There’s secret, top-secret, code-word-secret — and then there’s whatever President Trump’s health-care plan is. It’s apparently so deeply classified that the people overseeing the plan don’t even know they’re involved. The Republican Party has promised (and failed) to repeal and replace Obamacare for more than a decade — that is, the entirety of the law’s existence. Trump began teasing his own replacement plan during his first presidential bid, five years ago. Back then, he pledged to swap out the Affordable Care Act for “something terrific,” details TBD. Over subsequent months and years, Trump boasted about the benefits of his plan. It would be cheaper yet somehow also more generous than Obamacare. It would be “so easy,” even though “nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” It would “take care of everybody,” even as it took literal care away from many. Trump proclaimed the GOP will become “the party of healthcare,” but a conservative replacement to Obamacare would probably look something like…Obamacare.
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Baby Spider Monkeys! Three boisterous baby Spider Monkeys have been thrilling visitors to Taronga Western Plains Zoo these school holidays. Born over the space of a few months to mums Rosa, Hiccups and Jai, the three young females are thriving as they learn to eat, play and climb on the Primate Islands. “It’s really exciting to have three new babies, and to see the whole troop pitching in, it’s a real family affair,” said Primate Keeper Sasha Brook. Hiccups has always been a really good aunty to the other babies we’ve had in the troop, but hasn’t had offspring herself for a really long time, so it’s really nice to see her having a baby of her own.” “The eldest of these babies in particular has been getting more and more adventurous, venturing away from mum, interacting with her keepers, experimenting with eating solid foods and even clambering over other monkeys. It’s really cute to see!” The Spider Monkeys are very active throughout the day but the best time to see them is during feeding time, which occurs between 12.30pm and 1pm daily.
The Semafor editor-in-chief discusses his new book “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.”
The post Ben Smith on the Bust of the Digital Media Age appeared first on The Intercept.
That’s Texas. Here’s Oklahoma: The molar pregnancy Jaci Statton had would never become a baby. It was cancerous, though. At the last hospital in Oklahoma she went to during her ordeal last month, Statton says staff told her and her husband that she could not get a surgical abortion until she became much sicker. “They were very sincere; they weren’t trying to be mean,” Statton, 25, says. “They said, ‘The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.'” Jaci Statton’s pregnancy ordeal began in late February. She’s a stay-at-home mom living near Shawnee in central Oklahoma. She and her husband, Dustin Statton, have three kids – two seven year olds and an eight year old. Dustin is an oil field technician, and they have a fishing guide business – she says she and her family go fishing every day.
GOP wants to cut $30 billion from veterans spending “The Republican Party is always looking to ‘thank Veterans for their service’ but when it comes time to put your money where your mouth is this is what they do,” tweets Rep. Eric Ager, one of our local Democratic state House members. “So many veterans in NC like me rely on the VA for healthcare and this won’t help.” This is what the GOP wants to do to those veterans. Democrats Rep. Mark A. Takano (Calif.), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.) and Rep. Chris Deluzio (Pa.) write at Military Times: Thirty million fewer healthcare visits. Fewer staff, increased claims backlog, longer wait times for benefits. Almost a $30 billion shortfall for veterans funding. That’s the uncertainty that awaits America’s veterans, should Congressional Republicans succeed in dramatically slashing federal spending as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy proposed on April 19. Last Congress, we honored our promise to toxic-exposed veterans by providing benefits and care to approximately three million veterans exposed to toxins, including burn pits.
Jack Texeira was a ticking time bomb He appears to be one of those heavily armed, racist, incels with a propensity for grandiosity and violence. How in the hell did he get that top security clearance? Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of posting classified documents online, repeatedly tried to obstruct federal investigators and has a “troubling” history of making racist and violent remarks, Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing late Wednesday. In an 18-page memo, released before a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday in a Massachusetts federal court, the department’s lawyers argued that Airman Teixeira needed to be detained indefinitely because he posed a “serious flight risk” and might still have information that would be of “tremendous value to hostile nation states.” Airman Teixeira tapped into vast reservoirs of sensitive information, an amount that “far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed” so far, they wrote.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Wednesday that President Joe Biden, 80, will likely die within five years and that his supporters would have to count on Vice President Kamala Harris if he were to win re-election next year. “He announced that he’s running again in 2024, and I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely,” Haley, 51, said in an interview on Fox News. It’s even less like that Nikki Haley will be in politics in five years so …
This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine. DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission. In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine. “You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.” DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine. “The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them.
“One of the great renewable resources” “You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead. Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out? “What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other? With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.