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Msg #83900
0 replies | Big Beautiful Bill | By Mike Goodey on 7/3/25 3:57pm
Congress has passed this bill having to wait until Hakeem Jeffries finished his windbag speech.
Per Joe Biden who replied that this bill would hurt millions who depend on medicaid and many who depend on rural hospitals...medicaid is for those who actually need it not for those who want it for free because they are lazy. Rural hospitals will get 50B in aid.
Of course as Joe Biden was spewing this rhetoric he said "Look at that beautiful butterfly!" Jill corrected him by saying "That's an airplane."
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| | Msg #83898
1 replies | And just like that, Trump won and now... | By Moneyman/TX on 6/27/25 9:40am
people have learned to once again use the legal term, illegal aliens, and use it properly! Even Dems and their blind followers, especially those useful idiots, now use it properly.
LOL They no loner even attempt to distort the meaning of the phrase by showing off their one digit I.Q. level as they used to do when they claimed "It's undocumented ... this or that" or "no one is illegal" -- uh, yeah -- it's right there in the first word of the perfectly legitimate and honest legal term for someone who is in a country without the legal permission of that county.
I can't wait to see how much more normalcy and common sense is once again found in our country before he leaves office. This is exciting!!
Wow! That's shows just how far off into the crazy we have come to accept thanks to the far left nuts, when it can be described as "exciting", when people are returning to using the proper terms again. It's almost as if a lot of people are once again using the family dictionary (printed version) that was passed on to them after their parents have passed on. :-)
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| Msg #83896
0 replies | Open your eyes!!!!!!! | By Mike Goodey on 6/24/25 7:22pm
At least Trump did something about Iran, a terrorist country. Did Biden? NO! He gave the Iranians billions of dollars which led to their uranium projects advancing at breakneck speed.
Now, after the bombing of 3 nuclear sites, Iran wants a cease fire...go figure!
If Donald Trump saved a child from drowning in the ocean, the leaders of the left would criticize him for starving the sharks. They have no answers only criticism.
Now Kamala is thinking about running for California governor? Hasn't she been humiliated enough?
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| | | | Msg #83881
9 replies | Trump is lying about what is happening in LA | By JanetK_CA on 6/12/25 4:45pm
He claimed LA would be in flames if it weren't for the National Guard's presence. There's absolutely no justification for that claim. The majority of the protestors were peaceful, with the few who threw rocks, etc. arrested by local law enforcement, who were fully capable of handling the crowd - fairly small for LA. (Three Waymo taxis, all parked next to each other, were set on fire by vandal(s), but that was the video that was broadcast the most. Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks away, life went on as normal. The National Guard ended up only defending a federal building and backing up ICE agents. And there was certainly no need for Marines!
Similar circumstances happened in my county, as well. (We also had a sniper on the roof of a federal building, aiming at peaceful protestors!) Here's a description (by a non-partisan news outlet:
http://patch.com/california/lakeforest-ca/s/je31r/scenes-of-fear-and-panic-prompt-southland-mayors-call-for-ice-soldiers-to-get-out?user_email=dedc812ce801ab1db53e0d775cae0e164b5b2b43204154151d6d198ac0d240d5&user_email_md5=e13e77fa520f74b538281eb875f7f16f&lctg=5e2965a0b90c2f4b8a0366e2
Overall, this was a hugely disproportionate response, followed by lies about what really transpired, which makes one wonder what the real purpose is... [Just listening to Mayor of LA addressing the issues, and setting record straight. Will try to find a video and link.]
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| | Msg #83877
0 replies | Proposed tax bill could trigger automatic $500B Medicare cut | By JanetK_CA on 5/21/25 6:42pm
Here are two very interesting articles I've come across about aspects of the tax bill as currently proposed in the House. Some have claimed that the bill doesn't even mention Medicare, but it doesn't have to, as the first article explains. The cuts would be triggered automatically next year, amounting to about $500B - and yes, that's Medicare, not Medicaid:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-current-republican-tax-bill-could-cut-500-billion-from-medicare-this-bill-just-gets-more-and-more-cruel-0af411b1
This article does a good job of explaining how our current deficit situation (i.e. national debt) is different than what's happened in the past:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-tax-bill-reconcilation-deficit-moodys-debt-spending/
Also, it's being reported that way more than 50% of the tax cuts would be going to the richest of the rich, while the poorest will see increases. Seems to me those people at the very top should be paying more taxes, not less. That's very hard to make happen because of how most of them structure their assets and how they make money, but I believe it's worth the effort to figure out.
I just don't get focusing on saving billionaires on taxes. Many of them already benefit from federal subsidies of various types. Also, it's unlikely their tax savings will go back into the economy in the form of investments in growth and jobs, but more likely used to buy back stock, further enriching those at the top, as happened with the tax cuts in Trump's last term.
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| Msg #83876
0 replies | Praying for Joe | By Mike Goodey on 5/20/25 5:14pm
Sad to hear about Joe Biden' prostate cancer announcement. We pray that he stays comfortable wherever he may rest. From what doctors have said, it is not beatable, it's too aggressive.
My first question is : When did he know about this? Certainly the commander in chief would have regular checkups and the disease would have raised its' ugly head some time ago. Did Joe not allow White House doctors let the public know about this? Or maybe it was Jill who wouldn't allow it.
I have brought up mishaps that Joe has had during his term and critics here blamed it on ediing from a news channel. I explained that they didn't have to edit the videos, it actually happened the way it was shown. Slip and falls and cognitive decline are some of the side affects of this disease.
Talk about editing, after the debate between Biden and Trump Jill had to go up a few steps to get Joe and escort him from the stage. CNN did not allow that to be shown until weeks later when Joe's cognitive decline was revealed. It really appeared to be a coverup. Now those on the left don't want to talk about it or bring it up.
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| Msg #83866
0 replies | Commentary on the “Big, Beautiful Bill” pending in Congress | By JanetK_CA on 5/19/25 4:06am
One of my biggest concerns about items in this bill that's receiving very little attention is a 10-year ban on any state regulation of AI. Just in the interest of preventing fraud, let alone all the things it will eventually be able to do that we can't even imagine yet, I can't think of anything more in need of some kind of regulation than that!!
As for the rest of this, makes me wonder what else they're trying to hide by rushing through the usual debate process for a bill of this type. If it's good for the American people, why not just be upfront about it? And what happened to lowering prices on day one?! Just a useful slogan, I guess...
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Heather Cox Richardson
oprntoesSda3u56608fh11ul1tag00f2i0u9gm1ii0m286m11l83u12342u0 ·
May 18, 2025 (Sunday)
Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.
The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.
And so the bill moves forward.
In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.
Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.
Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.
The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”
On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).
The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.
But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.
But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.
In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?... They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart's chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.
In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.
So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”
Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.
Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.
Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.
In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.
And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.
“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned [and] believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”
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| Msg #83865
4 replies | Dangerous or even deadly: Some Calif weather service offices | By SC/CA on 5/17/25 9:45am
won't be open 24 hours.
http://www.sfgate.com/weather/article/california-weather-service-offices-cut-back-20331725.php
As summer heat waves and peak wildfire season loom in California, several of the state’s National Weather Service offices won’t have 24-hour staffing for weather alerts, reports said.
Daniel Swain, a former UCLA climate scientist who now works at the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told SFGATE that the reduced operations in the Central Valley are worrisome, especially during the extreme weather events that can occur during the warmest months.
“It is precisely in those extreme events where the consequences of a missed warning or a less timely forecast or missed connection between the weather service meteorologist and an emergency manager or fire responder could prove dangerous or even deadly,” Swain said.
Local weather offices often issue alerts when conditions pose a wildfire risk. In January, for example, the weather service issued a “life-threatening, destructive” wind warning” just the day before the catastrophic Palisades Fire sparked in Los Angeles County.
So glad we’re cutting the fat. Lol.
Maybe we can use trump’s lavish oil-money-bribe jet for the fire-fighters.
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| | | Msg #83851
3 replies | Just not right | By Mike Goodey on 4/29/25 10:40pm
Bill Clinton- 12.3 million deportations- 0 injunctions
George Bush- 10.3 million deportations- 0 injunctions
Barak O'Bama- 5.3 deportations- 0 injunctions
Donald Trump- 100 thousand deportations- 30 injunctions
Seems to be a conspiracy?
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| Msg #83850
5 replies | The clown in Sacramento | By Mike Goodey on 4/29/25 10:32pm
Last week Gavin Newsom's administration released a plan to charge a mileage tax on all California drivers!!!
This week CA democrats are taking up 5 more tax hikes in the state legislature. Hasn't the CA dems wasted enough money and then can't find it?
1) Property tax-(9 bills): Dems have introduced nine separate bills that would increase our property tax in some way - with the worst being a costly property transfer tax that would give state and local government 5% of the value of every home sold- on top of the capital gains tax!
Dems are working with union bosses to repeal prop 13 on the ballot in 2026.
2) Payroll tax - Newsom has included a job-killing hike in the payroll tax - costing struggling small businesses $1B more per year in payroll costs. That means fewer jobs in our state.
3) Vacancy tax (SB789) After forcing businesses to close with excessive taxes and regulations, dems now want to impose a tax on vacant offices and retail stores that used to have all the businesses they destroyed. Adding insult to injury!!!
4) Social media tax (AB796) This week dems will vote on a bill to impose a tax on the social media platforms you currently use for free. Expect that tax to be passed on to the users of these platforms.
5) Income tax - (AB1428) This bill would increase tax to 13.8%.
6) Mileage tax (AB1421) Newsom plans on tracking every driver's mileage and charging them 6-9 cents per mile they drive. That's the equivalent of an 80 cent per gallon hike in gas tax. Typical driver will pay $900-$1200 per year on poorly paved roads we have already paid for with gas and sales tax!! Talk about kicking us when we are down!
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| Msg #83847
2 replies | I have a friend. | By anotaryinva on 4/28/25 5:37pm
I have a friend, a bff if you will. We have been friends for over 40 years. I am a republican, she’s a democrat. This has never been an issue until now, suddenly I’m like a horrible person that could support republican policies and Trump. I live on the right coast she lives on the left coast. I am so sad that she is really ready to ditch 40 yrs. Has this happened to any of you?
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