Political Catch-All Thread

[golftdibrad1]

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/blowba ... ry-24-2025

Whole thing is full of wins, including Bongino being #2 at FBI...the guy wrote a book about how corrupt the FBI is

but all the whining wont change dem facts
https://san.com/cc/democrats-in-congres ... l-history/

A Quinnipiac poll shows Democratic approval in Congress at a historic low, with only 21% of voters approving. Meanwhile, Republican approval has reached a record high at 40%.
snip
Among registered Republicunts, 79% approve of their lawmakers’ performance, compared to just 10% who disapprove.

LFG

[dubshow]

The dfd arbiters of truth and justice will reject any facts and evidence unearthed from this, blinded by orange man hate.

Amazing really. We all know massive corruption exist. We all know trumpkin has issues. But for fucks sake it's all coming out. This is way beyond owning the libtards. Why be the ostrich?

[golftdibrad1]

The dfd arbiters of truth and justice will reject any facts and evidence unearthed from this, blinded by orange man hate.

Amazing really. We all know massive corruption exist. We all know trumpkin has issues. But for fucks sake it's all coming out. This is way beyond owning the libtards. Why be the ostrich?

Because IQ so low it all boils to "i hate your political sportsball team and love mine no matter what"

Principles don't exist to the dfd leftists.

[golftdibrad1]

[coogles]

From the Tangle newsletter on the 20th.

It’s federal budget season, which means a lot of head-spinning numbers and congressional dysfunction. Before we can truly appreciate the depth of the latter, we need to really understand the former. Here are some facts about the budget:

In fiscal year 2024, the federal budget deficit was $1.8 trillion. That’s 1,800 billion dollars, or 35 Departments of Energy. Again, that’s just the deficit.

For more perspective, the entire discretionary federal budget — or, everything that can legally be controlled through the reconciliation process — was $1.7 trillion in FY2024. That’s 2,125 Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus.

The mandatory spending for the federal budget — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, income security programs, VA benefits, and retirement plans — was $3.9 trillion in FY2024. That’s over double the entire discretionary spending budget.

Lastly, interest on the national debt accounted for a full $700 billion, or a bit less than three times the cost of the entire federal government workforce (about $270 billion).

I think laying all those numbers out in clear terms is essential to understanding what balancing the budget means. If you want to substantivelymeaningfully cut the deficit, you have to either bring those numbers down or significantly raise revenues (federal taxes) — which were roughly $4.4 trillion in FY2023.

Leaving revenue increases aside for a moment, if you’re looking to cut spending, these are the biggest areas of the budget (again, all in FY2023 numbers):

Healthcare (Medicare and Medicaid), mandatory spending: $1.5 trillion
Social Security, mandatory spending: $1.3 trillion.
Defense, discretionary spending: $800 billion.
Interest on federal debts: $660 billion.
That’s not to opine on what ought to be cut or how to prioritize these items over one another; it’s only to state the plain fact that these four areas comprise 70% of all federal spending — if you delete the entire rest of the federal budget, and these four areas remain the same, the budget is only balanced.

These top-line numbers are essential to keep in mind when Congress talks about responsible spending cuts — or Elon Musk and DOGE claim they’re going to do anything meaningful to the federal budget by pulling contracts, funding, or worker salaries — to truly appreciate the depths of their unseriousness.

The Senate wants to pass a spending bill first, then a funding bill second. Alright, what do they want to enact? A $345 billion total increase in three places: $175 billion for border security, $150 billion for defense, and $20 billion for the Coast Guard. I’d love to do a breakdown of each of those items and judge them as a matter of policy, but let me first address how Republicunts intend to pay for these increases. To get a sense of that, we should look at the House bill.

The House wants to pass spending and funding at the same time. This gets a bit complicated because they’re using a time span of a decade rather than breaking it out over a fiscal year, but this is a common practice. In that context, the House GOP is proposing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, dependent on finding $2 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending at the same time.

To their credit, the House is looking for cuts in at least one meaningful place: Medicaid — specifically, by paying for Medicaid based on population instead of the current open-ended entitlement system. To repeat, I’m not opining on the merits of this plan (or cutting Medicaid spending in general) — I’m just bluntly stating that this is one of the biggest areas where there is funding to cut, and the House is right to look there. However, proposed increases to discretionary spending from the House more than cancel out the changes to Medicaid spending and cuts to other federal programming — not to mention the fact that President Trump directed Congress not to touch Medicare or Medicaid.

So, that’s a decidedly mixed signal on what Republicunts are actually going to cut.

Furthermore, the topline math on revenue cuts paired with budget cuts doesn’t make a ton of sense at first glance, since $4.5 trillion in revenue cuts is greater than $2 trillion in spending cuts. However, Republicunts believe that tax cuts encourage economic stimulus that spurs more revenues over time, so they argue this spending is net neutral. Even totally ceding that point (which many economists don’t), and even assuming these cuts to mandatory spending are enacted, the House’s plan will still increase the deficit over the span of a decade by about $3 trillion. The House knows this. A balanced budget for five years, somewhat maddeningly, means an increasing debt and a federal deficit because of our fourth-largest spending item: interest on existing debt.

That brings me to congressional dysfunction. To be frank, the whole back and forth between the chambers — Should it be two bills or one? Is Mike Johnson outmaneuvering John Thune? Is Trump undermining the Senate? Is the House Freedom Caucus increasing its influence? Should we increase offshore drilling? Can Republicunts include all their priorities before a government shutdown? Will Democrats play ball? — it’s all tedious. It’s a fight for control of the captain’s wheel while the ship is sinking. It’s a high school putting on a school play while the building’s on fire.

It’s another melodrama from a party with control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, squabbling over how they’re going to keep the government from shutting down and the deficit neutral after years and years of sounding the alarm that what we truly need is a harsh look at reality and some stiff cuts.

I feel the urgency; I’m 37 years old. I’m going to be inheriting the debt that our increasingly aging Congress is increasingly saddling me with. I’ve been compelled by the conviction that every Congressional Republican directed at President Biden’s trillion-dollar pandemic-recovery spends — conviction that they have now seemed to abandon for a fun game of “who can curry the president’s favor the most,” with the exception of the blessedly idealistically consistent Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

Congress: Where is your urgency? What are you doing?

I really want to do a deeper analysis here. I would love to do an analyst’s job and get into the numbers and compare what each budget item does and where the cuts make the most sense, but I just can’t. It’s an obviously fruitless exercise. The House can pass their bill as advertised, the Senate can pass theirs and pair it with some similarly tough-but-feckless-budget-cuts and tax-cuts balancing act, they can meet in the middle — it just doesn’t matter. The deficit isn’t going to decrease. The national debt is going to get worse.

Congress is failing us.

[golftdibrad1]

From the Tangle newsletter on the 20th.

long article of .

This is on the whole correct.

Id add this: besides the waste that we can eliminate in so called discretionary spending, the ENTIRE problem is in CMS, IE medicare and medicaid. Why? its unfunded. Social security is indeed an issue that will be have to delt with, but the are that its 80 something percent funded through taxes. And who knows, maybe there is 20 something percent fraud and abuse there, DOGE seems to be looking into it. good. CMS is only something like 5% funded through taxes.

This has to be fixed if you are having a serious conversation about a balanced budget. Cuts to benefits, elimination of fraud, ending abuse of overbilling, breaking the knees of the medical cartel, ending ridiculous pricing, and an increase in taxes are the only way.

re: pricing & billing, that's probably the big one. Medicaid will pay out 10x for emergency room visits and treatment of the uninsured vs what insurance would pay under their negotiated agreements. Why is this a thing? Why cant a thing just cost what it costs? Why is the government ALLOWING itself to get fleeced? Its clearly an illegal practice. Walmart would get nailed to the wall in an instant if they tried to charge different prices for products based on where you work, or put another way who you had grocery insurance through. Or for example if you went to a membershit club without a membershit and the products were 5x the price across the board. Its both wildly illegal and unethical and it happens every day, and the government has allowed it for decades at this point.

However, Republicunts believe that tax cuts encourage economic stimulus that spurs more revenues over time, so they argue this spending is net neutral.

This is called the laffer curve, and its a thing. I however would argue that the cuts they are planning to our overcomplex system wont fix this. The real thing that needs to (and probably wont) happen is a complete re-work and simplification of the tax code. I'm a big fan of flat tax for both people and corporations; its simple and allows for planning on both the biz side and gov side. People can know with certainty what projects would cost ahead of time without complicated credit and deduction systems. Gov. would know what future revenu would be as projects come on line.

Anyway, I doubt we will get meaningful change on those fronts, and I think tax cuts should be off the table without both a vast simplification of the system and budget that is at the very least balanced. DOGE and the new bill MIGHT get us to a balanced budget, and I'll take that good thing, but without meaningful change to the system a future administration will just pull the same fuckery again.

[golftdibrad1]

dem again

welp, this one slipped under that radar, but Trump is indeed going after CMS, by first going after the hopsitals.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential ... formation/

from coffee and covid:

That wasn’t all. Finally, on Tuesday, President Trump signed another executive order titled, “Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information.” In 2019, Trump ordered that hospitals publish prices for all medical treatments they offer. The new requirement was supposed to become effective in 2021, but (of course) the Biden Administration didn’t enforce it, with predictable results of widespread non-compliance.

image 9.png
In his new order, Trump reinforced the message. This time, I mean it. The order requires Departments of Treasury (the money machine), Labor, and HHS to “take all necessary and appropriate action to rapidly implement and enforce the healthcare price transparency regulations … within 90 days of the date of this order.”

This order clarified that hospitals must publish “the actual prices of items and services, not estimates,” deleting a loophole left open by the first order. The agencies are directed to ensure “pricing information is standardized and easily comparable across hospitals and health plans.” And they are to propose “regulatory actions” designed to ensure compliance with the order and “complete, accurate, and meaningful data.”

Hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies have spent decades perfecting a Byzantine system designed to prevent patients from finding out what anything actually costs—because if they knew, they’d shop around.

My libertarian streak feels uncomfortable with some of the implications. Under normal circumstances, any government intervention in pricing sounds nightmarish. What would Ayn Rand say? But hospitals and insurance companies aren’t free-market entities—they’re government-subsidized, government-protected monopolies.

More importantly, hospitals and insurance companies made their bed during covid. They refused to tell us how much covid treatment cost when that information was critically important. They built a bureaucratic system that locks out competition, exploits price secrecy, and relies on taxpayer money through Medicare and Medicaid. If they want to act like government entities, then they get to play by government rules.

Lie down with dogs, get up with orders forcing you to tell people how much your services actually cost.

The truth is that publishing transparent pricing is the last thing hospitals want to do. But, given the sorry state of American medicine, it is the best way to quickly drive down healthcare costs. Hospitals made their gurney, and now they have to lay in it. Just like the rest of us.

This is step one of what i outlined above to stop the hospitals from unaccounted fleecing of CMS for billions.

[golftdibrad1]

INSANE IN THE UKRAINE

This, all of this. I thought you liberals were the anit-war party? When did the programing shift?

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/insa ... mail-title

[golftdibrad1]

Speech starts about 1:10 in

https://rumble.com/v6q5ixq-live-trump-j ... src_v1_ucp

Watch & discuss, or get in the chair.

edit:
ok I found a thing I don't agree with he said; mandatory death penalties for cop killers. The state should not have the power to execute anybody.

[dubshow]

Eh, I think mandatory death for scammers and fraudsters too. Good way to deter the ever growing market segment.

[golftdibrad1]

https://x.com/Patriotmom717/status/1894458798892618228

“I voted for Democrats my whole life. They never did anything they promised. Once they got our vote, they never did anything they promised.”

“I vote for a Republican once in my life, and this dude done everything he promised.”

[golftdibrad1]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-prepar ... 16518.html

bUt HoW wIlL wE gEt EdUcAtEd?

[golftdibrad1]

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/our- ... ore-cringe

we are reaching maximum cringe

[golftdibrad1]

I'm back bitches, pepper angus for continued delivery

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/far-right-extremism

here is noted far right extremist nanci pelosi speaking about medicare in 2010:


“we cannot keep our promises on medicare we simply must make the cuts in waste, fraud and abuse… we owe it to our seniors, we owe it to our country!”


here is a young fauxchahantas, have a listen:


“when that much money goes missing it’s usually because somebody broke some laws somewhere, but if we don’t look, if we don’t ask, if we don’t uncover it and make it all public we’ll never find out.”

here’s noted right wing rabble rouser barack obama who even back in 2005 was saying things like “our immigration system is broken” and “we simply cannot allow people to pour into the united states undetected, undocumented, unchecked.”

then he gave this speech in 2007.
vid at link

we can go all the way back to the halcyon days of 1993 when a young billy clinton stood by al gore in his pre manbearpig days and spoke of a bold new plan called REGO (short for “reinventing government”) that everyone seems to have forgotten about:


“In 1993 President Bill Clinton initiated the National Performance Review appointing a private group to reform federal government eliminating ~100 programs, ~250,000 federal jobs, consolidating ~800 agencies.”

they even wanted to, gasp, “change procurement rules” and “change the personnel rules.”

utter that one today and you’ll be right in the “right wing extremism” bucket.

slap the word DOGE on this and advocate for it, and they’ll throw you right off of “the view” yessirree bob they will.

snip

the primary purpose of the US government today is stealing from taxpayers to enrich and entrench an unaccountable aristocracy. it censors speech, interferes in elections, and steals like it’s going out of style.

we used to have centrist agreement that this was a bad thing.

now we have a left wing actively advocating for it and much of a right wing happy to go along to get along so long as they get some goodies too.

i think what’s actually happening is that a sane center of american politics is emerging and that the politicians that live downstream from it have not quite caught up yet.

what’s happening in the white house and DOGE is where the center always was and to whence it is returning. we didn’t change, the leaders did and they took us on one hell of a ride while trying to sell us the “most people actually agree with us” fraud of the last 20 years.

that fell apart. “trust the government” futures are limit down.

the GOP will (hopefully) figure this out and grow dominant (though never underestimate their ability to screw things up) but the left in the US is cooked. they are really well and truly screwed. they have no message, no meaning, no gravitas, not even and sanity.

they will continue to self-own and alienate because they are intellectually and emotionally broken and will need to collapse before they can try to fix themselves.

The left simply lost their daym minds to the woke mind virus.

[golftdibrad1]

Gold has spiked over 1% and is at all time highs

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... uters.html

I wonder why that is?

[golftdibrad1]