P90X - So glad that we had all those years of college so that we could write “limp-dick motherfucker” and get paid to do so. Marina Fang: ″Steve Bannon reportedly called House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) ‘a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,’ referring to the think tank whose fiscal conservative policies the representative espouses. The detail is one of many bizarre nuggets in Devil’s Bargain, a new book on White House chief strategist Bannon’s role in President Donald Trump’s political rise, by Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green, who has extensively covered the former Breitbart chairman. Green wrote that Bannon’s comment on Ryan came during the spring of 2016, when it became increasingly possible that Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, to the surprise and concern of establishment Republicans. Some of them had floated Ryan as a possible alternative if the party’s convention were to become contested.” [HuffPost ]

BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Here’s a clingy dog .

IT’S LIKE EVERY ELECTION CYCLE IS WORSE THAN THE LAST - Alan Smith: “A new survey pit Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg against President Donald Trump...from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found Zuckerberg, pegged in the survey as the Democratic presidential nominee, in a dead heat against Trump at 40% support each. The remaining 20% of respondents were unsure. Zuckerberg won the support of 69% of voters who said they cast a ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and 9% of those who said they voted for Trump. On the flip side, Trump received the backing of 85% of Trump voters and 5% of Clinton voters in the matchup.” [Business Insider ]

SHOW, HOST AWFUL - Lydia O’Connor: “NBC host Megyn Kelly’s Sunday night news magazine has lost viewers every week since its June debut, and last weekend’s episode was no exception. The July 16 episode of ‘Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly,’ a spotlight on sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, raked in 3.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen data, marking the show’s lowest viewer turnout since its June debut. This past Sunday’s episode, the sixth to air, earned a 0.4 rating in the sought-after 18-49 age demographic, which means that a mere 0.4 percent of those in that age group participating in Nielsen’s rating service watched the show.” [HuffPost ]

COMFORT FOOD

- Google Glass is back , apparently.

- Making the Taco Town taco from the famous SNL sketch.

- A street name search engine .

TWITTERAMA

@morninggloria : remember when people would make fun of how dumb george w bush sounded when he talked?  what a sweet and simple time

@SimonMaloy : [hikes nine days to emerge from Montana wilderness into cell reception area]

lol @realDonaldTrump @SenateMajLdr

@aedwardslevy : WASHINGTON Where there’s a bill, there’s no way.

Got something to add? Sen  tips/quotes/stories/photos/events/fundraisers/job movement/juicy miscellanea to Eliot Nelson (eliot@huffpost.com )