In case you wondered about the process that led to the preposterous finding that slavery was beneficial for the enslaved in the Florida “AP standards” here it is. It’s as bad as you might have thought:
The newspaper obtained copies of internal state documents after the state said in January that it would not allow schools to offer the new Advanced Placement course. The state claimed at the time the pilot program “significantly” lacked educational value and violated Florida law. The decision came amid Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) ongoing effort to target so-called “woke” culture, including the passage of the “Stop WOKE Act” last summer meant to limit teaching about systemic inequality.
The documents, however, appear to show an effort to whitewash the country’s history of slavery. In one lesson, the AP curriculum focuses on how enslaved Africans were removed from the continent and taken to plantations on Portuguese colonies that later became “a model for slave-based economy in the Americas.”
State reviewers said they were concerned the lesson “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and “may only present one side of this issue.” In a separate lesson that discussed how Europeans benefited from the slave trade, state reviewers claimed the curriculum “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”
In yet another case, a reviewer said a unit about abolitionists that worked to free slaves was not “factually inclusive or balanced.” The curriculum, the reviewer said, would be more accurate if the word “owners” was used rather than enslavers.
The documents noted there were many times reviewers said the course should include perspectives from “the other side,” but didn’t add any detail as to what perspectives they meant.
The Herald notes one of the reviewers was linked to conservative groups including the Civics Alliance, which seeks to bar “woke” standards from teaching curriculum. Many of the comments in the document were not attributed to specific individuals.
Florida is apparently allowing this to happen. I guess the majority doesn’t care. But anti-history, anti-science doesn’t bode well for them.
For the record, there isn’t another side to slavery. But any intelligent person knows that.
Donald Trump’s legal problems just got very real. We now have trial dates being set, jockeying among various co-defendants and even his former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, taking the stand to essentially say he was only following orders. It now appears certain that one way or the other, Trump will be facing a jury before the 2024 election. And for all his blustering about how every indictment makes him more popular, he wants his Republican supporters to do something about it.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has a full rundown of the Republican hysteria around the threat to their Dear Leader. The party is in such disarray that it’s difficult to anticipate how successful they might be at their various gambits to interfere in the 2024 elections around the country. But the outlines of what the MAGA caucus in the House plans to do in Washington are clear. They want to impeach Joe Biden, as we all predicted the moment they took the majority in 2022, and flood the zone with investigations. And they want to hold the government hostage by shutting down the government. If all goes well, they might even wreck the economy in the process.
Trump has exhorted them on his social media platform Truth Social for months to put a stop to what the GOP refers to as the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice. And he’s taken it to the campaign trail as well. At a Pennsylvania rally this summer Trump excoriated congressional Republicans whom he believes have not been fighting for him hard enough:
The Republicans are very high class. You’ve got to get a little bit lower class…Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried and get out — out! They have to play tough and … if they’re not willing to do it, we got a lot of good, tough Republicans around … and they’re going to get my endorsement every single time.
The problem is that there isn’t a whole lot his loyal House majority can do to help him. They are running investigations as fast as they can think of them. Aside from all the bogus Hunter Biden nonsense and the absurd impending impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden, they’re now set upon investigating the Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Fulton County prosecutor Fanni Willis with the supposed intention of defunding them for their alleged misconduct. They don’t seem to realize that these are local and state offices and are hardly dependent upon whatever small amounts of money the federal government might provide. It does make for a good Truth Social post though.
But they do have one card up their sleeves that it looks like they are going to play quite soon. You’ll recall that the House Freedom caucus was quite bent out of shape last spring when Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. They even staged a little hissy fit soon afterwards blocking a vote on the floor and putting the House into gridlock for week. They now plan to flex their muscles over the appropriations bills with a renewed threat of a government shutdown. And if the putative leader of their majority, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, doesn’t like it, they are pretty much on record saying that they are ready to pull the plug on his speakership. (All it would take is one member to call to vacate the chair and it will only take 4 GOP votes against him to put an end to his reign. )
During this summer’s recess the rebels, led by former Sen. Ted Cruz chief of staff, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, the battle lines have been drawn. (Roy was working for Cruz back in 2013 when he helped the House Tea Party caucus lead that disastrous government shutdown.) The Freedom Caucus released a statement making it clear that they will oppose any short term funding bill that doesn’t meet their demands:
“In the eventuality that Congress must consider a short-term extension of government funding through a Continuing Resolution, we refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden Administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities,”
They are hand-waving about cuts, including Ukraine military funding and “woke” pentagon spending. But the most important ransom demand, which is gaining traction in the whole caucus, is to cut funding for the Department of Justice and the FBI if they don’t succumb to their demands. That’s right, the Republicans are now agitating to defund the police.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., has two amendments that would “prohibit the use of federal funding for the prosecution of any major presidential candidate prior to the upcoming presidential election on November 5th, 2024.” Another one, proposed by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz is to “defund Jack Smith’s office and end the witch hunt.” He has the support of one of the most powerful people in the Republican Party:
Jack Smith is a terrible attorney with a lot of failures in his career.
Now, he’s abusing his power, the power of the special counsel, and the power of the Department of Injustice.
I will not fund Jack Smith’s special counsel and I will use the Holman Rule to defund his office.… pic.twitter.com/IFblJ7YC0i
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) August 1, 2023
The Holman rule would allow amendments to House appropriations legislation to reduce the salary of or fire specific federal employees, or cut a specific program. It has never been used for the purpose Greene proposes and was completely out of use since 1983 until the Trump crazed GOP took over in 2017. (Greene was still an obscure Trump devotee posting about space lasers and QAnon on Facebook groups at the time.)
None of this is going to happen, of course. Even if they could easily pass these ridiculous proposals in the House, which is unlikely, the senate isn’t going to go along with it. And in case they’ve forgotten, they’ll need to get a presidential signature on it too. I’m pretty sure President Biden isn’t going to do that.
And if they do shut down the government just for kicks anyway, one of the functions that will just keep going is the Department of Justice. NBC News reported:
The Justice Department said in a 2021 memo that in a shutdown, “Criminal litigation will continue without interruption as an activity essential to the safety of human life and the protection of property.” The Justice Department’s plans assume that the judicial branch remains fully operational, which it has said in the past can carry on for weeks in the event of a funding lapse.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is funded by a “permanent, indefinite appropriation for independent counsels,” the department said in its statement of expenditures. Given its separate funding source, the special counsel would not be affected by a shutdown and could run off of allocations from previous years.”
This is all more of the performance art that passes for politics in the Republican Party these days. A government shutdown over something that will make no difference is a perfect illustration of how preposterous they’ve become. Unfortunately for them, Republicans always take a big hit in popularity when they pull this stunt but they just can’t seem to help themselves. And better leaders than Kevin McCarthy have gone down with the ship when they do it.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, each time this happens people get more cynical about their government. And that way lies (even more) madness.
“Sen. Joe Manchin and his daughter Heather Manchin are pitching major political donors on a nascent effort to promote centrist policies and candidates that is projected to cost more than $100 million,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The project comes as Manchin, a 76-year-old West Virginia Democrat, is weighing whether to mount an uphill effort to win re-election to the Senate in 2024 or pursue a long-shot run for president—or take on a different role in politics altogether. The centrist senator, who represents a solidly Republican state, has been a pivotal deal maker in recent years and has flirted with becoming an independent, citing increasing frustration with both parties.”
A major Republican donor and one-time financial backer of former President Donald Trump is now a leader in the Florida chapter of No Labels’ third-party presidential bid.
Allan Keen, a Florida-based real estate developer and investor who gave more than $137,000 to Trump-related election entities last cycle, has joined the centrist political group in a leadership role with its Florida chapter.
The injection of a third-party candidate, David Graham writes in The Atlantic, “adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it.” Graham has described Manchin as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.” Even if he doesn’t run as an independent (unlikely), Manchin is still making himself a stalking horse for No Labels.
“No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election,” Graham writes. But that’s been true since 2016. We’ve survived two. Pray we survive a third and it’s not our last.
I tweeted this yesterday but wanted to make it clearer after the Biden administration announced names of the first 10 drugs chosen for price negotiation under last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Industry lobby PhRMA argues (and Republicans back them) that high U.S. prices reflect the high cost of drug development. Allowing the government to negotiate lower bulk prices for drugs (as takes place in Europe and eleswhere) will stifle innovation, they argue, is “tantamount to extortion,” and will cut funds for research.
(It might also lower investors’ and executives’ take-homes, but don’t look too closely at that, okay?)
Listen, “Americans pay from two to six times more than the rest of the world” for brand name prescriptions (2015). “American patients have long borne the burden” of “juicy returns” from $630bn in global sales in 2022, “65% of the global haul,” reportsThe Economist, which estimates the surcharge at two to three times more than consumers pay in other wealthy countries. “America is the piggy-bank of the pharma world,” David Mitchell of Patients for Affordable Drugs tells The Economist.
Seen another way, PhRMA’s “stifle innovation” argument is that U.S. consumers’ higher costs subsidize the rest of the world’s low drug prices. PhRMA wants to keep it that way. Is that their argument? It sounds like that’s their argument.
As President Joe Biden touts the first 10 drugs subject to Medicare price talks, Republicans are searching for their own message that would resonate with voters on the downsides of his signature domestic achievement.
Piggybacking on the pharmaceutical industry’s strategy, Republicans are working to persuade Americans that the Biden plan will stifle innovation and lead to price controls, several strategists say.
“The price control is a huge departure from where we have been as a country,” said Joel White, a Republican health care strategist. “It gets politicians and bureaucrats right into your medicine cabinet.”
However, the effort to reframe the drug price debate comes as Democrats prepare to run on the issue up and down the ballot next year against a Republican Party unlikely to cede any ground with campaign attacks and more likely to focus on the border and inflation.
A new poll from nonprofit KFF shows that 58 percent of independent voters trust Democrats to lower drug costs compared with 39 percent of Republicans.
“If they want to run their campaigns based on keeping the profits of the drug companies high, welcome,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) told POLITICO. “Why don’t they go for it and see how well President Biden does because people are going to understand that seniors want to see less expensive drugs
I’m sure the cult will fall in line even if they are eating cat food because they can’t afford their prescriptions. But the GOP plant to defend Big Pharma is an utter loser for everyone else. Republicans should just STFU and whine some more about Mr Potatohead. But I actually look forward to them defending high drug prices. As Klobuchar says, “go for it.”
1/ Pence's Chief of Staff @marctshort masterfully dissects what's wrong with WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' defenses.👇
If official capacity, "why was he circumventing" WH Counsel's advice, why wasn't Cipollone or DOJ involved, instead recruited outsiders wanted to listen to… https://t.co/rNB2JCq2Fe
In their questioning of multiple witnesses, Smith’s team of federal investigators have asked questions about how seemingly intoxicated Giuliani was during the weeks he was giving Trump advice on how to cling to power, according to a source who’s been in the room with Smith’s team, one witness’s attorney, and a third person familiar with the matter.
The special counsel’s team has also asked these witnesses if Trump had ever gossiped with them about Giuliani’s drinking habits, and if Trump had ever claimed Giuliani’s drinking impacted his decision making or judgment. Federal investigators have inquired about whether the then-president was warned, including after Election Night 2020, about Giuliani’s allegedly excessive drinking. They have also asked certain witnesses if Trump was told that the former New York mayor was giving him post-election legal and strategic advice while inebriated.
Furthermore, the special counsel’s office has probed how drunk witnesses and others believed Giuliani to be during specific and consequential moments of the tumultuous Trump-Biden presidential transition. Investigators asked for details that showed precisely how these witnesses knew firsthand the attorney was drinking while counseling Trump on subverting and overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Federal prosecutors often aren’t interested in investigating mere alcohol consumption. But according to lawyers and witnesses who’ve been in the room with special counsel investigators, Smith and his team are interested in this subject because it could help demonstrate that Trump was implementing the counsel of somebody he knew to be under the influence and perhaps not thinking clearly. If that were the case, it could add to federal prosecutors’ argument that Trump behaved with willful recklessness in his attempts nullify the 2020 election — by relying heavily on a lawyer he believed to be working while inebriated, and another who he bashed for spouting “crazy” conspiracy theories that Trump ran with anyway.
And if federal prosecutors were to make this argument in court, it could undermine Trump and his legal team’s “advice of counsel” defense. To avoid legal consequences or even possible prison time, the ex-president is already wielding this legal defense to try to scapegoat lawyers who advised him on overturning the election — even though these attorneys were only acting on Trump’s behalf, or doing what Trump had instructed them to do.
“In order to rely upon an advice of counsel defense, the defendant has to, number one, have made full disclosure of all material facts to the attorney,” explains Mitchell Epner, a former Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey. “That requires that the attorney understands what’s being told to them. If you know that your attorney is drunk, that does not count as making full disclosure of all material facts.”
Defendants looking to rely on that defense also have to have “reasonably followed the attorney’s recommended course of conduct in good faith,” according to Epner. “Now if, for example, Trump was getting two sets of advice from an attorney: one before 4 p.m. and when the attorney hadn’t been drinking and a second, much more aggressive set of advice after 4 p.m., when he had been drinking and this was a pattern, it would not be reasonable to rely on the drunk advice.”
Some witnesses told Smith’s team that they saw Giuliani consuming significant quantities of alcohol; some told the special counsel’s office that they could clearly smell alcohol on Giuliani’s breath, including on election night, and that they noticed distinct changes in his demeanor from hours prior, the sources tell Rolling Stone.
Some have already told investigators that they were directly aware of moments when Trump had talked to others about Giuliani’s drinking, and that Trump spoke negatively about his then-top lawyer’s alcohol consumption. (Trump is known for being a longtime teetotaler.)
The special counsel’s office declined to comment on this story on Tuesday morning. A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman wrote that “One should always question a story that is completely reliant on anonymous sources. This false narrative by nameless sources has been contradicted by on-the-record witnesses.” Last year, the former New York City mayor brought his friend and former business partner Roy Bailey onto his podcast, where he claimed Giuliani had been sober on election night 2020. “I was with you that night and you had nothing to drink. You were all business.”
Giuliani himself has repeatedly and vehemently denied allegations that he was drunk when he encouraged Trump, against the express wishes of some of the then-president’s senior aides, to falsely declare victory on Election Night 2020. The former New York City mayor has also pushed back on claims that his drinking contributed to his shift in public image from post-9/11 “America’s Mayor” to raging Trumpist. “I’m not an alcoholic,” Giuliani told NBC New York in 2021. “I probably function more effectively than 90 percent of the population.”
None of this stopped claims of his public drunkenness from entering the public record, in the form of another high-stakes, wide-ranging investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s efforts to cling to power.
Last year, when the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack held public hearings, the panel aired video clips of depositions of Trump brass, which included senior Trump adviser Jason Miller telling congressional investigators: “I think the mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president” on Election Night.
When these clips went viral, Giuliani angrily responded in a tweet that he “REFUSED all alcohol that evening,” and that he was “disgusted and outraged at the out right lie.
The testimony about Rudy being drunk on election night wasn’t actually new. It was reported earlier:
Rudy Giuliani was so drunk on election night that former President Donald Trump’s aides were concerned he’d accidentally smash valuable White House china, presidential biographer Michael Wolff told MSNBC.
Wolff described how on the night of November 3, 2020, the former New York City mayor was struggling to maintain his balance while trying to convince others that Trump had won re-election.
At one point, he was pulled aside into the White House’s china room by several aides of the former president, Raw Story reported. “And at that moment, Rudy was incredibly drunk, weaving this way and that way,” Wolff told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Friday afternoon.
“And the china, those place settings from every president are very valuable, and Trump’s aides were obviously, or rightfully, concerned about what Giuliani was saying to the president about the election, and giving him this misinformation,” Wolff continued. “But they were also concerned that he was going to break the china.”
He was literally reeling. Nonetheless he told Trump what he wanted to hear and Trump ignored everyone else and went out and said he’d won even though they had not counted most of the votes and none of the networks had called it. Drunk or not, Rudy was Trump’s most valued adviser through thick and thin.
Smith has a point. Trump was listening to a drunk lawyer tell him that he’d won the election. He knew he was drunk but he had it in his head that Rudy still had a great legal reputation and it didn’t matter. It could matter. A lot.
Last week, Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned for being part of a criminal organization that tried to illegally overturn the 2020 election. His mug shot was released and quickly went viral. Trump fumbled the COVID pandemic that cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and even more jobs; and he is personally responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade.
On the other side, President Joe Biden conducted his presidency with decency and compassion, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations of what could be achieved with a Republican Party that won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of his electoral victory. Unemployment is under 4%, the economy is growing and inflation has been coming down for months.
Yet somehow — against all common sense — the 2024 election between a competent President and an incompetent criminal — will be incredibly close.
He goes on to lay out the latest polling which shows that Trump and Biden are within a point of each other. It’s appalling. I know that Biden’s old but are people really going to allow a four-times indicted, twice impeached, lunatic to become president again? At this moment in time, that is apparently on the menu.
Pfeiffer spells out what’s going on:
1. Trump’s Holding More of His 2020 Voters than Biden
The primary reason for the statistical tie in the race is that Trump is holding onto more of his 2020 vote than Biden. In the NYT poll, 91% of Trump’s 2020 voters are supporting him again while only 87% percent of Biden’s voters plan to vote for him in 2024. Among Biden’s 2020 voters, 2% plan to vote for Trump, 4% claim they won’t if the race is between Biden and Trump, and 5% intend to vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Trump loses 2% to Biden, 3% to another candidate, and 2% say they won’t vote.
Relying on self-reported voter history can be a little noisy, but Biden’s approval rating demonstrates that he has some work to do with his own coalition. Only 77% percent of Democrats in the poll have a favorable opinion of Biden, compared to 80% of Republicans for Trump.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I find these numbers encouraging. Convincing people who already voted for Biden to vote for him again instead of sitting out the election or throwing their vote away on a third party candidate isn’t easy, but it is doable.
I hope he’s right about that. I just can’t imagine why anyone who voted for Biden last time would think the country would be in better hands with Trump. WTF???
2. Work to Do with Young Voters
There is, of course, some overlap with the above group, but young voters are not yet as on board with Biden 2024 as they were the last time around. According to Pew, Biden won voters 18-29 by 24 points in 2020, but he is only winning them by 10 in the NYT poll. Biden won voters 30-44 by 12 points. For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Times poll breaks out the age as 30-44, not 30-49, but Biden is only up three points with that group.
This change is not a bunch of young and young(ish) people deciding to support Trump. They are checking out of the election. — 9% of 18-29 year olds say they won’t vote if Biden and Trump are the nominees, and 16% of 30-44 year olds are either planning to vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.
These numbers are probably not a surprise to folks who pay attention. Young voters are a challenge for Biden. He started off the 2020 general election underperforming with that group and ended up generating high levels of turnout and support. It will take a lot of work, but Biden did it before and I am confident he can do it again.
Young people are busy with their lives and often turn off to politics. And they are idealistic and sometimes think it makes more sense to cast a protest vote to register their discontent with the system. But I suspect they will come around.
The 30-44 year olds are a bit more mystifying to me. They’ve been voting since at least 2016 and a lot of them voted for Obama. I don’t think idealism is driving this. I wonder what is?
Pfeiffer says there is also statistically insignificant move toward Trump from Black, Hispanic, Male and low-income voters and points out that the four points Biden has lost from Independents is likely because that number isn’t static and they’ve just finally admitted they are Republicans.
The big takeaways:
— Biden (and all of us) must work to reconstitute the coalition that defeated Trump in 2020;
— Biden’s (and our) task is more difficult because the anti-MAGA majority is much more diverse generationally, demographically, geographically, and ideologically than the MAGA minority;
— Communicating to younger voters Biden’s accomplishments and the stakes of this election are top priorities;
— The Biden campaign clearly understands the task ahead, which is why their current flight of ads focuses on Biden, not Trump
A viable third-party candidate like Larry Hogan or Cornell West is more damaging to Biden than Trump and could be what puts Trump over the top.
Yet another incredibly close race with the fate of democracy on the line is an unsettling and exhausting notion. It’s no fun to reflect on that prospect in the waning weeks of summer. Still, we must understand why the polling looks the way it does and formulate a strategy for how to invest our time and resources as the campaign heats up this fall.
Here’s an example of the ads that are currently being run by the Biden campaign. I see them a lot on the news channels. I have no idea if they’re penetrating the groups that need shoring up:
Nobody can say anything about Joe Biden except how old he is. Nothing else is relevant apparently. Except that his age is actually irrelevant, particularly when you look at what he’s done. Any progressive should be proud of accomplishments like this:
The Biden administration Tuesday identified 10 expensive prescription drugs that have been chosen for price negotiations with pharmaceutical manufacturers as the government seeks to ease the financial burden on older and disabled Americans. The announcement marks an unprecedented step in a long political war over the nation’s exorbitant drug costs even as the pharmaceutical industry is still trying to block the plan.
Half of the drugs chosen first for price negotiations are medications to prevent blood clots and treat diabetes and were taken by millions of people on Medicare in the past year, according to a list released by federal health officials who oversee Medicare, the vast public health insurance system. Others are used to treat heart trouble, autoimmune disease and cancer. Consumers will not see benefits swiftly; the lower, negotiated prices are due to become available in early 2026.
The three highest-cost drugs on the widely anticipated list of 10 are Eliquis, a blood thinner; Jardiance, which treats diabetes and heart failure; and Xarelto, another blood thinner. They cost Medicare $16 billion, $7 billion and $6 billion, respectively, in the past year.
Medications could be targeted for price negotiation if they are available under Medicare drug benefits, lack certain competition to push down their prices and have been sold for at least several years to give drugmakers time to help recoup the expense of developing them.
Tuesday’s step toward reducing Medicare drug prices was a significant element in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, a law that President Biden and his aides herald as a policy victory, even though the number of medications and the timing of the first price reductions are less ambitious than some Democrats had sought for many years. And the fate of the entire negotiation plan rests with the courts because six drug manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce and the pharmaceutical industry’s main trade group have lodged separate lawsuits around the country trying to obstruct it.
Still, the Biden administration, Democratic allies in Congress and consumer health-care advocates portrayed this initial list of 10 drugs as a milestone to shore up the financial stability of the Medicare system and ease the burden on its beneficiaries. Medicare is a federal insurance system for people who are at least 65, along with younger adults who have disabilities. When last year’s law passed, the Congressional Budget Office predicted the negotiations would save the program slightly more than $100 billion during the following decade.
“There is no reason why Americans should be forced to pay more than any developed nation for life-saving prescriptions just to pad Big Pharma’s pockets,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House, reflecting his intention to use the issue as a feature of his campaign for reelection.
The list also hands congressional Democrats a political opportunity ahead of the 2024 election to argue they are focused on pocketbook issues that can help millions of Americans. House members and senators lauded the release of the list. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, pointedly blamed Republicans for the high cost of prescription drugs, saying in a statement that Tuesday’s announcement “marks the end of a 20-year handout from Republicans in Congress to the pharmaceutical industry.”
Advocates for America’s patients and older Americans also praised the step forward in price negotiations. “We can’t allow seniors to be Big Pharma’s cash machine anymore,” said Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president for AARP, the large lobbying group for people 50 and older.
More than 60 percent of the 65 million people on Medicare take prescription medication, and 25 percent take at least four prescriptions, according to a survey this summer by KFF, a health-care policy organization.
The rest of the list consists of Januvia, Farxiga and NovoLog, which treat diabetes among other conditions; Enbrel and Stelara, for arthritis and psoriasis; and Entresto, for heart failure; and Imbruvica, for cancers of the blood.
Wall Street analysts widely expected that many of the 10 drugs selected for price negotiations would appear on the list, based on Medicare expenditures and their sales in the United States, among other criteria. For seniors enrolled in Medicare, their average, annual out-of-pocket costs ranged from $121 for diabetes drug NovoLog to $5,247 for cancer-drug Imbruvica, including those with financial assistance. All told, HHS estimates that about 9 million seniors enrolled in Medicare’s prescription drug program used one or more of the 10 drugs in 2022, and paid a total of $3.4 billion out of pocket.
For an old guy he seems to be doing a lot of good things. Maybe his age isn’t really the most important thing about him after all?
Brett Baier spreading doubt about the new vaccine. He doesn’t have to do this but it’s what his audience wants to hear so that’s what they’re serving up.
BRET BAIER (HOST): There’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t know really the stats. They don’t seem to match up, even today after all that we’ve been through.
DR. MARTY MAKARY (CONTRIBUTOR): That’s right. There’s a lot subject to interpretation because some people point to statistics that are massively inflated. We know that the hospitalization numbers are not real. We know the COVID death numbers are not real.
BAIER: Why do you say that?
MAKARY: Well, maybe half of those are real numbers because we don’t know who’s in the hospital for COVID versus an incidental COVID positive test. And when you test positive in the hospital when you’re in there for another reason, like heart failure, you get a stigma, you get a label. And so that goes down as a COVID hospitalization.
BAIER: And we as a country have not delved into the problems with vaccines, right? Other countries have, I know Germany had a big study. But we haven’t.
MAKARY: That’s right. It’s been frowned upon, it’s been sort of labeled vaccine hesitant work if you want to do research in that field. There’s no funding for it. The CDC hasn’t looked into their own VAERS database that has 1.6 million complications, self-reported. And the White House was sending emails to social media companies to take down true stories of vaccine-related complications.
BAIER: But you’re telling people, make this decision with your doctor. There are some cases in which it does reduce the severity of the illness.
MAKARY: That’s right. One thought is that this new COVID booster is going to be targeting the two strains that are out there now. So by the time it’s available, if those strains are still a threat and you haven’t had COVID this year, maybe it could be a good idea to get it if you’re high risk. But there’s myocarditis, there’s other complications in young, healthy kids. And how many doses are we going to give to young, healthy kids? 75 in the average lifespan of a 5-year-old in America? It’s not completely benign.
BAIER: These are states up to date with COVID-19 vaccines. But you have colleges that are mandating it again. Now, it’s interesting to hear the president and today the White House press secretary saying it’s suggested use. It’s not a mandate. But there are places that are mandating it already.
MAKARY: Well, there is a strong feeling from within the government that this meeting on September 12th is going to result in a strong recommendation by the CDC for all 300 million Americans that are over the age of 12 to get the shot. Now, the last time the White House pushed a new COVID booster without clinical data, only 17% of Americans said yes.
So, they would do themselves a favor to go through the normal process. Some people are raising eyebrows at the fact that the president sort of declared it effective and necessary. There are probably meetings with pharma that were private. Now the FDA’s going to approve it after the president declares it effective. People don’t like that process.
…
BAIER: If you’ve had it before, if you’ve had it multiple times before, are you protected better against this new strain?
MAKARY: Well, depends when you had it. But if you had it in the last year, the strain that this new COVID booster is designed for was a strain circulating earlier this year. And it’s believed to work against the two current strains. It’s just unknown if, a month from now, those are going to be the dominant strains or if this new BA.2.86 in Michigan is going to become the dominant strain.
BAIER: It’s really helpful for you to be here. Bottom line, talk to your doc.
MAKARY: Talk to your doc. Remember there’s the flu shot, it’s supposed to be a good match this year and that’s probably a good choice.
That myocraditis bullshit is especially dishonest. COVID causes way more heart problems in young people than the vaccine. (Overall, the numbers for either are low.) This doctor almost surely knows this but also knows it’s a right wing talking point to devalue the vaccines so he’s pushing it anyway.
I’ve become philosophical about this because it’s been so politicized that it’s pointless to even discuss it. It’s every man for himself now. Get vaccinated if you care about your own health or the health of people around you. Protect yourself from miscreants who have decided to just let ‘er rip. Good luck.
I just watched Andrea Mitchell attempt to interview the fast-talking hustler Vivek Ramaswamy. It wasn’t pretty.
Anyway, this is making the rounds today:
WATCH: In 2003, Rev. Al Sharpton schools a young student named Vivek Ramaswamy who questioned the then-presidential candidate's political experience. https://t.co/NKp94fHi4dpic.twitter.com/55btP73Bgx
This Oct. 27, 2003, exchange between Sharpton and Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show “Hardball,” has reentered circulation in the past few days because there was a 2024 Republican presidential candidate in the room. The event was hosted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics and, at the time, Vivek Ramaswamy was a Harvard student. So when Matthews turned to the audience for questions soon after the event started, Ramaswamy was the first to offer one.
“Rev. Sharpton, hello, I’m Vivek,” he began. “I want to ask you — last week on the show we had Sen. [John] Kerry and the week before we had Sen. [John] Edwards, and my question for you is: Of all the Democratic candidates out there, why should I vote for the one with the least political experience?”
And right there, you can probably see why the clip has gained new attention. Ramaswamy entered the 2024 presidential race without any experience in elected office, something that was leveled against the candidate during the first primary debate held last week in Wisconsin.
Sharpton, being Sharpton, had a clever response ready.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” he told Ramaswamy, “because I have the most political experience.”
The crowd laughed.
“I got involved in the political movement when I was 12 years old,” Sharpton continued. “And I’ve been involved in social policy for the last 30 years. So don’t confuse people [having] a job with political experience.” Just because an official there in Cambridge, Mass., has a position, he added, “doesn’t mean that they have political experience and it doesn’t mean they have experience to run the United States government.”
“I think that we confuse titleholders with political experience as we have seen with the present occupant in the White House,” Sharpton continued. “George Bush was a governor and clearly has shown he doesn’t have political experience.”
Ramaswamy, of course, would substitute his business background for Sharpton’s experience in social movement. But Sharpton was also almost 50 years old in 2003, 12 years older than Ramaswamy is now.
The current candidate’s critics note not only that his question suggested that those without experience in elected office should be viewed with skepticism but that he was considering voting for a Democrat in the 2004 primary — itself an obvious point of criticism for his opponents. There’s a trivial rejoinder Ramaswamy can offer, of course: The most recent Republican president was a guy with no political experience who used to vote Democratic.
The emergence of this video snippet marks a broader evolution than Ramaswamy’s own, of course. As years pass, it will become only more common for candidates to be presented with their past comments or views, thanks to the increase in how often we are recorded and how easy it is to retrieve those recordings. Even when we aren’t recording ourselves, we’re often around cameras. And the ability of automated systems to pick out our faces from even blurry, crowded photos and videos continues to improve. A 37-year-old candidate running for the presidency in 2044 will have grown up entirely in the iPhone era. Good luck to her, escaping her past comments.
In its totality, the exchange between Matthews and Sharpton is a remarkable political time capsule. It was held only weeks after Arnold Schwarzenegger usurped California Gov. Gray Davis’s position in a recall election, something that Sharpton lumped in with the 2000 presidential results to declare that “we’ve gone through a nonmilitary civil war.”
That was one of Sharpton’s approaches to the nomination that year: Pick up rhetoric from the activist base of the party and hope to parlay it into votes. It’s what Ramaswamy is doing this year, albeit with a more virulent base and a flimsier anchor to established political values.
Sharpton made it to mid-March 2004, earning no delegates. Kerry, who spoke at Harvard the week before Sharpton, got the nomination. In November, Bush was legitimately elected to a second term in office.
Not exactly the path Ramaswamy or his party want to follow.
Ramaswamy is a masterful fast-talking hustler. It is completely unsurprising that he was able to get funding for his company before he was even out of law school. There is a certain kind of person who is very attracted to people like him. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about but it’s really all chutzpah.
