As GOP-gerrymandered legislatures vie for Most Authoritarian North Carolina Republicans held the state budget and Medicaid expansion hostage to a failed attempt to expand casino gambling for three months. They finally passed the budget on September 22. Gov. Roy Cooper allowed it to become law without his signature. A veto and inevitable override vote would have been a pointless additional delay. We sounded the 🚨 on this when the NC budget dropped with this hidden language. Now the national media are paying attention. Thanks to @JuddLegum and @tesszeeks for putting some ☀️on what’s happening here in NC. https://t.co/vnl6425yhP — Sen. Graig Meyer (@GraigMeyer) October 2, 2023 There was one teensy rider added. Judd Legum reports in a thread: In other words, something like National Security Letters provided for in the Patriot Act (for those who ain’t). 5. Gov Ops is dominated by Republicans and pursues partisan investigations. It is co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).
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QOTD: John Kelly CNN reports: “What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. Of course we knew all this. Kelly has now confirmed it. MAGA cultists believe that all these people who worked for Trump are liars. All of them Tens of millions of deluded people believe it. As Kelly says, “God help us.”
There’s been much less coverage of this actual thing that happened than there was of Trump’s various suggestions that he would do it (followed by him not doing it). https://t.co/qU9h9AWR8Y — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 3, 2023 President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that the manufacturers of all of the first 10 prescription drugs selected for Medicare’s first price negotiations have agreed to participate, clearing the way for talks that could lower their costs in coming years and give him a potential political win heading into next year’s election. The drugs include the blood thinner Eliquis, which the White House said was used by more than 3.7 million Medicare enrollees from June of last year through this past May and had an average out-of-pocket cost of $608 per enrollee for 2022. Also included is diabetes treatment Jardiance, which was used by nearly 1.6 million Medicare enrollees and had a 2022 out-of-pocket cost per enrollee of $490.
Maybe … Ian Millhiser watched today’s first Supreme Court arguments and they were apparently as nutty as the shenanigans taking place on the House floor today, where the MAGA kooks have decided to oust their own speaker and the NY Courthouse steps where Trump is babbling incoherently during every break. Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus. That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional. The good news is that the Court appears unlikely to buy what Francisco is selling.
Trump got a gag order in his NY trial today after tweeting out lies and personal information about the judge’s clerk. He took down the tweet but his followers screenshot it and are passing it around and apparently there is some fundraising going on. It was a warning that he would be sanctioned if he does it again. The judge didn’t say anything about disparaging himself or the prosecutor which Trump has been doing every day during breaks in the trial. I guess he figures they are fair game. He shouldn’t. Trump is literally telling his followers to “go after” the prosecutor. And that’s the tip of the iceberg: Former President Donald J. Trump had a lot to say on the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company. Speaking to reporters at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday, he dismissed the judge as a “rogue” justice and said he did not “think the people of this country are going to stand for it.” And he focused on the official who filed the lawsuit against him, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
Now what? In a 45-minute roll call vote, the House moved to oust McCarthy as speaker. The final vote was 216 to 210 in favor of Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate, with eight Republicans joining Democrats. The rest of the Republicans are pissed. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), now the Speaker Pro Tempore, emphatically gaveled the House into recess subject to the call of the chair. pic.twitter.com/VfQWzIqMQZ — Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) October 3, 2023 Earlier today Matt Gaetz said he would support Steve Scalise for Speaker but I don’t see him taking it. He’s got a recent cancer diagnosis and is on chemotherapy. I doubt his doctor would recommend taking one of the most stressful jobs in the world right now. Who else? Nobody knows. This is the first time in history that a speaker has been ousted with a motion to vacate the chair. It was only tried once before back in 1910 and the speaker survived. And it divided the Republican Party for many years after: The House has never removed a speaker and hasn’t held a floor vote on removing a speaker in well over a century. In 1910, Speaker Joseph G.
One of the things I’m interested in is gardening with native plants. So, I love following the #NativePlants hashtag on the fediverse. I get to see people using native plants in their gardens, talking about interesting species, and showing great gardening photos. However, the native plant gardening community is pretty big. And the social web … Continue reading Ecoregion Hashtags
Real talk Last week President Biden gave a speech that went largely unmarked in the press and it’s really too bad. It may be the best speech he’s ever given and if people saw it it might set their minds at ease a little bit about his prospects in the next election and the following four years. He’s never been much of a speaker but the speeches he’s been making on the threat to democracy are excellent. This is the fourth one he’s given and it’s a sincere effort on his part to which we should all pay attention. After all, while we are all painfully aware of the right wing’s anti-democratic turn, he is the president and it stands to reason he sees this from a different perspective. That he is so determined to sound the alarm should get much more attention than it does. On the heels of a bizarre impeachment inquiry hearing last week in which Republicans House members threw out outrageous smears against him without a shred of evidence and a GOP primary debate that had the candidates yelling at each other like drunk sports hooligans, Biden traveled to Arizona to open the John McCain Institute and Library.
Do Americans really want this unhinged crook to become president? pic.twitter.com/4ZJqoOIudB — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 2, 2023 This should go well. https://t.co/5vbtIHbiCe — Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) October 2, 2023 According to CNN, Trump has decided that it will be good for him to appear at this trial and sit sullenly at the table with the expression he had on his face for the mug shot because he thinks it makes him look tough. The assumption is that it will help with the fund raising since the mug shot was so successful. Given both his personal history and the recent pattern in white-collar accountability, Trump might understandably be surprised he finds himself in so much trouble. https://t.co/JB3vLz2NVK — Philip Bump (@pbump) October 2, 2023 All of that is incredibly sick, but that’s how the cult works. They love their big, manly criminal Dear Leader.
It’s just as bad as you thought The Guardian reports on the latest “intellectual” vomit spewing forth from the centers of right wing academia: June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”. In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.