Stop Calling For Unity!

For decades the magic term in DC has been bi-partisanship or more comically called ‘compromise’…..and to this day there are some mindless dweebs that are still calling for and believing in this ‘unity’.

Trump’s possible candidate for AG has made it clear what will not happen after this past election.  (I know Gaetz is gone Bondi is in….I wrote this draft before he withdrew)

Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and former Senate aide whose name has repeatedly come up as a potential attorney general in the next Trump administration, seems bent on revenge against Democrats even after the former president’s big win Tuesday night.

“Here’s my current mood,” Davis wrote on X Wednesday morning. “I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)“

In the past, Davis has said he wants to imprison journalists in “gulags,” though the line between what Davis calls “trolling” and his earnest dialogue sometimes isn’t easily discernible, as a Politico profile from September noted.

In any event, Davis‘ string of posts following Trump’s win made no mention of taking the “high road,” so to speak.

“F— unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump,” he wrote in another post minutes earlier, making an overly broad reference to “they.”

His statements pretty much sums up the hatred that is ruling over the government and its cogs.

Now for the Democrats….for decades they have embraced the stupidity the bi-partisanship was the way to govern…..now how has that worked out?

This last election their base went the way of the dodo….

One of the focal points of Harris’ campaign was her outreach to women voters. She made this election about freedom for women to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive health.

And while this message did resonate with many women – in particular younger women – it didn’t with others. According to exit polls by the Associated Press, 47% of women over the age of 45 voted for Trump, as well as 43% of women aged 18-44. More than half of white women overall also voted for Trump (53%).

Exit polls by CNN also found that while Harris did better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 with white women with college degrees, white women without degrees overwhelmingly supported Trump.

This says a lot about the decisions that some women made in the election. It seems possible that what Trump was able to do was give these women enough wiggle room to reconcile what might seem to be otherwise irreconcilable. For instance, they could perhaps believe that Trump wouldn’t actually implement a national abortion ban, simply because he has said he would not. Or they may simply believe that Trump’s policies wouldn’t necessarily apply to them.

https://theconversation.com/why-did-white-women-and-the-democratic-base-abandon-kamala-harris-my-view-from-the-campaign-trail-243136

Democrats need a new plan…this centrist BS has gotten them nowhere and has done little for the people that voted for them.

They whisper and shout a lot about the wealth inequality during campaigns and have little plan after they lose….

America has gone through many ups and downs since the civil rights era, but one thing has remained remarkably constant: In 1970, 12.6 percent of Americans were considered poor; in 2023, that number was 11.1 percent — or 36.8 million people. “To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote last year.

It might seem as though the persistence of poverty in the United States says something about how intractable the problem is. This is, after all, the richest country in the world. If America can’t rid itself of poverty, then who can? But it’s not that America can’t do it; it’s that it chooses not to.

That said, there isn’t a single answer to why so many Americans continue to be stuck in poverty. It is true, for example, that the American welfare system is broken, consistently undermined, and, in some cases, set up to fail. Studies have shown that programs like work requirements don’t work, and states have been caught hoarding billions of dollars worth of welfare funds instead of distributing them among the people they’re intended for.

https://www.vox.com/policy/374488/ending-poverty-america-policy-choice

Dems need a new plan….but that would mean going against the hand that feeds them, special interests, and if history since 1992 has taught anything is that they will not go against the powers that control the party.

So they will continue to offer platitudes and the GOP will continue winning elections.

We need a new party, a progressive party, that has the best interests in the people of this country and not the profits of the corporations.

This may be wishful thinking and as long as stupidity reigns there will be no change.

The party will not move forward without change.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Trumpian Possibilities For Healthcare

A continuing look ahead at the possibilities for 2025 and a new president…..

I am an old fart so healthcare is a prime concern for me as I age…..I am not particularly impressed with some of the rhetoric around this issue coming from the Trump camp.

We could see major changes in a wealth of areas in the field….like ‘reform’ of the ACA, Medicare ‘reform’, changes in the CDC, and others…..let’s look at the overall picture…..

Donald Trump returned to the presidency last night, and the impacts for healthcare could be sweeping.

The 2024 election returns Republicans to the helm of health agencies, armed with plans to reshape federal health programs, reshape standards for healthcare, and push to lower prices. Trump said previously that he would allow some of his most outspoken campaign leaders, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to “go wild” on health, medicine, and food policy.

In addition to wanting to tackle rising costs, Trump has also said he wants to improve the performance of U.S. health agencies. The slogan “Make America Healthy Again” was a facet of his campaign. He touched on it again in his victory speech last night, also name-dropping Kennedy.

Trump will likely head into his second term with a supportive Congress, as the GOP has regained the Senate and the Associated Press has not yet called which party will lead the House.

Here are some of the healthcare priorities Trump mentioned on the campaign trail.

https://www.moneytalksnews.com/ways-president-elect-trump-plans-to-change-healthcare/

Medicare is a concern to this nation’s seniors and there is the possibility that major changes could be waiting in the wings…..

On the campaign trail, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are eager to portray themselves as guardians of Medicare. Each presidential candidate accuses the other of backing spending cuts and other policies that would damage the health insurance program for older Americans.

But the election’s outcome could alter the very nature of the nearly 60-year-old federal program. More than half of Medicare beneficiaries are already enrolled in plans, called Medicare Advantage, run by commercial insurers, and if Trump wins, that proportion is expected to grow — perhaps dramatically.

Trump and many congressional Republicans have already taken steps to aggressively promote Medicare Advantage. And Project 2025, a political wish list produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation for the next presidency, calls for making insurer-run plans the default enrollment option for Medicare.

Such a change would effectively privatize the program, because people tend to stick with the plans they’re initially enrolled in, health analysts say. Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025, though the document’s authors include numerous people who worked in his first administration.

Conservatives say Medicare beneficiaries are better off in the popular Advantage plans, which offer more benefits than the traditional, government-run program. Critics say increasing insurers’ control of the program would trap consumers in health plans that are costlier to taxpayers and that can restrict their care, including by imposing onerous prior authorization requirements for some procedures.

“Traditional Medicare will wither on the vine,” said Robert Berenson, a former official in the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations who’s now a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a left-leaning research group.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/election-outcome-bring-big-medicare-experts/

None of this news strikes me as making the country “healthy again”….as was promised on the campaign trail.

But that is just me

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”