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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:21:17 GMT -8
Whoever stole my iPad should Facetime.
The QOP War on Sick Kids
Millions of people, including children, have in recent months lost access to Medicaid, the federal program intended to provide health insurance coverage for low-income Americans.
Axios reports that numbers released by the Biden White House show that a whopping 60 percent of people who have been booted off Medicaid this year come from just nine states, all of which are led by Republicans.
The states in question are Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas, all of which have both Republican governors and state legislatures, although New Hampshire's House of Representatives at the moment is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.
Per Axios, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra this week sent letters to all nine states warning them to comply with federal Medicaid requirements or face unspecified repercussions.
In interviews with Axios, officials in those states insisted that they were complying with regulations and that their purging of Medicaid roles wasn't a deliberate attempt to deny low-income children access to health care.
"At least 2.2 million kids have been removed from Medicaid and its sister program, the Children's Health Insurance Program, during the so-called 'unwinding' of pandemic-era coverage protections as of September, according to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services," the publication writes.
"Many may have been disenrolled because of a procedural issue and not necessarily because they were no longer eligible. States have been restoring coverage for over 500,000 people, many of them children, who were inappropriately booted from Medicaid because of an error in calculating income."
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:22:15 GMT -8
MAGA's Greatest Hits
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:29:57 GMT -8
Will the Bullies Have Guns, Too? Ever Heard of Bystanders Getting Shot?
Conservative podcast host Steve Bannon said that children should be taught to handle guns in school so they are not "picked on" by bullies.
During a program at Turning Point USA's America Fest on Tuesday, Bannon lamented that gun classes were not taught to young students in most schools.
"We should get kids off social media and start teaching them the proper use of guns, how to defend themselves, their own self-defense," the firebrand conservative said.
"Should we not make that an integrated part of the education so they're not picked on or not threatened and certainly not scared, right?" he told the crowd to cheers.
Welcome to PE at Bannon Elementary
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:33:27 GMT -8
The US Finishes a Finnish Agreement. Vlad Doesn't Like It.
Russia has summoned the Finnish ambassador in Moscow, after Finland signed a new agreement on military co-operation with the US.
Monday's deal grants the US broad access to the area of Finland's long border with Russia.
Moscow said it would "take necessary measures to counter the aggressive decisions of Finland and its Nato allies".
Finland joined Nato this year in response to Russia's Ukraine invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently accused Nato of having "dragged" Finland into the bloc, and announced the creation of a new military district near Finland's border.
Meanwhile Finland has accused Russia of channelling migrants towards its territory in a "hybrid operation", and has temporarily closed all its border crossings with its eastern neighbour.
"We do not expect the United States to take care of the defence of Finland. We continue to invest in our defence and share the burden in our area and beyond," Defence Minister Antti Hakkanen said, quoted by the AFP news agency.
"However, this agreement significantly enhances our ability to act together in all situations."
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:34:50 GMT -8
Way to Go, Guys! You Authorized a Coin.
The data doesn’t lie. This Republican House of Representatives passed just 22 bills that became law in 2023. In contrast, under Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi the previous House passed 85 bills in 2021, including landmark COVID-19 legislation and the infrastructure law.
In last week’s House Rules Committee hearing, Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado pointed that out, blasting Republicans for the profound waste of time they’ve been all year. “The data speaks for itself,” he said. “This will go down as the least productive Congress since 1933.”
“Think about that: the least productive Congress since the Great Depression,” he continued. ”That is what Republicans have brought the country in the form of their majority.” They’ve also brought the ridiculous and utterly baseless formal impeachment inquiry, which is what the House Rules Committee was wasting its time on when Neguse called Republicans out.
This House did manage to get the debt ceiling lifted and keep the government’s doors open. Their other accomplishments? They renamed some Veterans Affairs clinics and authorized a coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:37:17 GMT -8
And Now a Word From the Biden Campaign
With less than a year until the 2024 vote, there is a glaring cognitive split at the top of the Democratic Party. While commentators and many strategists are aghast at Biden’s polling slide and desperate to see a course correction, the president’s aides at the White House and at reelection headquarters give every indication that they consider the election very much under control. The morning after the November 7 vote, Michael Tyler, the campaign’s communications director, circulated a toldja-so memo scoffing at the “pundit class” practice of “breathlessly making prediction after prediction about November 2024 based on polling” and pointing out that Biden “now presides over the best midterm & off-year combo for a president’s party in 20 years.” Another Biden insider described the run of off-year election victories to me as “canaries in the coal mine, dying,” and predicted that the president would win next November because “Dobbs is going to be on every ballot in every jurisdiction in America.” Democrats have been doing better than expected in all sorts of elections since Roe was overruled, and abortion-rights activists are pushing ballot initiatives in at least ten states.
If the campaign has an unofficial motto, it might be “Calm the fuck down, trust the process, and vote for Joe Biden. One. More. Time.” His top advisers believe that the political-media complex is repeating all its mistakes of 2019 in underestimating Biden and misunderstanding just how low Trump has sunk in voters’ estimation. They’re convinced Biden will rebound in popularity as the election gets closer and its stakes become apparent to the average voter. They also fully expect that no matter what happens between now and Election Day, the race will be decided by the narrowest of margins, just like almost every recent contest.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:38:28 GMT -8
Rudy Can't STFU
Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Arshaye “Shaye” Moss asserted that Giuliani is continuing to baselessly accuse the former Fulton County election workers of manipulating the absentee ballot count to steal the 2020 election from former president Donald Trump in Georgia. The former New York mayor repeated the allegations during and after his defamation damages trial last week, even as his lawyer conceded in court the claims were wrong.
On Friday, hours after an eight-person federal jury ordered Giuliani to pay the two workers three times more than they asked for, Giuliani gave another live news interview in which he claimed he was unable to present evidence of “all the videos at the time” showing “what happened at the arena,” Moss and Freeman’s lawyers alleged. [...]
Freeman and Moss’s attorneys wrote Monday that they asked Giuliani to agree to stop making such false claims before bringing their new suit seeking a court order and legal fees but that Giuliani refused to agree.
Minutes after filing the new suit, Gottlieb asked Howell, Giuliani’s trial judge, to let the plaintiff’s immediately pursue the $148 million judgment, citing the risk that Giuliani, the former Manhattan U.S. attorney, will empty out his savings before any money can be recovered.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:42:09 GMT -8
Bartov Is Just Another liar for Hire
The judge presiding over the high-stakes civil business fraud trial of former President Donald Trump harshly questioned the credibility of a key expert defense witness, suggesting his testimony was influenced by his nearly $900,000 fee…
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron slammed Bartov in a Monday evening ruling denying the defendants’ latest request for a directed verdict in the $250 million case.
“Bartov is a tenured professor, but all that his testimony proves is that for a million or so dollars, some experts will say whatever you want them to say,” Engoron wrote in the three-page ruling.
It is common for experts to be paid by the party asking for their involvement in a lawsuit, but opposing parties — or in this case, a judge — can use that compensation to question the expert’s credibility.
“The most glaring flaw” in the defendants’ bid to scrap the case for lack of evidence, Engoron wrote, is their assumption that their experts’ testimony “is true and accurate, or at least that the Court, as the trier of fact, will accept it as true and accurate.”
The judge wrote that Bartov’s “overarching point” was that the financial statements at the heart of the case “were accurate in every respect.”
But Engoron noted that he had already found that those financial records “contained numerous obvious errors” before the trial even began. “By doggedly attempting to justify every misstatement, Professor Bartov lost all credibility,” Engoron wrote.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:45:42 GMT -8
Bibi Says "Fuck You" to the US
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that he was “proud” to have prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state, putting him at odds with what for decades has been the United States’ policy priority for the region.
“I’m proud that I prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state because today everybody understands what that Palestinian state could have been, now that we’ve seen the little Palestinian state in Gaza,” Netanyahu said at a news conference.
He then talked about the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which he referred to using the biblical term “Judaea and Samaria.”
“Everyone understands what would have happened if we had capitulated to international pressures and enabled a state like that in Judaea and Samaria, surrounding Jerusalem and on the outskirts of Tel Aviv,” Netanyahu said.
And This Guy Says "Fuck You" to Palestinians
A local Israeli council head suggested in a radio interview that Gaza should be “flattened completely, just like Auschwitz today,” the latest Israeli official to publicly call for the annihilation of the besieged Palestinian enclave.
David Azoulai, a political leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, made the remark Sunday in an interview with Tel Aviv’s Radio 103FM. He went further, suggesting that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly sent to refugee camps in Lebanon. Metula sits near the Israel-Lebanon border.
What happened on Oct. 7 is a “kind of second Holocaust,” Azoulai said, according to a translation of the interview by Haaretz. The politician said that while he is “not a far-right person,” he believes Palestinians in Gaza should be ordered to “go to the beaches,” where Israeli ships will “load them up, the civilians … the terrorists they have there, and place them on Lebanon’s shores where there are enough refugee camps.”
They Are Both Recruiting Young Palestinians to Hamas
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:49:42 GMT -8
WRITE A BOOK REPORT? HUH?
A 13-year-old boy who was arrested and accused of planning a mass shooting at an Ohio synagogue will have to write a book report on a Swiss diplomat who saved thousands of Jewish people during World War II, a family court judge ruled.
The teen, who is not being named because of his age, was charged with misdemeanor inducing panic and misdemeanor disorderly conduct after allegedly making a detailed plan to shoot members of Temple Israel in the city of Canton, south of Akron.
He allegedly shared his plan on Discord, an online chat platform that has been used by previous mass shooters.
The Stark County Sheriff's Office learned of his alleged plan on Sept. 1, according to a Stark County Family Court filing that the sheriff's office submitted.
The teen pleaded "true," the juvenile equivalent of guilty, to all counts on Friday, NBC affiliate WKYC of Cleveland reported.
Stark County Family Court Judge Jim James gave the teen a year of probation and ordered that he read a book and then write a report about Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who saved more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II, according to the news station.
The Kid Wasn't Accused of Failing English
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:50:59 GMT -8
If They Were Aiming to Tell the Truth, They Missed the Target
On Sept. 26, Target set off a national firestorm when it said it would close nine stores in four states because theft and organized retail crime had made them too dangerous to run.
On its face, Target’s announcement was evidence that retail crime was preventing one of the country’s most prominent retailers from operating stores profitably and safely. It challenged skeptics who believed that retailers had exaggerated the impact of organized retail crime and used it as an excuse for poor financial performance.
There was just one problem with the explanation Target gave for closing stores: The locations it shuttered generally saw fewer reported crimes than others it chose to keep open nearby, a monthslong CNBC investigation has found.
CNBC’s findings cast doubt on Target’s explanation and raise questions about whether the company’s announcement was designed to advance its legislative agenda — seeking a crackdown on organized retail crime — and to obscure poor financial performance at the stores as it grapples with sliding sales.
In some cases, Target chose to keep operating stores in busier areas that had better foot traffic or higher median incomes, even though the locations saw more theft and violence, the probe revealed. In those areas, police departments may be better funded due to higher tax bases, and shoppers may have more to spend on discretionary goods.
Many of the locations Target closed were “small-format” stores the company opened over the last five years as part of an experiment to expand its footprint in dense, urban areas. The moves followed Target’s decision to shutter four similar stores in the spring that it said were underperforming, Retail Dive previously reported.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:52:58 GMT -8
An abused wife took on Tesla over tracking tech. She lostSan Francisco police Sergeant David Radford contacted Tesla in May 2020 with a request on a case: Could the automaker provide data on an alleged stalker’s remote access to a vehicle? A woman had come into the station visibly shaken, according to a police report. She told police that her abusive husband, in violation of a restraining order, was stalking and harassing her using the technology in their 2016 Tesla Model X. The SUV allows owners to remotely access its location and control other features through a smartphone app. She told police she had discovered a metal baseball bat in the back seat — the same bat the husband had previously used to threaten her, the police report stated.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:55:34 GMT -8
Flori-dumb Lives Up to the Name
Florida is experiencing a severe labor shortage. It impacts the key hospitality sector, which is having problems filling typically low-paying jobs at restaurants, hotels, and theme parks. Farmers are having difficulty finding workers to pick crops. And there aren’t enough construction workers to clean up and rebuild after hurricanes strike.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported that, as of August 2023, there are only 53 workers for every 100 open jobs in the Sunshine State. But Gov. Ron DeSantis has made clear that migrants are unwelcome in Florida. And to deal with the labor shortage, Florida Republicans have come up with a new idea—easing child labor laws for 16- and 17-year-olds.
Backed by industry groups representing restaurant and hotel owners, the proposed bill would get rid of state guidelines on when 16- and 17-year-olds can work and would limit local governments’ ability to enact stronger regulations in their communities.
The bill, for instance, would make it legal for employers to put older teens to work on overnight shifts, even if they have school the next day.
Currently, under Florida law, it’s illegal for employers to work minors under 18 more than 30 hours a week during the school year, put them to work during school hours, put them to work overnight (between 11 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.) or schedule older teens to work more than six days in a row.
Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, opposed the proposal, saying that “the answer isn’t changing the laws and making it more dangerous.”
“These kids need to be focusing on graduating. What helps the economy is getting them out of schools and getting them into professional careers,“ she said. “And if they are spending so much time feeling that they need to work more hours or are in a situation where they are, it’s distracting them from everyday school. That’s why there are rules in place and this is not the answer to what the Republicans have done to our economy when it comes to our migrant work force. There are better solutions and this is not it.”
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 19, 2023 10:57:53 GMT -8
The Pain in UrkaineAccording to the Ukrainian General Staff, this is what the last day looked like for Russian forces.  On the personnel front, that’s not the largest number of Russian troops lost in any single day. It’s not even the highest in the past two weeks. But when it comes to tanks and armored vehicles … damn: 44 tanks, 60 armored troop carriers, 56 trucks and other vehicles, and, to top it all off, 38 artillery guns. Those are battalion-sized losses, and it follows a solid week in which there have been double-digit Russian tank losses every day. By Ukrainian estimates, here’s what Russia has lost in just the first 18 days of December: 18,400 men 232 tanks 412 armored personnel carriers 461 trucks and transport vehicles 266 pieces of artillery These are unsustainable losses for any army.
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hasben
Resident Member
Posts: 1,023
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Post by hasben on Dec 19, 2023 13:59:26 GMT -8
And Now a Word From the Biden Campaign
I think they are dreaming. The Dem party is showing its usual horrible political strategy while the right eats their lunch.
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