Biden's poll numbers:
https://news.yahoo.com/jake-tapper-cant ... soc_trk=ma
What a Great Country America Is
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Thanks. I needed that today.Rach3 wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2023 5:42 pmBiden's poll numbers:
https://news.yahoo.com/jake-tapper-cant ... soc_trk=ma
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From Iowa Capital Dispatch today :
GOP’s desired work requirements for federal aid would kick roughly 21M from anti-poverty programs.
Congressional Republicans’ efforts to slash federal spending by tying work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP would have far-reaching consequences for people with mental health issues, chronic health problems, and some people with disabilities if enacted, policy experts on anti-poverty programs say.
GOP’s desired work requirements for federal aid would kick roughly 21M from anti-poverty programs.
Congressional Republicans’ efforts to slash federal spending by tying work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP would have far-reaching consequences for people with mental health issues, chronic health problems, and some people with disabilities if enacted, policy experts on anti-poverty programs say.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Seems US is most at risk when Congress and SCOTUS are in session.From CR Gazette today:
"We all rely on credit cards to help manage life’s expenses. That’s because credit cards provide more convenience, security, fraud protection and flexibility than cash, checks and most other forms of payment. But legislation recently introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate would fundamentally change how credit cards work. It would allow retailers to bypass secure payment networks and make credit card payments less secure.
Today, the bank or credit union who issues your credit card pays the growing expense of information security, fraud protection and any losses incurred from fraud. Since retailers (and their bottom lines) benefit from their customers’ convenient credit card usage, they pay a small interchange fee to the card issuer to help with the growing expense of keeping those payment networks secure for consumers.
The Credit Card Competition Act that’s currently being debated in both the U.S. House and Senate would give retailers more choices for which network they use to process their customer’s credit card transactions. Their options would include cheaper, less secure networks that would leave their customers at higher risk of fraud and leave their card issuer on the hook for the financial consequences of the retailer’s choice. Of course, retailers would have a financial incentive to choose the cheapest, less secure card-processing network while their customers and card issuers deal with the consequences long after the purchase is complete. If retailers are allowed to simply choose the cheaper networks that haven’t invested in the latest security technology, consumer payment data will be even more vulnerable to breaches and fraud.
This is especially poor timing for legislation that would weaken consumers’ security. Credit card fraud was already the largest type of identity theft in 2021, and fraud rates have doubled between 2011 and 2021. The combination of increased costs for fraud protection and decreased interchange fee contributions from retailers will cause banks and credit unions to reevaluate lending criteria, interest rates, rewards programs and more. Smaller credit card issuers will face being pushed out of the market, resulting in fewer options and less credit accessibility to consumers.
While the intention behind the Credit Card Competition Act is noble — to save consumers from the expense of interchange fees, we don’t have to speculate whether that will be the result. After similar legislation passed to limit interchange on debit transactions in 2010, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond showed that less than 1 percent of retailers passed that savings on to their customers.
As a whole, the Credit Card Competition Act would reduce funding for fraud protection with little to no savings for consumers while making credit cards less secure and less accessible. Please reach out to your senators and representatives in Congress. Ask them to protect the security credit card purchases and the accessibility of consumer credit by opposing the Credit Card Competition Act."
Renee Christoffer is CEO of Veridian Credit Union.
"We all rely on credit cards to help manage life’s expenses. That’s because credit cards provide more convenience, security, fraud protection and flexibility than cash, checks and most other forms of payment. But legislation recently introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate would fundamentally change how credit cards work. It would allow retailers to bypass secure payment networks and make credit card payments less secure.
Today, the bank or credit union who issues your credit card pays the growing expense of information security, fraud protection and any losses incurred from fraud. Since retailers (and their bottom lines) benefit from their customers’ convenient credit card usage, they pay a small interchange fee to the card issuer to help with the growing expense of keeping those payment networks secure for consumers.
The Credit Card Competition Act that’s currently being debated in both the U.S. House and Senate would give retailers more choices for which network they use to process their customer’s credit card transactions. Their options would include cheaper, less secure networks that would leave their customers at higher risk of fraud and leave their card issuer on the hook for the financial consequences of the retailer’s choice. Of course, retailers would have a financial incentive to choose the cheapest, less secure card-processing network while their customers and card issuers deal with the consequences long after the purchase is complete. If retailers are allowed to simply choose the cheaper networks that haven’t invested in the latest security technology, consumer payment data will be even more vulnerable to breaches and fraud.
This is especially poor timing for legislation that would weaken consumers’ security. Credit card fraud was already the largest type of identity theft in 2021, and fraud rates have doubled between 2011 and 2021. The combination of increased costs for fraud protection and decreased interchange fee contributions from retailers will cause banks and credit unions to reevaluate lending criteria, interest rates, rewards programs and more. Smaller credit card issuers will face being pushed out of the market, resulting in fewer options and less credit accessibility to consumers.
While the intention behind the Credit Card Competition Act is noble — to save consumers from the expense of interchange fees, we don’t have to speculate whether that will be the result. After similar legislation passed to limit interchange on debit transactions in 2010, a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond showed that less than 1 percent of retailers passed that savings on to their customers.
As a whole, the Credit Card Competition Act would reduce funding for fraud protection with little to no savings for consumers while making credit cards less secure and less accessible. Please reach out to your senators and representatives in Congress. Ask them to protect the security credit card purchases and the accessibility of consumer credit by opposing the Credit Card Competition Act."
Renee Christoffer is CEO of Veridian Credit Union.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From AxiosAM today:
Artificial intelligence and generative bots, led by ChatGPT, will upend next year's elections with as much force as social media reset the playbook in 2008, Axios Denver's John Frank writes from Aspen.
Why it matters: Top technologists are portraying a dystopian 2024 landscape in which misinformation and disinformation proliferate with a speed and ease that means "you can't trust anything that you see or hear," as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it.
The campaign will be "full of false information that anyone can generate," Schmidt said yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
MIT's Daniel Huttenlocher, who joined Schmidt on a panel, said: "AI is now this huge amplifier for how you should not trust anything in print. ... And by the way you shouldn't trust any images, and you shouldn't trust any videos, and you shouldn't trust any audio either."
Ron Klain, former chief of staff to President Biden, said during a separate conversation that campaigns will need to change to counter AI.
Klain said Biden must connect directly with people on the campaign trail, and the campaign to recruit local trustworthy messengers, rather than "bringing in random people from other places."
Artificial intelligence and generative bots, led by ChatGPT, will upend next year's elections with as much force as social media reset the playbook in 2008, Axios Denver's John Frank writes from Aspen.
Why it matters: Top technologists are portraying a dystopian 2024 landscape in which misinformation and disinformation proliferate with a speed and ease that means "you can't trust anything that you see or hear," as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt puts it.
The campaign will be "full of false information that anyone can generate," Schmidt said yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
MIT's Daniel Huttenlocher, who joined Schmidt on a panel, said: "AI is now this huge amplifier for how you should not trust anything in print. ... And by the way you shouldn't trust any images, and you shouldn't trust any videos, and you shouldn't trust any audio either."
Ron Klain, former chief of staff to President Biden, said during a separate conversation that campaigns will need to change to counter AI.
Klain said Biden must connect directly with people on the campaign trail, and the campaign to recruit local trustworthy messengers, rather than "bringing in random people from other places."
Re: What a Great Country America Is
St. Louis Is the Struggling Downtown You Haven’t Heard Of — and Right-Wing Policies Are Making Things Worse
June 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Kevin McDermott
Mr. McDermott is the editorial page editor for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Empty storefronts dot most of the blocks around my downtown neighborhood these days and have overtaken some of them. Once a buzzy destination for shoppers and diners, downtown today frequently looks deserted, its visitors presumably repelled by reports of violent crime, homelessness and blight. Upper-floor offices, once packed with white-collar workers eager to hit the bars at quitting time, now sit mostly empty. The comforting sounds of sidewalk diners and live music that used to hum along with the traffic on summer nights has been replaced by sirens, or silence.
Based on extensive media coverage, I could be describing post-pandemic San Francisco, currently the national poster child of a city on the verge of a dreaded “doom loop.” Major outlets have breathlessly reported San Francisco’s every blow, but conservative media were the first to hold the city up as evidence of the utter failure of progressive urban policies.
Yet St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative. Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis is a blue island in a red state, and conservative state policies have at least partly driven the city’s decline. More apt parallels to St. Louis are places like Kansas City, Mo., Memphis, Nashville and Little Rock, Ark.: liberal enclaves that in a macrocosm of the worst kind of family dysfunction are at the mercy of conservative state governments. The consequences of this dysfunction can be far-reaching.
In 2015, for example, St. Louis passed an ordinance to gradually raise the state’s $7.65 minimum wage for workers in the city to $11 by 2018 — prompting passage of a state law that retroactively prohibited cities from passing their own minimum wage hikes and dropping St. Louis workers’ minimum by more than $2 overnight. (Missouri voters later responded with a statewide referendum that stepped around the legislature and gradually raised the state’s minimum wage to $12 by this year.) The pandemic magnified that kind of dysfunction just as it became a primary battlefield in the culture wars.
St. Louis has been steadily losing population for years, dipping below 300,000 in 2020 for the first time since the mid-1800s — but the virus accelerated the decline. The effects were acute in my downtown neighborhood, particularly in emptying out the office workers, who scattered away to Zoom from their suburban homes and have never fully returned.
A July 2022 Brookings Institution analysis described urban population loss during the pandemic as “historic.” The report highlighted cities like San Francisco, New York, Washington, Boston — and St. Louis. Some downtowns have since bounced back. St. Louis, like San Francisco, isn’t among them.
The reasons are debatable, but St. Louis’s politically fraught relationship with its Republican-controlled state government certainly hasn’t helped. Even as St. Louis leaders and schools struggled to navigate the once-in-a-century plague by following federal pandemic guidelines and expert advice, they had to contend with a barrage of lawsuits from Republican Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (now the state’s junior senator) demanding that they drop their mask mandates.
And while San Francisco is certainly struggling with the fact that many of its office workers haven’t returned, its violent crime rate — despite so much discussion suggesting the contrary — has not yet equaled prepandemic levels. St. Louis, in contrast, has been at or near the highest annual homicide rate of any major city in America over the past several years.
To combat crime, the legislature offered the helping hand of attempting a state takeover of the city’s police force. The narrative from the right was that the city’s soft-on-crime policies were to blame for the unmoored violence that is driving the city’s economic decline, so the police need to be under outside control.
Left out of that narrative is the fact that gun crime here is abetted by Missouri gun laws that are among the loosest in the nation. Virtually anyone can walk around the city with a gun, with no state-mandated background check and few state-level restrictions, and there’s next to nothing the police can do about it until the shooting starts. The state has rebuffed all entreaties from the city to be allowed to enforce some kind of permit requirement.
St. Louis is hardly alone in this. That kind of tension between blue cities with higher-than-average crime rates and red-state legislatures that have forced unusually loose gun laws upon them has played out repeatedly in courtrooms, statehouses and city halls.
The nation watched in April as Tennessee’s legislature expelled one Nashville Democrat and one Memphis Democrat for their role in a statehouse protest demanding tighter state gun laws. When a Black Kansas City teenager was shot in the face in April by a white homeowner after mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell, police noted that Missouri’s “stand your ground” law, which removes the duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, may apply to the case. The Memphis City Council’s recent efforts to create a gun-permit requirement in the city has run headlong into Tennessee’s permitless-carry law. The city of Little Rock was sued in 2021 for refusing to allow guns in its city hall, in alleged violation of Arkansas’ gun statutes.
A result of all of this is a strange duality: on one side, a national media-fueled apparition, on the other, an ignored reality. As the whole country was being told about the April 4 San Francisco stabbing death of the prominent tech executive Bob Lee — which attracted a storm of criticism before that narrative was undermined by the arrest of an acquaintance of Mr. Lee — actual random violent crime continued plaguing St. Louis.
In the few days before Mr. Lee died, a St. Louis man was shot to death in the middle of the day, and another was wounded in a nighttime hail of bullets that also hit at least 10 cars in the area. On the day Mr. Lee died, the driver of a getaway car involved in a violent store robbery in St. Louis County allegedly caused a crash that killed another driver. St. Louis police that day also found a body rolled up in carpet and plastic in a parking lot. The next day, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed on the city’s troubled north side.
Conservative critics inevitably point to the city’s progressive leadership as part of the problem. Mayor Tishaura Jones was elected in 2021 with a campaign that de-emphasized traditional policing, and among her first actions was to cut almost 100 vacant police positions and shift police funding to social services. The city prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, who frequently feuded publicly with the police during her tenure, was forced to resign in May after her office bungled or dropped a series of high-profile criminal cases, sometimes with tragic consequences.
But while the case might be made that the city’s progressive leaders have hampered law enforcement, it could also be argued that the supermajority-Republican legislature has made matters worse with its annual campaign to push state laws ever farther right in ways that directly affect St. Louis.
A glaring example is the state’s Second Amendment Preservation Act, signed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson in 2021, which prohibits Missouri officials from enforcing federal firearms laws that do not accord with state law. St. Louis and the county that includes Kansas City sued (the city and state governments here trade lawsuits like St. Louis gang members trade bullets), arguing the law is unconstitutional and has made local police hesitant to work with their federal counterparts for fear of inadvertently violating it.
The state has been unhelpful in other ways. The largest-ever Missouri state income tax cut that lawmakers passed last year will inevitably affect St. Louis and every other city in Missouri, where basics like infrastructure and education remain chronically underfunded. Regarding the endemic problem of unhoused St. Louisans, there isn’t wide agreement among city leaders and advocates about how to best address the issue, but few think a new state law that effectively criminalizes homelessness on state property is the solution.
St. Louis, flush with federal stimulus cash, is trying to stop the slide with progressive initiatives that included a pilot program that directed $500 monthly payments to struggling families and a $37 million program to spur investment in the city’s long-neglected north side. The city has earmarked $250 million in federal pandemic aid for business start-ups and affordable housing, and is lobbying private institutions to help raise hundreds of millions more to create housing and small-business loan programs.
Republican critics maintain it is the city’s de-emphasizing of policing that’s the real problem, and as such the legislature in 2021 passed a state law that effectively penalizes cities that cut their police budgets. But even the largest St. Louis police force would still be policing a city flooded with unregulated guns and few tools to confront them, courtesy of those same Republican state leaders. A current effort to pass a statewide ballot referendum that would go around lawmakers to give St. Louis the authority to impose firearms permits and other reforms is the kind of Hail Mary the city is left with. Whatever impediments San Francisco faces in confronting its problems, at least it doesn’t have an adversary rather than a partner in its state Capitol.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/opin ... ffice.html
June 27, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Kevin McDermott
Mr. McDermott is the editorial page editor for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Empty storefronts dot most of the blocks around my downtown neighborhood these days and have overtaken some of them. Once a buzzy destination for shoppers and diners, downtown today frequently looks deserted, its visitors presumably repelled by reports of violent crime, homelessness and blight. Upper-floor offices, once packed with white-collar workers eager to hit the bars at quitting time, now sit mostly empty. The comforting sounds of sidewalk diners and live music that used to hum along with the traffic on summer nights has been replaced by sirens, or silence.
Based on extensive media coverage, I could be describing post-pandemic San Francisco, currently the national poster child of a city on the verge of a dreaded “doom loop.” Major outlets have breathlessly reported San Francisco’s every blow, but conservative media were the first to hold the city up as evidence of the utter failure of progressive urban policies.
Yet St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative. Unlike San Francisco, St. Louis is a blue island in a red state, and conservative state policies have at least partly driven the city’s decline. More apt parallels to St. Louis are places like Kansas City, Mo., Memphis, Nashville and Little Rock, Ark.: liberal enclaves that in a macrocosm of the worst kind of family dysfunction are at the mercy of conservative state governments. The consequences of this dysfunction can be far-reaching.
In 2015, for example, St. Louis passed an ordinance to gradually raise the state’s $7.65 minimum wage for workers in the city to $11 by 2018 — prompting passage of a state law that retroactively prohibited cities from passing their own minimum wage hikes and dropping St. Louis workers’ minimum by more than $2 overnight. (Missouri voters later responded with a statewide referendum that stepped around the legislature and gradually raised the state’s minimum wage to $12 by this year.) The pandemic magnified that kind of dysfunction just as it became a primary battlefield in the culture wars.
St. Louis has been steadily losing population for years, dipping below 300,000 in 2020 for the first time since the mid-1800s — but the virus accelerated the decline. The effects were acute in my downtown neighborhood, particularly in emptying out the office workers, who scattered away to Zoom from their suburban homes and have never fully returned.
A July 2022 Brookings Institution analysis described urban population loss during the pandemic as “historic.” The report highlighted cities like San Francisco, New York, Washington, Boston — and St. Louis. Some downtowns have since bounced back. St. Louis, like San Francisco, isn’t among them.
The reasons are debatable, but St. Louis’s politically fraught relationship with its Republican-controlled state government certainly hasn’t helped. Even as St. Louis leaders and schools struggled to navigate the once-in-a-century plague by following federal pandemic guidelines and expert advice, they had to contend with a barrage of lawsuits from Republican Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt (now the state’s junior senator) demanding that they drop their mask mandates.
And while San Francisco is certainly struggling with the fact that many of its office workers haven’t returned, its violent crime rate — despite so much discussion suggesting the contrary — has not yet equaled prepandemic levels. St. Louis, in contrast, has been at or near the highest annual homicide rate of any major city in America over the past several years.
To combat crime, the legislature offered the helping hand of attempting a state takeover of the city’s police force. The narrative from the right was that the city’s soft-on-crime policies were to blame for the unmoored violence that is driving the city’s economic decline, so the police need to be under outside control.
Left out of that narrative is the fact that gun crime here is abetted by Missouri gun laws that are among the loosest in the nation. Virtually anyone can walk around the city with a gun, with no state-mandated background check and few state-level restrictions, and there’s next to nothing the police can do about it until the shooting starts. The state has rebuffed all entreaties from the city to be allowed to enforce some kind of permit requirement.
St. Louis is hardly alone in this. That kind of tension between blue cities with higher-than-average crime rates and red-state legislatures that have forced unusually loose gun laws upon them has played out repeatedly in courtrooms, statehouses and city halls.
The nation watched in April as Tennessee’s legislature expelled one Nashville Democrat and one Memphis Democrat for their role in a statehouse protest demanding tighter state gun laws. When a Black Kansas City teenager was shot in the face in April by a white homeowner after mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell, police noted that Missouri’s “stand your ground” law, which removes the duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense, may apply to the case. The Memphis City Council’s recent efforts to create a gun-permit requirement in the city has run headlong into Tennessee’s permitless-carry law. The city of Little Rock was sued in 2021 for refusing to allow guns in its city hall, in alleged violation of Arkansas’ gun statutes.
A result of all of this is a strange duality: on one side, a national media-fueled apparition, on the other, an ignored reality. As the whole country was being told about the April 4 San Francisco stabbing death of the prominent tech executive Bob Lee — which attracted a storm of criticism before that narrative was undermined by the arrest of an acquaintance of Mr. Lee — actual random violent crime continued plaguing St. Louis.
In the few days before Mr. Lee died, a St. Louis man was shot to death in the middle of the day, and another was wounded in a nighttime hail of bullets that also hit at least 10 cars in the area. On the day Mr. Lee died, the driver of a getaway car involved in a violent store robbery in St. Louis County allegedly caused a crash that killed another driver. St. Louis police that day also found a body rolled up in carpet and plastic in a parking lot. The next day, a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed on the city’s troubled north side.
Conservative critics inevitably point to the city’s progressive leadership as part of the problem. Mayor Tishaura Jones was elected in 2021 with a campaign that de-emphasized traditional policing, and among her first actions was to cut almost 100 vacant police positions and shift police funding to social services. The city prosecutor, Kimberly Gardner, who frequently feuded publicly with the police during her tenure, was forced to resign in May after her office bungled or dropped a series of high-profile criminal cases, sometimes with tragic consequences.
But while the case might be made that the city’s progressive leaders have hampered law enforcement, it could also be argued that the supermajority-Republican legislature has made matters worse with its annual campaign to push state laws ever farther right in ways that directly affect St. Louis.
A glaring example is the state’s Second Amendment Preservation Act, signed by Republican Gov. Mike Parson in 2021, which prohibits Missouri officials from enforcing federal firearms laws that do not accord with state law. St. Louis and the county that includes Kansas City sued (the city and state governments here trade lawsuits like St. Louis gang members trade bullets), arguing the law is unconstitutional and has made local police hesitant to work with their federal counterparts for fear of inadvertently violating it.
The state has been unhelpful in other ways. The largest-ever Missouri state income tax cut that lawmakers passed last year will inevitably affect St. Louis and every other city in Missouri, where basics like infrastructure and education remain chronically underfunded. Regarding the endemic problem of unhoused St. Louisans, there isn’t wide agreement among city leaders and advocates about how to best address the issue, but few think a new state law that effectively criminalizes homelessness on state property is the solution.
St. Louis, flush with federal stimulus cash, is trying to stop the slide with progressive initiatives that included a pilot program that directed $500 monthly payments to struggling families and a $37 million program to spur investment in the city’s long-neglected north side. The city has earmarked $250 million in federal pandemic aid for business start-ups and affordable housing, and is lobbying private institutions to help raise hundreds of millions more to create housing and small-business loan programs.
Republican critics maintain it is the city’s de-emphasizing of policing that’s the real problem, and as such the legislature in 2021 passed a state law that effectively penalizes cities that cut their police budgets. But even the largest St. Louis police force would still be policing a city flooded with unregulated guns and few tools to confront them, courtesy of those same Republican state leaders. A current effort to pass a statewide ballot referendum that would go around lawmakers to give St. Louis the authority to impose firearms permits and other reforms is the kind of Hail Mary the city is left with. Whatever impediments San Francisco faces in confronting its problems, at least it doesn’t have an adversary rather than a partner in its state Capitol.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/opin ... ffice.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From New York Times Magazine today ( in part ):
"...Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020. “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general..."
In the Kitchen With ‘The Bear”
The acclaimed FX series about a faltering Chicago restaurant is back for a second season.
Review: Season 2 of the restaurant dramedy is more uplifting, more team-focused and more magnificent, our critic says.
"...Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020. “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general..."
In the Kitchen With ‘The Bear”
The acclaimed FX series about a faltering Chicago restaurant is back for a second season.
Review: Season 2 of the restaurant dramedy is more uplifting, more team-focused and more magnificent, our critic says.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
America celebrates the 4th:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/us/india ... index.html
"The shooting was just one of several on Monday evening disrupting American life: Another shooting in Philadelphia left five people – including a 15-year-old boy – dead, and two boys, ages 2 and 13, wounded. Another, in Fort Worth, Texas, left three dead and eight wounded."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/04/us/india ... index.html
"The shooting was just one of several on Monday evening disrupting American life: Another shooting in Philadelphia left five people – including a 15-year-old boy – dead, and two boys, ages 2 and 13, wounded. Another, in Fort Worth, Texas, left three dead and eight wounded."
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Self checkout:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/reta ... 28039.html
If Trump can try to steal steal an election with his Jan.6 mob , why not ?
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/reta ... 28039.html
If Trump can try to steal steal an election with his Jan.6 mob , why not ?
Last edited by Rach3 on Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Killing kids:Rach3 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:31 pmhttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/reta ... 28039.html
If Trump can try to steal steal an election with his Jan.6 mob , why not ?
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/21/gun-de ... stream=top
Re: What a Great Country America Is
These are not "kooks" ; 74M "Americans" voted for Trump in 2020, as did a majority of SCOTUS:Rach3 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:54 pm
Killing kids:
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/21/gun-de ... stream=top
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sheriff-depa ... 08134.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Per Axios today:Rach3 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:31 pmSelf checkout:
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/reta ... 28039.html
If Trump can try to steal steal an election with his Jan.6 mob , why not ?
Retailers have a problem: People aren't paying for stuff.
Why it matters: Retailers are already grappling with an uncertain economy, a shift toward spending on services, and rising labor costs — so the last thing they need is another threat to the bottom line, Nathan writes.
Driving the news: Two major chains today reported that their earnings are suffering from consumers not ponying up, albeit in two very different ways:
Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Lauren Hobart said in a statement that "elevated inventory shrink" — in particular, theft — was a large factor in why the company's Q2 earnings fell short of expectations.
Dick's stock plunged 24% today after the concerns helped prompt the company to lower its earnings outlook.
Separately, Macy's said it was caught off guard by the rising number of credit card customers who aren't paying their bills.
Delinquencies caused sales in the company's "other revenue" segment to plunge from $234 million a year earlier to $150 million in its most recent quarter.
Macy's shares closed down 14%.
Of note: Both companies also reported old-fashioned sales declines, highlighting the continued struggle for retailers of apparel and sporting goods.
The big picture: The scale and complexity of organized theft schemes is on the rise, the National Retail Federation reported in April.
While debate exists about whether the problem is truly systemic or just a scapegoat for other challenges, NRF reported that retailers experienced a 26.5% increase in organized retail theft incidents in 2021.
For Macy's, the company said it had expected more delinquencies in the rising rate environment, but it was caught off guard by "the speed at which the increase occurred for the company and the broader credit card industry" over the past three months.
The bottom line: Retailers aren't getting paid in full.
(Rach3: Guess who does pay for the thieves ? )
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From STAT News today:
"Medicaid warned states Wednesday that they could be mistakenly removing children from government insurance programs in a post-pandemic review of millions of enrollees.
States may be unnecessarily disenrolling children from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program because they are reviewing families as a whole despite there being a higher threshold to remove children from the programs.
“Children in pretty much every state have higher income eligibility thresholds than their parents, making them much more likely to still remain eligible for Medicaid, even if their parents no longer qualify,” Medicaid Director Daniel Tsai told reporters.
Tsai repeatedly declined to say how many states are experiencing the issue or how many children could be affected.
“Many states in discussions are in the midst of trying to determine if they have this issue or not,” he said. “We’re not sitting around waiting for everybody to assess things before we take action.”
States have disenrolled more than 5.5 million people since the pandemic freeze on Medicaid ended this spring. Seventy-four percent of those people have been removed because they did not complete the renewal process, according to data from the nonprofit KFF. Those cases, known as procedural removals, can occur because people have outdated contact information or believe they are no longer eligible — even if their children might be.
But data on how many children are losing medical insurance are extremely limited so far. Only 15 states have reported disenrollments by age, and between them nearly 1.5 million children have been removed, said Jennifer Tolbert, director of the state health reform and data for KFF. It is not clear how many of those were for procedural reasons.
Medicaid issued letters to all 50 states, ordering them to review their renewal process for the glitch.
The agency has previously declined to publicly name states that are not in compliance with redetermination processes, but Tsai said earlier this month that officials paused terminations in “half a dozen” states to review potential errors.
He also said in July that Medicaid is in “collaborative discussions” with Montana about implementing waivers to let eligible people auto-renew their insurance. If that occurs, “there would only be one state across the country that has not taken up any of the many policy waivers and flexibilities we have put out,” Tsai said then. He declined to name the one state, but policy and health care advocacy groups have publicly called out Florida.
Analysts will have a more complete picture of how many children have been affected next month when states finish sssessing their eligibility systems, Tolbert said.
However, disenrollments are likely to continue. Eleven states only began the renewal process in July; 20 states and the District of Columbia started in June, while others began in the spring. One state, Oregon, will not start until this October."
"Medicaid warned states Wednesday that they could be mistakenly removing children from government insurance programs in a post-pandemic review of millions of enrollees.
States may be unnecessarily disenrolling children from Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program because they are reviewing families as a whole despite there being a higher threshold to remove children from the programs.
“Children in pretty much every state have higher income eligibility thresholds than their parents, making them much more likely to still remain eligible for Medicaid, even if their parents no longer qualify,” Medicaid Director Daniel Tsai told reporters.
Tsai repeatedly declined to say how many states are experiencing the issue or how many children could be affected.
“Many states in discussions are in the midst of trying to determine if they have this issue or not,” he said. “We’re not sitting around waiting for everybody to assess things before we take action.”
States have disenrolled more than 5.5 million people since the pandemic freeze on Medicaid ended this spring. Seventy-four percent of those people have been removed because they did not complete the renewal process, according to data from the nonprofit KFF. Those cases, known as procedural removals, can occur because people have outdated contact information or believe they are no longer eligible — even if their children might be.
But data on how many children are losing medical insurance are extremely limited so far. Only 15 states have reported disenrollments by age, and between them nearly 1.5 million children have been removed, said Jennifer Tolbert, director of the state health reform and data for KFF. It is not clear how many of those were for procedural reasons.
Medicaid issued letters to all 50 states, ordering them to review their renewal process for the glitch.
The agency has previously declined to publicly name states that are not in compliance with redetermination processes, but Tsai said earlier this month that officials paused terminations in “half a dozen” states to review potential errors.
He also said in July that Medicaid is in “collaborative discussions” with Montana about implementing waivers to let eligible people auto-renew their insurance. If that occurs, “there would only be one state across the country that has not taken up any of the many policy waivers and flexibilities we have put out,” Tsai said then. He declined to name the one state, but policy and health care advocacy groups have publicly called out Florida.
Analysts will have a more complete picture of how many children have been affected next month when states finish sssessing their eligibility systems, Tolbert said.
However, disenrollments are likely to continue. Eleven states only began the renewal process in July; 20 states and the District of Columbia started in June, while others began in the spring. One state, Oregon, will not start until this October."
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Texas Judge Rejects State Law Aimed at Controlling Progressive Cities
By J. David Goodman
Reporting from Houston
Aug. 30, 2023
A Texas district court judge ruled on Wednesday that a new state law aimed at preventing cities from making local rules on a broad range of subjects — including requiring rest breaks for construction workers — was unconstitutional, siding with the leaders of Houston, San Antonio and other Texas cities who had challenged the law.
Why It Matters: The law was part of the struggle for control of Texas.
The law, known as House Bill 2127, was set to go into effect on Friday. Its passage this year was among the most aggressive steps yet taken by the Republican-dominated Legislature to exert control over the state’s increasingly progressive, Democratic-led cities.
The law would have prevented cities from enacting ordinances including those affecting labor, agriculture and natural resources, and was expected to nullify existing laws on everything from sanitation rules to the regulation of puppy mills. It was labeled “the Death Star” by its Democratic opponents because of its sweeping impact on the powers of cities to regulate themselves.
After its passage, the law gained national attention because it would have tossed out ordinances in Austin and Dallas requiring periodic rest breaks for construction workers — a change adopted as the state was experiencing a series of searing heat waves.
In a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston called the judge’s ruling a “tremendous victory” for the people of Houston and other cities around Texas.
Background: Businesses liked the law. City leaders did not.
Business groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business, Republican lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott backed the law, which they dubbed the Regulatory Consistency Act, as a means of streamlining regulations and preventing companies from having to comply with a hodgepodge of different regulations in different parts of the state.
Labor groups, city leaders and Texas Democrats objected that it was instead a means of usurping local control at a time when cities in Texas were becoming increasingly progressive and adopting greater protections for workers and tenants.
In July, the City of Houston, joined by San Antonio and El Paso, filed suit against the State of Texas, arguing that the law was overly broad and violated the provisions of the State Constitution that give cities the power to make their own rules. City leaders said that because of the law’s sweeping language, they had yet to determine precisely which of their rules would be pre-empted by the measure, and which could still be enforced.
The Travis County judge hearing the case in Austin, Maya Guerra Gamble, agreed, finding that the law “in its entirety is unconstitutional” and granting the cities’ motion for summary judgment on Wednesday.
What’s Next: Rules on water breaks remain, for now.
The Texas attorney general was expected to appeal the decision. The case could eventually end up before the State Supreme Court, whose nine members are all Republican.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/us/t ... court.html
By J. David Goodman
Reporting from Houston
Aug. 30, 2023
A Texas district court judge ruled on Wednesday that a new state law aimed at preventing cities from making local rules on a broad range of subjects — including requiring rest breaks for construction workers — was unconstitutional, siding with the leaders of Houston, San Antonio and other Texas cities who had challenged the law.
Why It Matters: The law was part of the struggle for control of Texas.
The law, known as House Bill 2127, was set to go into effect on Friday. Its passage this year was among the most aggressive steps yet taken by the Republican-dominated Legislature to exert control over the state’s increasingly progressive, Democratic-led cities.
The law would have prevented cities from enacting ordinances including those affecting labor, agriculture and natural resources, and was expected to nullify existing laws on everything from sanitation rules to the regulation of puppy mills. It was labeled “the Death Star” by its Democratic opponents because of its sweeping impact on the powers of cities to regulate themselves.
After its passage, the law gained national attention because it would have tossed out ordinances in Austin and Dallas requiring periodic rest breaks for construction workers — a change adopted as the state was experiencing a series of searing heat waves.
In a news conference on Wednesday, Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston called the judge’s ruling a “tremendous victory” for the people of Houston and other cities around Texas.
Background: Businesses liked the law. City leaders did not.
Business groups such as the National Federation of Independent Business, Republican lawmakers and Gov. Greg Abbott backed the law, which they dubbed the Regulatory Consistency Act, as a means of streamlining regulations and preventing companies from having to comply with a hodgepodge of different regulations in different parts of the state.
Labor groups, city leaders and Texas Democrats objected that it was instead a means of usurping local control at a time when cities in Texas were becoming increasingly progressive and adopting greater protections for workers and tenants.
In July, the City of Houston, joined by San Antonio and El Paso, filed suit against the State of Texas, arguing that the law was overly broad and violated the provisions of the State Constitution that give cities the power to make their own rules. City leaders said that because of the law’s sweeping language, they had yet to determine precisely which of their rules would be pre-empted by the measure, and which could still be enforced.
The Travis County judge hearing the case in Austin, Maya Guerra Gamble, agreed, finding that the law “in its entirety is unconstitutional” and granting the cities’ motion for summary judgment on Wednesday.
What’s Next: Rules on water breaks remain, for now.
The Texas attorney general was expected to appeal the decision. The case could eventually end up before the State Supreme Court, whose nine members are all Republican.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/us/t ... court.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Per Axios today :
Concertgoers throwing things at performers. People talking on their phones during movies. Tourists defacing historical landmarks in pursuit of the perfect selfie.
The first truly post-pandemic summer has shown the bad behaviors unleashed during the stress of COVID aren't slowing down, Tina Reed writes for Axios Vitals.
Why it matters: Worsening mental health, and decaying societal connections, are driving a long-tail trend of rude behavior.
New York-based neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez said: "The pandemic really did change us very inherently because, for the first time in anyone's lifetime, it was like every man for himself."
Flashback: Early in the pandemic, reports of bad behavior — outbursts on airplanes and violence against health care workers became more common.
A study in Harvard Business Review last year found rude behavior was increasingly the norm.
Not much has improved since then.
A few weeks ago, an Instagram video of an American Airlines pilot urging fliers to "be nice" and "respectful" went viral.
The pilot said: "I shouldn't have to say that."
(Rach3: It did not help when the US president 2016-2020 and his allies were public bullies.)
Concertgoers throwing things at performers. People talking on their phones during movies. Tourists defacing historical landmarks in pursuit of the perfect selfie.
The first truly post-pandemic summer has shown the bad behaviors unleashed during the stress of COVID aren't slowing down, Tina Reed writes for Axios Vitals.
Why it matters: Worsening mental health, and decaying societal connections, are driving a long-tail trend of rude behavior.
New York-based neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez said: "The pandemic really did change us very inherently because, for the first time in anyone's lifetime, it was like every man for himself."Flashback: Early in the pandemic, reports of bad behavior — outbursts on airplanes and violence against health care workers became more common.
A study in Harvard Business Review last year found rude behavior was increasingly the norm.
Not much has improved since then.
A few weeks ago, an Instagram video of an American Airlines pilot urging fliers to "be nice" and "respectful" went viral.
The pilot said: "I shouldn't have to say that."
(Rach3: It did not help when the US president 2016-2020 and his allies were public bullies.)
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Alabama Cherishes Its History of Defying the Federal Courts
Sept. 6, 2023, 5:02 a.m. ET
By David Firestone
Mr. Firestone, a member of the editorial board, covered the South for The New York Times.
Most other states would be ashamed of the tongue lashing issued against the government of Alabama on Tuesday by a trio of federal judges, all of whom were clearly furious that the state ignored their order to create a second majority-Black congressional district.
“We are deeply troubled,” the judges wrote, in an opinion laced with palpable anger, that the state drew a voting map that doesn’t do what the court previously ordered. “We are disturbed,” they wrote, that the Alabama Legislature didn’t even try to comply with a requirement that even the U.S. Supreme Court said was necessary. “We are struck,” they wrote, by the unprecedented nature of the defiance.
But Alabama’s leaders knew exactly what they were doing. They all but asked for the decision, as a way to show that no judge, court or other arm of the federal government could push them around. And far from being ashamed, state officials remained obstinate after the decision was issued. The state attorney general’s office issued a statement saying Alabama was right all along, that the court’s decision was disappointing and that the state planned to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In doing so, Alabama illustrated how contempt for the law — not to mention for equal representation and basic fairness — is an animating value in whole swaths of America. There are days when it feels as if defiance is defining large parts of the country, as represented by so many politicians who feel comfortable only when they are resisting someone else’s agenda rather than coming up with their own.
The legal problem with Alabama’s strategy is that the Supreme Court already ruled on the matter. Just three months ago, in one of the surprises of its term, the court ruled that Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a supreme achievement of the civil rights era — by drawing a voting map that diluted the power of Black voters. A single district in which Black voters were in the majority was not enough, the high court said.
After that ruling was handed down, the lower court told the state legislature to abide by it and come up with a new map that had two majority-Black districts. But in July the legislature simply refused. Instead, it approved yet another map with only one such district. And its leaders made it clear they were proud of standing up to federal power.
“The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” wrote Gov. Kay Ivey, who signed the map into law, “and I am pleased that they answered the call, remained focused and produced new districts ahead of the court deadline.” In one stroke, she not only flipped off the Roberts court but also ludicrously lumped it in with voting rights activists.
In a hearing last month, the three judges on the lower-court panel couldn’t quite believe it when Alabama came back with a map with only a single majority-Black district. “What I hear you saying is the State of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instruction,” said Judge Terry Moorer, writing for the Federal District Court for Northern Alabama, one of the three who announced on Tuesday that they would appoint a special master to draw the second district and simply impose it on the state in time for next year’s elections.
The judge’s description of intentional insolence was on the money. Alabama knew full well that it would lose this case and that a second majority-Black district would inevitably be created over its opposition. That would give Democrats a good chance to win two of the state’s seven congressional seats. But Republican lawmakers, who control the statehouse, didn’t want to be seen as the creators of the district. They didn’t want to appear that they were knuckling under to the power of the federal government. They wanted the court to do it, and they wanted the public to understand that it was the court’s doing.
With their actions, they are evoking an image of defiance from 1954, when state leaders openly said they would ignore the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and continue segregating Black and white children in Alabama’s public schools. The state, along with others in the South, spent years resisting the mandate to end separate schools, and in 1963, Gov. George Wallace notoriously promised “segregation forever,” bowing to reality only when federal troops made him do so. A series of court rulings eventually integrated the public schools, but many white parents responded by pulling their children out of those schools and enrolling them in private academies.
That tradition clearly lives on in the halls of state in Montgomery. When it comes to accepting the mandates of racial justice, Alabama’s leaders will hold out as long as they can and only grudgingly acknowledge reality when it is imposed on them. And no mandates are worse than those from the federal courts, the traditional enemy of the state’s regressive inclinations.
“The federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to the right thing,” Chris England, a Black state representative from Tuscaloosa, said a few weeks ago. “Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.” Maybe the state attorney general, Steve Marshall, thinks the Supreme Court will reverse its decision from July, but more likely, he just wants to play out the charade a little longer.
The federal law enforcement system has a particularly bad reputation in the state now that it has twice indicted Donald Trump, who won Alabama with 62 percent of the vote in 2020 and who has persuaded many Republicans that Democrats manipulate federal judges and prosecutors for their own corrupt purposes. After the map ruling was issued on Tuesday, the speaker of the Alabama House, Nathaniel Ledbetter, said the whole thing was part of a Democratic plot to win back the House of Representatives in 2024, led by Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder. (Those two were probably not chosen at random.)
“It’s a way for the Democrats to try to take over the House without a vote being cast,” Mr. Ledbetter said on a talk radio show run by host who has been an editor at Breitbart News.
It’s slightly inconvenient for this theory that two of the three judges who signed Tuesday’s opinion were appointed by Mr. Trump. But little things like facts and law and justice just get in the way when you’re invoking a well-worn conspiracy theory to drive Alabama into the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opin ... uling.html
Sept. 6, 2023, 5:02 a.m. ET
By David Firestone
Mr. Firestone, a member of the editorial board, covered the South for The New York Times.
Most other states would be ashamed of the tongue lashing issued against the government of Alabama on Tuesday by a trio of federal judges, all of whom were clearly furious that the state ignored their order to create a second majority-Black congressional district.
“We are deeply troubled,” the judges wrote, in an opinion laced with palpable anger, that the state drew a voting map that doesn’t do what the court previously ordered. “We are disturbed,” they wrote, that the Alabama Legislature didn’t even try to comply with a requirement that even the U.S. Supreme Court said was necessary. “We are struck,” they wrote, by the unprecedented nature of the defiance.
But Alabama’s leaders knew exactly what they were doing. They all but asked for the decision, as a way to show that no judge, court or other arm of the federal government could push them around. And far from being ashamed, state officials remained obstinate after the decision was issued. The state attorney general’s office issued a statement saying Alabama was right all along, that the court’s decision was disappointing and that the state planned to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In doing so, Alabama illustrated how contempt for the law — not to mention for equal representation and basic fairness — is an animating value in whole swaths of America. There are days when it feels as if defiance is defining large parts of the country, as represented by so many politicians who feel comfortable only when they are resisting someone else’s agenda rather than coming up with their own.
The legal problem with Alabama’s strategy is that the Supreme Court already ruled on the matter. Just three months ago, in one of the surprises of its term, the court ruled that Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a supreme achievement of the civil rights era — by drawing a voting map that diluted the power of Black voters. A single district in which Black voters were in the majority was not enough, the high court said.
After that ruling was handed down, the lower court told the state legislature to abide by it and come up with a new map that had two majority-Black districts. But in July the legislature simply refused. Instead, it approved yet another map with only one such district. And its leaders made it clear they were proud of standing up to federal power.
“The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” wrote Gov. Kay Ivey, who signed the map into law, “and I am pleased that they answered the call, remained focused and produced new districts ahead of the court deadline.” In one stroke, she not only flipped off the Roberts court but also ludicrously lumped it in with voting rights activists.
In a hearing last month, the three judges on the lower-court panel couldn’t quite believe it when Alabama came back with a map with only a single majority-Black district. “What I hear you saying is the State of Alabama deliberately disregarded our instruction,” said Judge Terry Moorer, writing for the Federal District Court for Northern Alabama, one of the three who announced on Tuesday that they would appoint a special master to draw the second district and simply impose it on the state in time for next year’s elections.
The judge’s description of intentional insolence was on the money. Alabama knew full well that it would lose this case and that a second majority-Black district would inevitably be created over its opposition. That would give Democrats a good chance to win two of the state’s seven congressional seats. But Republican lawmakers, who control the statehouse, didn’t want to be seen as the creators of the district. They didn’t want to appear that they were knuckling under to the power of the federal government. They wanted the court to do it, and they wanted the public to understand that it was the court’s doing.
With their actions, they are evoking an image of defiance from 1954, when state leaders openly said they would ignore the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and continue segregating Black and white children in Alabama’s public schools. The state, along with others in the South, spent years resisting the mandate to end separate schools, and in 1963, Gov. George Wallace notoriously promised “segregation forever,” bowing to reality only when federal troops made him do so. A series of court rulings eventually integrated the public schools, but many white parents responded by pulling their children out of those schools and enrolling them in private academies.
That tradition clearly lives on in the halls of state in Montgomery. When it comes to accepting the mandates of racial justice, Alabama’s leaders will hold out as long as they can and only grudgingly acknowledge reality when it is imposed on them. And no mandates are worse than those from the federal courts, the traditional enemy of the state’s regressive inclinations.
“The federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to the right thing,” Chris England, a Black state representative from Tuscaloosa, said a few weeks ago. “Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.” Maybe the state attorney general, Steve Marshall, thinks the Supreme Court will reverse its decision from July, but more likely, he just wants to play out the charade a little longer.
The federal law enforcement system has a particularly bad reputation in the state now that it has twice indicted Donald Trump, who won Alabama with 62 percent of the vote in 2020 and who has persuaded many Republicans that Democrats manipulate federal judges and prosecutors for their own corrupt purposes. After the map ruling was issued on Tuesday, the speaker of the Alabama House, Nathaniel Ledbetter, said the whole thing was part of a Democratic plot to win back the House of Representatives in 2024, led by Barack Obama and his attorney general Eric Holder. (Those two were probably not chosen at random.)
“It’s a way for the Democrats to try to take over the House without a vote being cast,” Mr. Ledbetter said on a talk radio show run by host who has been an editor at Breitbart News.
It’s slightly inconvenient for this theory that two of the three judges who signed Tuesday’s opinion were appointed by Mr. Trump. But little things like facts and law and justice just get in the way when you’re invoking a well-worn conspiracy theory to drive Alabama into the past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opin ... uling.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
How the Supreme Court Should Respond to Alabama’s Defiance
Sept. 12, 2023
By Kate Shaw
Contributing Opinion Writer
A panel of three federal judges last week issued a scathing opinion directing the state of Alabama to comply with the Voting Rights Act. It was the latest development in a saga in which the state has repeatedly flouted the requirements of the Voting Rights Act and the rulings of federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
Despite the judges’ admonishment, Alabama did not back down. In fact, it doubled down, immediately filing a notice of appeal and asking first the lower court and then the Supreme Court to put the ruling against it on hold (to preserve the possibility of using the state legislature’s map).
Alabama’s appeal confronts the Supreme Court with a profound test. The case may appear to involve a set of technical questions about one state’s legislative map. But it is more fundamentally about whether the Supreme Court should still be viewed as in any sense standing outside politics. Facing a crisis in public confidence, the court should take the opportunity to regain some of its rapidly dwindling legitimacy by sending a clear message that even its ideological fellow travelers do not get a pass from abiding by its rulings.
Alabama’s conduct in this case also reveals just how serious a problem discrimination against Black voters remains — and thus how vital the Voting Rights Act is today. The Supreme Court’s response will thus have implications beyond the bounds of this case — and it will be measured for what it reveals about both the court’s legitimacy and the future of the Voting Rights Act.
For the Alabama appeal, the Supreme Court will probably need to respond quickly. The state has represented that it must finalize its congressional districts by early October. If the court blesses Alabama’s conduct and allows the state’s defiance to stand — either after briefing and oral argument or by issuing a stay on the “shadow docket” and allowing the state’s discriminatory map to remain in place, as it did in an earlier stage of this very litigation — it will be announcing to the world that its opinions need not be heeded. If that happens, defiance by other political actors, both left and right, can be expected, and will be justified.
The court’s June decision in Allen v. Milligan was a rare and welcome surprise from a court whose recent track record has otherwise involved remaking broad swaths of the law at breakneck speed. In this case, a 5-4 majority rejected Alabama’s effort to roll back the protections of the Voting Rights Act, instead ruling that Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map was likely unlawful. By doing so, it affirmed the ruling of the same three-judge panel (which includes two appointees of former President Donald Trump) that rebuked the state last week.
The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, concluded that the map, which created just one majority-Black district out of seven — in a state that is 27 percent Black — was most likely unlawful because it gave Black voters in Alabama less opportunity than others in the state to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.
As a result of that ruling, Alabama was required to draw a congressional map that contained a second majority-Black district or, in the words of the lower court, something “quite close to it.”
Alabama lawmakers instead produced a map that, once again, contained only one majority-Black district. In signing that new map into law, Gov. Kay Ivey did not condemn the legislature’s intransigence but rather applauded it, saying that “the legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts.”
In seeking to return to the Supreme Court, Alabama is probably hoping it can garner enough support to at least win a delay — one that will allow the state to keep its unlawful map in place for the 2024 election. More ambitiously, the state, perhaps emboldened by the court’s recent decision striking down the use of affirmative action in higher education, may hope that if it can peel off a single vote, this case might provide the court an opportunity to further limit or to strike down entirely the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Alabama’s defiance comes at a time when the Supreme Court is in a precarious position with the American public. Its approval is at a record low.
The outright defiance in the Alabama case is not of an unreasoned decision, or one radically breaking with settled precedent, but from a straightforward application of the court’s cases interpreting the requirements of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court merely applied tests used by many courts across many years to enforce Section 2 of the act.
We are now a decade out from the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case, in which Chief Justice Roberts pronounced, in a breathtaking act of judicial hubris, that “history did not end in 1965” and that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” Notwithstanding nearly unanimous congressional judgment and numerous judicial decisions to the contrary, he wrote that the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime was both outdated and unconstitutional.
Yet the John Roberts of Allen v. Milligan struck a markedly different note, referring to the right to vote as “fundamental,” noting the V.R.A.’s purpose to ensure minority voters’ ability to participate fully in the political process and elect representatives of their choosing and crediting the district court’s finding that “Black Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections.” His opinion also saw “no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings” that political campaigns in Alabama had been “characterized by overt or subtle racial appeals” and that “Alabama’s extensive history of repugnant racial and voting-related discrimination is undeniable and well documented.”
Despite this language, it would be naïve to read the court’s opinion in Allen as guaranteeing the future of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote in the case, also wrote in a separate concurrence his openness to reconsidering the V.R.A.’s constitutionality at some later date. At least some of the dissenting justices are clearly eager for that date to come. But it would be disastrous for the court to use this case to reach that result.
The V.R.A. remains critical, particularly in the states — largely though not exclusively in the South — that would have been covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime the court gutted in the Shelby County case.
Consider Louisiana, where in 2022 a district court found that the state’s congressional map violated the V.R.A. — a conclusion the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit let stand before the Supreme Court put the ruling on hold pending the outcome in the Alabama case (in June, the court allowed the Louisiana challenge to proceed). Or Georgia, where a V.R.A. challenge to the state’s 2021 legislative maps is now in trial. Or South Carolina, where the Supreme Court this fall will review a lower-court opinion concluding that a congressional district was an unlawful racial gerrymander in violation of the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments. And of course, Allen v. Milligan, which, like Shelby County, arose in Alabama.
There are similar examples from other states. But the key point is that this first post-Shelby redistricting cycle has been marked by widespread discrimination against Black voters. And the Supreme Court has an opportunity in its response to Alabama’s conduct not only to regain some of its own dwindling legitimacy but also to stem some of the damage it caused in the Shelby County ruling.
Going into Allen v. Milligan, the court’s record of hostility toward the Voting Rights Act — and Chief Justice Roberts’s own critical writings on the topic, both as a justice and as a young Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration — gave every reason to believe that the conservative majority would use the case as an opportunity to further narrow the reach of the V.R.A.
But the court did not do that. Rather, it did what a court should do — reviewed and ultimately affirmed the lower court’s careful legal and factual findings, noted and adhered to its own many precedents enforcing the Voting Rights Act and simply applied the law.
Refusing to countenance Alabama’s lawlessness could demonstrate that the court is still capable of functioning as a court, and consistent with the rule of law. Doing that would benefit both the court and the country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/opin ... oting.html
Sept. 12, 2023
By Kate Shaw
Contributing Opinion Writer
A panel of three federal judges last week issued a scathing opinion directing the state of Alabama to comply with the Voting Rights Act. It was the latest development in a saga in which the state has repeatedly flouted the requirements of the Voting Rights Act and the rulings of federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.
Despite the judges’ admonishment, Alabama did not back down. In fact, it doubled down, immediately filing a notice of appeal and asking first the lower court and then the Supreme Court to put the ruling against it on hold (to preserve the possibility of using the state legislature’s map).
Alabama’s appeal confronts the Supreme Court with a profound test. The case may appear to involve a set of technical questions about one state’s legislative map. But it is more fundamentally about whether the Supreme Court should still be viewed as in any sense standing outside politics. Facing a crisis in public confidence, the court should take the opportunity to regain some of its rapidly dwindling legitimacy by sending a clear message that even its ideological fellow travelers do not get a pass from abiding by its rulings.
Alabama’s conduct in this case also reveals just how serious a problem discrimination against Black voters remains — and thus how vital the Voting Rights Act is today. The Supreme Court’s response will thus have implications beyond the bounds of this case — and it will be measured for what it reveals about both the court’s legitimacy and the future of the Voting Rights Act.
For the Alabama appeal, the Supreme Court will probably need to respond quickly. The state has represented that it must finalize its congressional districts by early October. If the court blesses Alabama’s conduct and allows the state’s defiance to stand — either after briefing and oral argument or by issuing a stay on the “shadow docket” and allowing the state’s discriminatory map to remain in place, as it did in an earlier stage of this very litigation — it will be announcing to the world that its opinions need not be heeded. If that happens, defiance by other political actors, both left and right, can be expected, and will be justified.
The court’s June decision in Allen v. Milligan was a rare and welcome surprise from a court whose recent track record has otherwise involved remaking broad swaths of the law at breakneck speed. In this case, a 5-4 majority rejected Alabama’s effort to roll back the protections of the Voting Rights Act, instead ruling that Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map was likely unlawful. By doing so, it affirmed the ruling of the same three-judge panel (which includes two appointees of former President Donald Trump) that rebuked the state last week.
The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, concluded that the map, which created just one majority-Black district out of seven — in a state that is 27 percent Black — was most likely unlawful because it gave Black voters in Alabama less opportunity than others in the state to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.
As a result of that ruling, Alabama was required to draw a congressional map that contained a second majority-Black district or, in the words of the lower court, something “quite close to it.”
Alabama lawmakers instead produced a map that, once again, contained only one majority-Black district. In signing that new map into law, Gov. Kay Ivey did not condemn the legislature’s intransigence but rather applauded it, saying that “the legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts.”
In seeking to return to the Supreme Court, Alabama is probably hoping it can garner enough support to at least win a delay — one that will allow the state to keep its unlawful map in place for the 2024 election. More ambitiously, the state, perhaps emboldened by the court’s recent decision striking down the use of affirmative action in higher education, may hope that if it can peel off a single vote, this case might provide the court an opportunity to further limit or to strike down entirely the key remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Alabama’s defiance comes at a time when the Supreme Court is in a precarious position with the American public. Its approval is at a record low.
The outright defiance in the Alabama case is not of an unreasoned decision, or one radically breaking with settled precedent, but from a straightforward application of the court’s cases interpreting the requirements of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court merely applied tests used by many courts across many years to enforce Section 2 of the act.
We are now a decade out from the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder case, in which Chief Justice Roberts pronounced, in a breathtaking act of judicial hubris, that “history did not end in 1965” and that “nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically.” Notwithstanding nearly unanimous congressional judgment and numerous judicial decisions to the contrary, he wrote that the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime was both outdated and unconstitutional.
Yet the John Roberts of Allen v. Milligan struck a markedly different note, referring to the right to vote as “fundamental,” noting the V.R.A.’s purpose to ensure minority voters’ ability to participate fully in the political process and elect representatives of their choosing and crediting the district court’s finding that “Black Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections.” His opinion also saw “no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings” that political campaigns in Alabama had been “characterized by overt or subtle racial appeals” and that “Alabama’s extensive history of repugnant racial and voting-related discrimination is undeniable and well documented.”
Despite this language, it would be naïve to read the court’s opinion in Allen as guaranteeing the future of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who cast the deciding vote in the case, also wrote in a separate concurrence his openness to reconsidering the V.R.A.’s constitutionality at some later date. At least some of the dissenting justices are clearly eager for that date to come. But it would be disastrous for the court to use this case to reach that result.
The V.R.A. remains critical, particularly in the states — largely though not exclusively in the South — that would have been covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime the court gutted in the Shelby County case.
Consider Louisiana, where in 2022 a district court found that the state’s congressional map violated the V.R.A. — a conclusion the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit let stand before the Supreme Court put the ruling on hold pending the outcome in the Alabama case (in June, the court allowed the Louisiana challenge to proceed). Or Georgia, where a V.R.A. challenge to the state’s 2021 legislative maps is now in trial. Or South Carolina, where the Supreme Court this fall will review a lower-court opinion concluding that a congressional district was an unlawful racial gerrymander in violation of the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments. And of course, Allen v. Milligan, which, like Shelby County, arose in Alabama.
There are similar examples from other states. But the key point is that this first post-Shelby redistricting cycle has been marked by widespread discrimination against Black voters. And the Supreme Court has an opportunity in its response to Alabama’s conduct not only to regain some of its own dwindling legitimacy but also to stem some of the damage it caused in the Shelby County ruling.
Going into Allen v. Milligan, the court’s record of hostility toward the Voting Rights Act — and Chief Justice Roberts’s own critical writings on the topic, both as a justice and as a young Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration — gave every reason to believe that the conservative majority would use the case as an opportunity to further narrow the reach of the V.R.A.
But the court did not do that. Rather, it did what a court should do — reviewed and ultimately affirmed the lower court’s careful legal and factual findings, noted and adhered to its own many precedents enforcing the Voting Rights Act and simply applied the law.
Refusing to countenance Alabama’s lawlessness could demonstrate that the court is still capable of functioning as a court, and consistent with the rule of law. Doing that would benefit both the court and the country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/opin ... oting.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Wall Street damaged the housing market for both rental and ownership, and now health care as well:
https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/21/ftc ... e=hs_email
https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/21/ftc ... e=hs_email
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Only in Texas, with its freewheeling, unregulated market.Rach3 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 3:40 pmWall Street damaged the housing market for both rental and ownership, and now health care as well:
https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/21/ftc ... e=hs_email
Re: What a Great Country America Is
I'm doing some projection again, I guess.NYT today:
Ohio High School Football Coach Resigns After Team Used ‘Nazi’ as Play Call
The Brooklyn High team used the term during the first half of a game against a team in Beachwood, a largely Jewish Cleveland suburb, school officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/us/o ... =url-share
Ohio High School Football Coach Resigns After Team Used ‘Nazi’ as Play Call
The Brooklyn High team used the term during the first half of a game against a team in Beachwood, a largely Jewish Cleveland suburb, school officials said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/us/o ... =url-share
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Well, when the Right supports criminals , what would you expect:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/business ... index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/business ... index.html
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Come on, man!! When BLM was trashing the cities of America you fell back on the tropes of victimhood, no doubt being being glad that businesses and whites were being punished. Defunding the police; this didn't come from conservatives. Stop making things up!! Why do you tell lies? Perhaps you think the rest of the world is filled with useful idiots who drink the NYT and WAPO cool aid!!! Have you heard about the crime in NYC at all? No, I'll bet you haven't and even if you have it would be somebody's fault other than the Democrat controlled city administration. It's the kind of emotive commentary you'd expect to hear in a primary school playground; Bwaaaa - she's got my ball!! Gimme it back.Rach3 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 5:25 pmWell, when the Right supports criminals , what would you expect:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/business ... index.html
Mind the credibility gap, Lefties!!
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Belle wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 5:28 pmRach3 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 5:25 pmWell, when the Right supports criminals , what would you expect:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/business ... index.html
Mind the credibility gap, Lefties!!
Tell all that to the GOP about to nominate Trump for 2024 , and his Jan.6 “tourists” supporters.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
As I was just saying.
NYT 9/29/23:
Trump’s promise of Lawlessness
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.
But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”
Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.
Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.
In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.
That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.
The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.
All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.
As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”
Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.
This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.
Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.
Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.
There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.
Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.
Alex Kingsbury has been an editor with The Times and a member of its editorial board since 2018. Previously, he sat on the editorial board of The Boston Globe and was deputy editor of The Globe's Ideas section. @akingsburynyt
(Rach3: Even scarier is the fact as bad as Trump is, he is at least stupid ; his advisers like Stephen Miller are smart and more evil than Trump.)
NYT 9/29/23:
Trump’s promise of Lawlessness
By Alex Kingsbury
Mr. Kingsbury is a member of the editorial board.
Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.
But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”
Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.
Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.
In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.
That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.
The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.
All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.
As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”
Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.
This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.
Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.
Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”
While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.
There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.
Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”
True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.
Alex Kingsbury has been an editor with The Times and a member of its editorial board since 2018. Previously, he sat on the editorial board of The Boston Globe and was deputy editor of The Globe's Ideas section. @akingsburynyt
(Rach3: Even scarier is the fact as bad as Trump is, he is at least stupid ; his advisers like Stephen Miller are smart and more evil than Trump.)
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Well, I'd go along with that Rach 3. Any nation which refuses to control its borders isn't up to much and cannot be trusted. Conservatives are not responsible for that horror, no matter what their other sins may be.
Yesterday I watched on YouTube a documentary about film director John Sturges; his films and some of his own comments about his influences and style were included. He's long been a favourite of mine, together with Ford, Hawks, Wyler, Hitchcock, Cukor, Zinnemann et al. I couldn't help feeling huge regret that Sturges was obviously working in a USA zeitgeist light years away from the present culture; of separatism, victimhood and identity politics. Also that that period and those moguls and that *studio system allowed somebody like Sturges to rise and flourish. From film editor to director. Sturges's films, like those of the aforementioned directors, provided many role models for audiences. Who can forget Steve McQueen as Virgil Hilts and that fabulous motor-bike sequence? What followed that daring stunt was a return to the "cooler" - to stoicism and acceptance, not victimhood and grievance. And certainly not to shouting and violence.
(*It was Billy Wilder who once said that breaking up the cartels of film studios and theatres was one of the worst decisions ever made in the USA.)
Yesterday I watched on YouTube a documentary about film director John Sturges; his films and some of his own comments about his influences and style were included. He's long been a favourite of mine, together with Ford, Hawks, Wyler, Hitchcock, Cukor, Zinnemann et al. I couldn't help feeling huge regret that Sturges was obviously working in a USA zeitgeist light years away from the present culture; of separatism, victimhood and identity politics. Also that that period and those moguls and that *studio system allowed somebody like Sturges to rise and flourish. From film editor to director. Sturges's films, like those of the aforementioned directors, provided many role models for audiences. Who can forget Steve McQueen as Virgil Hilts and that fabulous motor-bike sequence? What followed that daring stunt was a return to the "cooler" - to stoicism and acceptance, not victimhood and grievance. And certainly not to shouting and violence.
(*It was Billy Wilder who once said that breaking up the cartels of film studios and theatres was one of the worst decisions ever made in the USA.)
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Another breath-taking non sequitur. The article is about environmental degradation by powerful, ie GOP donor business interests, not hapless asylum seekers trying to escape an early death of themselves and their children.
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jserraglio
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Re: What a Great Country America Is
Baloney, Belle.
Think Scorsese, Spielberg, Kubrick, Nichols, Allen, Lucas, Coppola, Altman, Lee, Burton, Linklater, Tarantino and Eastwood to make up an even baker’s dozen.
Here are a neat baker’s dozen more of important directorial names: the two Andersons, the Wachowskis, the Coens, the Camerons, Fincher, Nolan, Hughes, Mangold, Gerwig, Howard, Brooks, Peckinpah, and Peele.
And if the great Austrian-born Billy Wilder counts, as he should, then so must the Czech New Wave filmmaker Milos Forman. By the way, Wilder bitterly fought the inertia of the studio system before finally winning artistic control over his movies.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Per NYT today survey of American secondary education:
" The high school class of 2023 received the lowest ACT test scores since 1991, a sixth year of consecutive decline."
" The high school class of 2023 received the lowest ACT test scores since 1991, a sixth year of consecutive decline."
Re: What a Great Country America Is
NYT today:
....For all the cynicism about politics today, it is worth remembering how often grass-roots political movements in the U.S. have managed to succeed. In the 1920s and 1930s, the country had a highly unequal economy and a Supreme Court that threw out most policies to reduce inequality. But activists — like A. Philip Randolph, a preacher’s son from Jacksonville, Fla., who took on a powerful railroad company — didn’t respond by giving up on the system as hopelessly rigged.
They instead used the tools of democracy to create mass prosperity. They spent decades building a labor movement that, despite many short-term defeats, ultimately changed public opinion, won elections and remade federal policy to put workers and corporations on a more equal footing. The rise of the labor movement from the 1930s through the 1950s led to incomes rising even more rapidly for the poor and middle class than for the rich, and to the white-Black wage gap shrinking.
One big lesson I took from my research was the unparalleled role of labor unions in combating inequality (a role that more Americans seem to have recognized recently).
There are plenty of other examples of grass-roots movements remaking American life. The civil-rights and women’s movements of the 1960s also overcame long odds, as did the disability-rights movement of the 1970s and the marriage-equality movement of the 2000s.
Other examples come from the political right. In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of conservatives, including Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, began trying to sell the country on the virtues of a low-tax, light-regulation economy. For years, they struggled to do so and were frustrated by their failures. Friedman kept a list of newspapers and magazines that did not even review his first major book.
But the conservatives kept trying — and the oil crisis that began 50 years ago last week eventually helped them succeed. A politician who embraced their ideas, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency and moved the U.S. closer to the laissez-faire ideal than almost any other country.
The conservatives who sold this vision promised it would lead to a new prosperity for all. They were wrong about that, of course. Since 1980, the U.S. has become a grim outlier on many indicators of human well-being. But the conservatives were right that overhauling the country’s economic policy was possible.
This history does not suggest that the political system is hopelessly broken. It instead suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have a broadly prosperous economy largely because the country has no mass movement organized around the goal of lifting living standards for the middle class and the poor. If such a movement existed, it might well succeed. It has before.
The central lesson I took from immersing myself in the past century of the American economy is that it can change, sometimes much more quickly than people expect. When it has changed in a major way, it often has been because Americans have used the political system to change it. The future can be different from the past.
....For all the cynicism about politics today, it is worth remembering how often grass-roots political movements in the U.S. have managed to succeed. In the 1920s and 1930s, the country had a highly unequal economy and a Supreme Court that threw out most policies to reduce inequality. But activists — like A. Philip Randolph, a preacher’s son from Jacksonville, Fla., who took on a powerful railroad company — didn’t respond by giving up on the system as hopelessly rigged.
They instead used the tools of democracy to create mass prosperity. They spent decades building a labor movement that, despite many short-term defeats, ultimately changed public opinion, won elections and remade federal policy to put workers and corporations on a more equal footing. The rise of the labor movement from the 1930s through the 1950s led to incomes rising even more rapidly for the poor and middle class than for the rich, and to the white-Black wage gap shrinking.
One big lesson I took from my research was the unparalleled role of labor unions in combating inequality (a role that more Americans seem to have recognized recently).
There are plenty of other examples of grass-roots movements remaking American life. The civil-rights and women’s movements of the 1960s also overcame long odds, as did the disability-rights movement of the 1970s and the marriage-equality movement of the 2000s.
Other examples come from the political right. In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of conservatives, including Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, began trying to sell the country on the virtues of a low-tax, light-regulation economy. For years, they struggled to do so and were frustrated by their failures. Friedman kept a list of newspapers and magazines that did not even review his first major book.
But the conservatives kept trying — and the oil crisis that began 50 years ago last week eventually helped them succeed. A politician who embraced their ideas, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency and moved the U.S. closer to the laissez-faire ideal than almost any other country.
The conservatives who sold this vision promised it would lead to a new prosperity for all. They were wrong about that, of course. Since 1980, the U.S. has become a grim outlier on many indicators of human well-being. But the conservatives were right that overhauling the country’s economic policy was possible.
This history does not suggest that the political system is hopelessly broken. It instead suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have a broadly prosperous economy largely because the country has no mass movement organized around the goal of lifting living standards for the middle class and the poor. If such a movement existed, it might well succeed. It has before.
The central lesson I took from immersing myself in the past century of the American economy is that it can change, sometimes much more quickly than people expect. When it has changed in a major way, it often has been because Americans have used the political system to change it. The future can be different from the past.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From Axios today:
Latest data shows millions of eligible Americans have been disenrolled from Medicaid.
As of Nov. 1, 10 million Americans lost Medicaid enrollment, 74% of whom lost coverage for procedural reasons, according to a new analysis.
Latest data shows millions of eligible Americans have been disenrolled from Medicaid.
As of Nov. 1, 10 million Americans lost Medicaid enrollment, 74% of whom lost coverage for procedural reasons, according to a new analysis.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Your health system there is in a bad way!! I watched "As Good as it Gets" again last night (great film!!) and 'Carol the Waitress' had a chronically ill child, Spencer. She had to use the Emergency Department and see another "9 year old doctor they put into the hospitals". It was very funny - so brilliantly written and acted - but I found myself wondering how many other Americans are in the same predicament, daily. My daughter-in-law became ill from food poisoning/gastric in 2017 when in NYC and was taken straight to hospital (covered by her travel insurance) and was totally impressed with the service and the staff.
The British NHS is supposedly the best thing since sliced bread, but not according our GP - a woman who worked in the UK hospital system before emigrating to Australia (most doctors work for the government in the UK, with fewer in private practice than in our country). She was not complimentary about the British health system. Her husband is a Plastic Surgeon and he works in our health system; both are very pleased they made the change to Australia.
The overwhelming issue for any first class health system in a developed country is that the cost of technology, training and medicine vastly outweighs the capacity of people, even governments, to pay for. I went to the dentist in Vienna as I broke my tooth eating a sweet. My own dentist did tell me before we left that we'd have 'second to none' treatment should the need arise while we were living there. True to form, it was exceptional. I paid 90Euro for a temporary filling which the dentist told me would hold out until we arrived home. Well, here it is 12 years later and it's as good as ever. Same with the doctors we saw; we went to the head of the queue because we paid cash. The rest of the time doctors are paid by the government and this is a smaller amount, probably similar to Australia's Medicare system of 'bulk billing'. Taxes are very high in Austria.
The British NHS is supposedly the best thing since sliced bread, but not according our GP - a woman who worked in the UK hospital system before emigrating to Australia (most doctors work for the government in the UK, with fewer in private practice than in our country). She was not complimentary about the British health system. Her husband is a Plastic Surgeon and he works in our health system; both are very pleased they made the change to Australia.
The overwhelming issue for any first class health system in a developed country is that the cost of technology, training and medicine vastly outweighs the capacity of people, even governments, to pay for. I went to the dentist in Vienna as I broke my tooth eating a sweet. My own dentist did tell me before we left that we'd have 'second to none' treatment should the need arise while we were living there. True to form, it was exceptional. I paid 90Euro for a temporary filling which the dentist told me would hold out until we arrived home. Well, here it is 12 years later and it's as good as ever. Same with the doctors we saw; we went to the head of the queue because we paid cash. The rest of the time doctors are paid by the government and this is a smaller amount, probably similar to Australia's Medicare system of 'bulk billing'. Taxes are very high in Austria.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Per Axios today:
About 16% of adults have received an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall, according to updated CDC survey data.
By the numbers: The states with the highest rates as of Nov. 18 include Vermont (33.2%), Washington, D.C. (30.1%) and Minnesota (26.8%).
Those with the lowest are Mississippi (5.4%), Louisiana (8.2%) and Florida (8.3%).
Meanwhile, cases of the BA.2.86 variant have tripled in the past few weeks, USA Today notes.
About 16% of adults have received an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall, according to updated CDC survey data.
By the numbers: The states with the highest rates as of Nov. 18 include Vermont (33.2%), Washington, D.C. (30.1%) and Minnesota (26.8%).
Those with the lowest are Mississippi (5.4%), Louisiana (8.2%) and Florida (8.3%).
Meanwhile, cases of the BA.2.86 variant have tripled in the past few weeks, USA Today notes.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
And folks are still dying in red states more than in blue states. We top up every time a new shot comes out, just to be sure. It costs nothing to be safe!
Can't wait for the combo flu/covid shot, coming soon to a drugstore near you.
Can't wait for the combo flu/covid shot, coming soon to a drugstore near you.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Pay for Play. Well,why not high school, too ?
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/05/ncaa-s ... stream=top
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/05/ncaa-s ... stream=top
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Per Axios today:
Nearly half of registered voters (48%) said the U.S. is spending "too much" on aid for Ukraine, according to a new poll by the Financial Times and University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
65% of Republicans said the U.S. is spending too much on Ukraine, compared with 52% of independents and just 32% of Democrats.
Nearly half of registered voters (48%) said the U.S. is spending "too much" on aid for Ukraine, according to a new poll by the Financial Times and University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
65% of Republicans said the U.S. is spending too much on Ukraine, compared with 52% of independents and just 32% of Democrats.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
From Axios today, Big Pharma in action:
For eight of the top 10 drugs with substantial net price increases last year, there was no clinical evidence to justify a price hike, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.
The big picture: The increases for these eight drugs, after accounting for rebates and discounts, amounted to almost $1.3 billion in additional spending, according to ICER, a nonprofit that assesses the value of medicines.
Details: In its last year of market exclusivity, AbbVie's blockbuster drug Humira was in the top spot on ICER's list. The wholesale price was raised by 7.1%, while the net price increased by 2% — leading to $386 million in additional costs, ICER found.
That was followed by Johnson & Johnson's multiple myeloma drug Darzalex, whose 6.2% net price increase added $248 million in costs, and Pfizer's breast cancer therapy Ibrance, with a 4.5% net price increase that added $151 million in costs.
What they're saying: "We continue to see list price increases above inflation for many of the most costly drugs," said ICER chief medical officer David Rind.
The latest report was the fifth time ICER identified "unsupported" price increases. Drugmakers have taken issue with how ICER makes its assessments.
"The arbitrary methodology supports misleading conclusions about biopharmaceutical value and evidence, which should give anyone pause before making patient access or other policy-related decisions based on the report," the National Pharmaceutical Council said in a statement.
For eight of the top 10 drugs with substantial net price increases last year, there was no clinical evidence to justify a price hike, according to a new analysis from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review.
The big picture: The increases for these eight drugs, after accounting for rebates and discounts, amounted to almost $1.3 billion in additional spending, according to ICER, a nonprofit that assesses the value of medicines.
Details: In its last year of market exclusivity, AbbVie's blockbuster drug Humira was in the top spot on ICER's list. The wholesale price was raised by 7.1%, while the net price increased by 2% — leading to $386 million in additional costs, ICER found.
That was followed by Johnson & Johnson's multiple myeloma drug Darzalex, whose 6.2% net price increase added $248 million in costs, and Pfizer's breast cancer therapy Ibrance, with a 4.5% net price increase that added $151 million in costs.
What they're saying: "We continue to see list price increases above inflation for many of the most costly drugs," said ICER chief medical officer David Rind.
The latest report was the fifth time ICER identified "unsupported" price increases. Drugmakers have taken issue with how ICER makes its assessments.
"The arbitrary methodology supports misleading conclusions about biopharmaceutical value and evidence, which should give anyone pause before making patient access or other policy-related decisions based on the report," the National Pharmaceutical Council said in a statement.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Food insecurity in Iowa, the "Tall Corn State" of MAGA, and elsewhere.From Axios:
The (Des Moines) metro's largest food pantry network recorded the busiest period of its nearly five decades of operation during the fiscal year that ended last month.
Why it matters: There's no sign that needs are waning, Blake Willadsen, a spokesperson for Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC), tells Axios.
DMARC assisted nearly 22,000 people in June, its second-highest month on record.
By the numbers: Almost 60,000 people used DMARC's 14 metro pantries during the recently completed fiscal year, Willadsen says.
That's up almost 40% from the year that ended in June 2022, when it served nearly 44,600 people.
The previous 12-month record was just over 58,700 in the 2020 calendar year.
Zoom in: A third of this year's visitors had never used the pantry network before, a stat that CEO Matt Unger described as "staggering" in a statement.
Cumulatively, there were nearly 252,000 visits for monthly assistance. (Rach3: The metro has a population of approx. 350000.)
What's happening: The reduction or end to multiple federal programs that boosted food and housing assistance during the pandemic is driving the demand, local and national advocates told Axios recently.
That's resulted in "a catastrophe" in places like New York, the New York Times reports.
Meanwhile, (GOP) Gov. Kim Reynolds signed some of the nation's harshest restrictions linked with the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) into law this year, the Washington Post reports.
Iowa will spend millions in additional administrative costs over the upcoming years to take in less SNAP allocations.
The law's backers contend it'll cut down on fraud and ultimately save money, per the Post.
What's next: DMARC officials say the easiest ways to make a difference are volunteering at its pantries or making donations.
Be smart: Giving money is generally more beneficial than donating food, as DMARC can purchase six times more food in bulk through its warehouse operations than people can generally buy in stores.
The (Des Moines) metro's largest food pantry network recorded the busiest period of its nearly five decades of operation during the fiscal year that ended last month.
Why it matters: There's no sign that needs are waning, Blake Willadsen, a spokesperson for Des Moines Area Religious Council (DMARC), tells Axios.
DMARC assisted nearly 22,000 people in June, its second-highest month on record.
By the numbers: Almost 60,000 people used DMARC's 14 metro pantries during the recently completed fiscal year, Willadsen says.
That's up almost 40% from the year that ended in June 2022, when it served nearly 44,600 people.
The previous 12-month record was just over 58,700 in the 2020 calendar year.
Zoom in: A third of this year's visitors had never used the pantry network before, a stat that CEO Matt Unger described as "staggering" in a statement.
Cumulatively, there were nearly 252,000 visits for monthly assistance. (Rach3: The metro has a population of approx. 350000.)
What's happening: The reduction or end to multiple federal programs that boosted food and housing assistance during the pandemic is driving the demand, local and national advocates told Axios recently.
That's resulted in "a catastrophe" in places like New York, the New York Times reports.
Meanwhile, (GOP) Gov. Kim Reynolds signed some of the nation's harshest restrictions linked with the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) into law this year, the Washington Post reports.
Iowa will spend millions in additional administrative costs over the upcoming years to take in less SNAP allocations.
The law's backers contend it'll cut down on fraud and ultimately save money, per the Post.
What's next: DMARC officials say the easiest ways to make a difference are volunteering at its pantries or making donations.
Be smart: Giving money is generally more beneficial than donating food, as DMARC can purchase six times more food in bulk through its warehouse operations than people can generally buy in stores.Re: What a Great Country America Is
From Axios today:
In corporate America, DEI efforts lost momentum this year after a Supreme Court affirmative action ruling in June.
"2023 has undeniably shifted the DEI landscape for years to come," Paradigm said in a report last month.
What's happening: Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote an open letter to his alma mater calling for Claudine Gay to resign as president, and said the university's DEI office was a "major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus."
Gay's job is safe, Harvard's board said yesterday.
Stacy Burdett, an antisemitism expert and former vice president of the Anti-Defamation League, said: "It's a reality that traditional DEI has not been inclusive enough of antisemitism and it's urgent to address the gaps."
"The racial justice movement as we know it may not have imagined the need to support and protect a group of mostly white people who are targeted by hate crimes and identity-based harassment," she said.
But she added that "the culture war against diversity, and efforts to turn DEI into a bogeyman don't make Jewish people safer. That's simply playing on Jewish fear to score political points."
Flashback: Three years ago, after George Floyd's killing and the ensuing protests threw the lack of diversity at colleges and companies into the spotlight, universities were raking in funds to establish new DEI programs.
Institutions, including Brown and UT Dallas, raised funds to increase accessibility, support DEI research and hire faculty.
A slew of colleges around the country, including the University of Minnesota and Penn State, established new scholarships to support students from underrepresented backgrounds.
What to watch: Bills to defund DEI efforts at public colleges or limit or ban identity-based faculty hiring have been proposed in 20 states this year.
In corporate America, DEI efforts lost momentum this year after a Supreme Court affirmative action ruling in June.
"2023 has undeniably shifted the DEI landscape for years to come," Paradigm said in a report last month.
What's happening: Billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote an open letter to his alma mater calling for Claudine Gay to resign as president, and said the university's DEI office was a "major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus."
Gay's job is safe, Harvard's board said yesterday.
Stacy Burdett, an antisemitism expert and former vice president of the Anti-Defamation League, said: "It's a reality that traditional DEI has not been inclusive enough of antisemitism and it's urgent to address the gaps."
"The racial justice movement as we know it may not have imagined the need to support and protect a group of mostly white people who are targeted by hate crimes and identity-based harassment," she said.
But she added that "the culture war against diversity, and efforts to turn DEI into a bogeyman don't make Jewish people safer. That's simply playing on Jewish fear to score political points."
Flashback: Three years ago, after George Floyd's killing and the ensuing protests threw the lack of diversity at colleges and companies into the spotlight, universities were raking in funds to establish new DEI programs.
Institutions, including Brown and UT Dallas, raised funds to increase accessibility, support DEI research and hire faculty.
A slew of colleges around the country, including the University of Minnesota and Penn State, established new scholarships to support students from underrepresented backgrounds.
What to watch: Bills to defund DEI efforts at public colleges or limit or ban identity-based faculty hiring have been proposed in 20 states this year.Re: What a Great Country America Is
A NYT headline today:
Homelessness Rose to Record Level This Year, Government Says
The rise of 12 percent was the biggest one-year jump since the federal government began an annual count in 2007.
(The data was as of mid- Jan.2023)
Homelessness Rose to Record Level This Year, Government Says
The rise of 12 percent was the biggest one-year jump since the federal government began an annual count in 2007.
(The data was as of mid- Jan.2023)
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Stop letting illegal immigrants flood into your country!
Re: What a Great Country America Is
STAT News today; the rip-off continues ?:
American taxpayers footed the bill for at least $1.8 trillion in federal and state health care expenditures in 2022 — about 41% of the nearly $4.5 trillion in both public and private health care spending the U.S. recorded last year, according to the annual report released last week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
On top of that $1.8 trillion, third-party programs, which are often government-funded, and public health programs accounted for another $600 billion in spending.
This means the U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million.
Between direct public spending and compulsory, tax-driven insurance programs, Germany spent about $380 billion in health care in 2022; France spent around $300 billion, and so did the U.K.; Italy, $147 billion; Spain, $105 billion; and Austria, $43 billion. The total, $1.2 trillion, is about two-thirds of what the U.S. government spent without offering all of its citizens the option of forgoing private insurance.
This isn’t an aberration. The fact that, for many years, more taxpayer dollars have gone to health care in the U.S. than in countries where the health system is actually meant to be taxpayer-funded is central to the argument made by economists Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav in their recent book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.”
“We’re already paying as taxpayers for universal basic automatic coverage, we’re just not getting it,” Finkelstein said at the STAT Summit this past October. “We might as well formalize and fund that commitment upfront.” The numbers in this CMS report illustrate their point: The U.S. would not need to raise taxes in order to provide basic universal coverage, since it’s already responsible for picking up a relative majority of the expenses.
Offering universal coverage would cut health care costs for individuals too, according to Finkelstein and Einav. That’s because people would have the choice not to purchase additional private health insurance, thereby avoiding contributions that get deducted from their paychecks as well as out-of-pocket charges. According to the latest CMS data, Americans spent $471 billion on out-of-pocket health expenses in 2022, on top of whatever they were already paying for health care coverage.
Overall, health care spending grew 4% in 2022 from the previous year, accounting for 17.3% of gross domestic product. The increase was largely driven by growth in Medicaid and private health insurance spending.
American taxpayers footed the bill for at least $1.8 trillion in federal and state health care expenditures in 2022 — about 41% of the nearly $4.5 trillion in both public and private health care spending the U.S. recorded last year, according to the annual report released last week by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
On top of that $1.8 trillion, third-party programs, which are often government-funded, and public health programs accounted for another $600 billion in spending.
This means the U.S. government spent more on health care last year than the governments of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Austria, and France combined spent to provide universal health care coverage to the whole of their population (335 million in total), which is comparable in size to the U.S. population of 331 million.
Between direct public spending and compulsory, tax-driven insurance programs, Germany spent about $380 billion in health care in 2022; France spent around $300 billion, and so did the U.K.; Italy, $147 billion; Spain, $105 billion; and Austria, $43 billion. The total, $1.2 trillion, is about two-thirds of what the U.S. government spent without offering all of its citizens the option of forgoing private insurance.
This isn’t an aberration. The fact that, for many years, more taxpayer dollars have gone to health care in the U.S. than in countries where the health system is actually meant to be taxpayer-funded is central to the argument made by economists Amy Finkelstein and Liran Einav in their recent book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.”
“We’re already paying as taxpayers for universal basic automatic coverage, we’re just not getting it,” Finkelstein said at the STAT Summit this past October. “We might as well formalize and fund that commitment upfront.” The numbers in this CMS report illustrate their point: The U.S. would not need to raise taxes in order to provide basic universal coverage, since it’s already responsible for picking up a relative majority of the expenses.
Offering universal coverage would cut health care costs for individuals too, according to Finkelstein and Einav. That’s because people would have the choice not to purchase additional private health insurance, thereby avoiding contributions that get deducted from their paychecks as well as out-of-pocket charges. According to the latest CMS data, Americans spent $471 billion on out-of-pocket health expenses in 2022, on top of whatever they were already paying for health care coverage.
Overall, health care spending grew 4% in 2022 from the previous year, accounting for 17.3% of gross domestic product. The increase was largely driven by growth in Medicaid and private health insurance spending.
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Talk about a rip-off! We spent over $50,000 in healthcare-related expenses last year, which cost the government a bundle due to the tax deduction we had to take to make ends meet. If we had universal healthcare, that deduction would not exist, and our taxes could be used to fund, say, Medicare for all. All because private insurance CEOs want to drive big cars and own mega-houses in gated communities.
This is definitely an ass-backwards way to run a country's budget, dontcha think?
This is definitely an ass-backwards way to run a country's budget, dontcha think?
Re: What a Great Country America Is
The decline in US longevity not a priority in the US:
https://wapo.st/3RZbxkw (free)
Impeaching Joe Biden is, though.
https://wapo.st/3RZbxkw (free)
Impeaching Joe Biden is, though.
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jserraglio
- Posts: 11928
- Joined: Sun May 29, 2005 7:06 am
- Location: Cleveland, Ohio
Re: What a Great Country America Is
Some interesting polling about democratic values in today's USA:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/large-number ... 49404.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/large-number ... 49404.html
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