Extending that - here is a tip for christmas, if you do a Love Actually/Die Hard christmas double feature you get to see Alan Rickman get what he deserves for what he put Emma Thompson though
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I swear there must be people in the PMO saying that now.
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Boo sucks
Welsh Matterhorn (from the back) - Cnicht.
Bottom image is someone elseâs feeble effort but shows the shape.
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https://x.com/FoxNews/status/1864077289517920345
Forced to withdraw because he was too establishment in his response to Covid. To MAGA, because he on board with enforcing lockdowns and other mainstream NPIs, he is a NAZI, but one of the bad ones.
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In a normal world this would be an impeachment on its own butâŚ
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This movement is nothing but grift
The original reporting here - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/05/grenell-trump-cabinet-loyalty-00192785
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Lots of interesting sides to this story. Of course, shooting people is wrong, full stop.
HoweverâŚ
Itâs actually incredible that the US public have put up with a system that allows them to be exploited in this way for so long. They repeatedly vote for politicians who do nothing to address corporate greed, who actually support it in fact. The healthcare system is beyond inhumane.
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SoâŚthey choose it. Just like they choose to allow about 1 school shooting incident per day. This shooting eclipsed coverage of someone shooting up a kindergarten in California. They choose it. All we can say is âthoughts and prayersâ, but it isnât any more newsworthy than the weather. There was a nasty thunderstorm in Indianapolis, and someone killed 7 children at a primary school outside Memphis, thoughts and prayers.
They just affirmed this choice last month by abandoning the rule of law. So the real tragedy here is we did not have live streaming of the shootingâŚ
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Oh lordy!!! Mercy ! I already think the future is bleak. Please make this nightmare stop !
And here I have been hoping that this bastard would have died of a heart attack by now. ButâŚAI Tzar ? What the fuck is Crypto and AI Tzar, what the fuck is that even supposed to mean ?
He might as well just hire directly a Russian oligarch now, instead of going through back channels like this,
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David Icke was incorrect about the British Royal family, but maybe there is somethingâŚ
Yeah, maybe. I should probably start looking for more expertise in certain circles on YoutubeâŚ
Joe Rogan next then.
And the police wonder why people donât like themâŚ
In US politics âCzarâ is an informal title, more of a nickname than a real position. Often where a supposed Czar position is said to exists, the area of government they oversee has multiple departments and agencies involved in those efforts and so the press create the title and assign it to a person they are covering to give clarity in their reporting on who is principally leading the government effort when the official government titles of those people donât make that clear.
Sometimes they are positions purposefully created by the president to manage the coordinated response to an emerging issue where multiple departments and agencies are doing work in that area but donât have established ways of working together. Biden appointing Jeff Zients as Covid Czar as soon as he got into office is a good example of it. Sometimes those positions age out naturally - Elizabeth Warren came to national prominence as the âConsumer Czarâ and once the Consumer Financial Protection Board was created and got up and running there was no longer a need for her role. Sometimes the roles become formalized. After the Sep 11th attacks the position of Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence Czar, was created to address a gap in how information from the various intelligence agencies got integrated. The independent office of National Drug Control Policy was formally created by Congress on the urging of Nixon to give the Drug Czar a permanent role.
With Trump itâs just a dumb honorific he has given to someone pestering him to give them a title that makes no sense.
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It is unfortunately very complicated. For as awful and ridiculous as our health insurance system is, one of the biggest problems we have of getting rid of it, or rebuilding from the ground up in a way that is patient focused, is it becomes unreasonably popular the second it gets threatened. Lots of people are immunized from the reality of how bad and broken the system is because of how much of the cost is covertly covered by employers, and you donât really know how bad insurance is until you have to use it. If you are a healthy corporate worker who has limited exposure to what trying to use your insurance is like it seems like a good deal. Better than paying several hundred dollars more a month in additional taxes to fund a âsocialistâ program. For too many Americans, the way Americans do things is obviously correct and so not only are alternatives not given healthy consideration they are reflexively rejected. American Exceptionalism.
The result is for all the talk online about the popularity of a public option, it isnt popular enough to make it politically viable and opposition to it is very strong. Both Clinton and Obama tried and got burned by it. Clinton badly, to the point there were concerns at the time that their failure was going to make him a 1 term president. Obama got less burned only because he gave up sooner understanding there simply wasnt the will in his own party and so with as much opposition as he was getting from the GOP he needed every vote from his people to get anything done.
To that point the ACA (Obamacare) has produced big improvements including significantly cutting back on corporate greed. But the system is still fucking brutal. In my in between jobs period I had to cover myself in the ACA marketplace and I was still paying $450 a month premium for a policy that had a $5000 deductible. That is fucking absurd, even before you get into issues like rejected claims and surprise out of network providers*, but ask yourself something - how would you be feeling right now if you were an American getting their health coverage through a government program with Trump back in office and a legion of goons behind him salivating at the prospect of cutting coverage people on government funded programs?
*hospitals are a fucking nightmare. You get billed separately for each aspect of your care, which is a nightmare in itself. For an ER visit with an overnight stay you might get separate bills for the ER facility, ER Doc, X ray, separate bill for the radiologist review (who you never saw or spoke to), hospital bill (separate from the ER), Drâs bill. These come in piecemeal and if you are trying to budget you have absolutely no way of knowing how many bills you are getting, where they are coming from or even when they are going to arrive. The worst though is that most insurance requires you go to somewhere âin networkâ. Basically a Dr or facility that has a contract with your insurance that sets the fees between them. If you go out of network the insurance typically wont cover those services. The problem is at a hospital it may be in network in general, but the various people coming in and out to provide you with care may not be and you have no way of knowing that at the time. You couldnt create a less patient friendly more stupid system if you tried.
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Just wanted to comment on health insurance as I was shopping that this afternoon, as I have to renew by December 15th to be covered for Jan 1st 2025.
I havenât enrolled yet, but my monthly premium (it covers me, wife, and 2 kids) is $1,208.
In addition to the monthly premium, seeing a doctor will be $40 or $80 for a specialist. There are also charges along the way for prescriptions, and since my son has an auto-immune disease, diabetes type 1, there will be plenty of additional charges for that.
With no exaggeration whatsoever, I fully expect to pay around $20,000 for health care in 2025 for the family. This does not include dental, either. Years ago, when the kids were doing braces with the orthodontist, I didnât even see the cost as my wife handled all that, probably to stop me from blowing up!
The cost of medical care is one of the worst things about living in America.
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The amazing thing about this is for as long as I can remember the Republican complaint about executive branch action like this is that it is driven by people around the president, not the president themself, and so is undemocratic. Yet read thisâŚitâs not even Trump floating this idea, but his transition team.
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