Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Amanda Marcotte at Salon writes—Yes, Trump's Twitter threats against Democrats are a "distraction" — but we can't ignore them:
In an effort to get a handle on the endless deluge of awfulness pouring out of Trump, it's become common to describe some of the godawful things he does as "distractions" from other awful things he does. It's an effort to triage our response, apparently on the theory that figuring out which Trump evils rank higher than others can somehow sharpen our efforts to process and resist them. It's an honorable desire based in empirical evidence: Indeed, Trump sometimes does or says nasty things to divert public and media attention from other nasty things he does or says. Unfortunately, this often fails to understand that the nasty stuff Trump does to distract us from other nasty stuff is incredibly dangerous on its own terms, and can't just be shrugged off as a pure or content-free distraction. [...]
Today's case in point: Trump, who has frequently indulged in late-night binges of Twitter vitriol while most Americans are asleep, was at it again late on Wednesday night when he decided to promote a video by a cowboy cosplayer and Trump superfan named Couy Griffin declaring, "The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat." [...]
So it's true that these things are blatant distractions. But it doesn't follow that the best approach is necessarily to ignore Trump's childish behavior. The fact the president of the United States is encouraging domestic terrorism against "Democrats" — not just against specific politicians, which would be bad enough, but against anyone who identifies as a Democrat — is not a small thing. On the contrary, it's incredibly dangerous. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—Texas legislature gives 1.5 million poor residents the finger:
It's not enough just to refuse federal health care funds to expand Medicaid. Not in Texas. The legislature there has passed a bill prohibiting the state from taking the funds. Gov. Rick Perry is expected to sign the proposal.
AUSTIN, Texas, May 26 (Reuters) - The Republican-majority Texas House and Senate on Sunday sent Governor Rick Perry a proposal to prevent the state from expanding its Medicaid program as outlined by President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law. [...]
The proposal, an amendment to a Medicaid-related bill, says state health officials "may only provide medical assistance to a person who would have been otherwise eligible for medical assistance or for whom federal matching funds were available under the eligibility criteria for medical assistance in effect on December 31, 2013."
There are approximately 1.5 million low-income Texans who are uninsured and would have qualified to receive Medicaid under the terms of the expansion. That means that 1.5 million Texans will still be forced to use the emergency room—the least efficient and most expensive option available—for their primary means of health care. It also comes on top of $700 million in cuts the state has made to hospitals because of a budget shortfall.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show:
Greg Dworkin rounds up Trump's imaginary war on Twitter and PA Gop's bioattack on Dem legislators, then parses the polls showing Trump's trouncing. Zoom firings at Weight Watchers. Lack of contact tracing = data fudging. Brazil's COVID explosion.
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