Flange's Incoherent Flailing

Fox poll shows Trump approval down with rural voters

Selena Simmons-Duffin at NPR:

Advocates for people with serious illnesses, like cancer and HIV, say the strict Medicaid work rules that the Trump administration released this week are likely to put ongoing treatments in jeopardy.

States must put the work requirements into effect by January 1. That was already a tight timeline, says Adrianna McIntyre, assistant professor of health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "It takes states literally months — usually years — to make the types of changes to their systems that they needed to make for this new rule," she says. "They were severely constrained by the timeline having a year and a half from the time of the law being passed to implement all of this." At stake is health coverage for 68 million low-income Americans on Medicaid, the health insurance system jointly funded by states and the federal government. States must "make the changes, test the changes to make sure they're not going to break the system, and then go live," McIntyre says.

The nearly 400-page interim final rule released Monday makes that process even harder. For months, federal officials have been meeting with states informally and giving them guidance, and states understood that people with conditions where continuous health insurance coverage was really important would be exempt. "What the rule says, as published, is that that's actually not enough," McIntyre explains. "The condition or the disease needs to be actively interfering with your ability to work. So people with early stage cancer who are in radiation treatment but still have the capacity to work, or people who have HIV but can still technically work, are not exempted from the work requirement." McIntyre and others foresee situations where a person newly diagnosed with cancer, who is working, loses Medicaid because they don't fill out the paperwork correctly. That could lead to patients losing coverage when they need it most.

Pitched as "a path to prosperity"

Republicans have long heralded work requirements as a way to encourage personal responsibility. Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, presented the policy to reporters at the White House Tuesday. "If you're sitting at home, which is true for the millions of people who are able-bodied on Medicaid, on average, you're spending 6.1 hours watching television, or just hanging around," Oz said. "So, as a path to prosperity, Congress very wisely said, 'Let's get you back into the workforce.'"

[...]

Most on Medicaid already work 

The new requirements apply in the more than 40 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. For years, that has meant any low-income adult who does not have access to affordable insurance at work could enroll in Medicaid. Starting in January, adults in those states, from age 19 to 64 will have to periodically prove that they are either working, going to school or volunteering at least 80 hours a month. Alternatively, they will have to prove that they are exempt from the work requirement. Most adults who get Medicaid are already working, according to an analysis of government data by the health policy research organization KFF. About 1 in 5 people are not meeting the 80 hours-per-month threshold, KFF found, and this population had barriers that kept them from the workforce. Some could not find jobs; others were laid off; others had retired.

The Trump Regime’s CMS is enacting harsh Medicaid work requirements, effective 2027. Such a change will adversely effect 68M Medicaid recipients.

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Ric Grenell -- to oversee, in his words, getting rid of the artworks in the Kennedy Center ahead of the renovations. This was a directive that he gave me in his office shortly after Donald Trump made his TRUTH Social post about the closure. I was told that we, the Kennedy Center, wanted new art to replace the outgoing art for the reopening. And so what I was tasked with was contacting donors, and, in some cases, that's foreign nations that made donations to the American people by way of the Kennedy Center, and asked them to remove their work or in some cases paid to remove it if it was a statue that was installed outside that had to be dug up. Without my knowledge, the African Room, which is again one of these lounges, that was something like 30, 32 African nations came together at the time the Kennedy Center opened to gift this lounge. And inside that room were beautiful handmade tapestries from different tribes throughout the continent of Africa. There was a sculpture from Ghana that represented the collective Africans' grief at the assassination of President Kennedy. And there were ornate hand-carved wooden doors carved from 700-year-old wood that contained scenes of Yoruban village life. That room is now completely gutted and emptied. I was not told where those items went.

“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.

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A coalition of seven blue states sued the Trump administration Tuesday after it paid a French company nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money to not build offshore wind farms.

The lawsuit, led by New York attorney general Letitia James, argued that the deal struck between TotalEnergies and the Trump administration earlier this year deprived their states of much-needed power, and could raise electricity costs in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions.

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted a message on X on Tuesday declaring that "homosexuality has no place in America" before deleting it amid criticism from Democrats, LGBTQ+ advocates, and fellow members of the GOP. The Republican congressman published the message on Tuesday, the second day of Pride Month, adding, "Happy Nuclear Family Month." The post referred to a nonbinding resolution signed by Gov. Bill Lee in April that defines a nuclear family as "one husband, one wife" and their children. The backlash was immediate. Ogles later deleted the post and blamed a staff member, saying in a statement that he was working on his farm when his phone "began going crazy" over a post that he claimed was made by a member of his communications team. "The post was stupid, hurtful and a complete distraction from my America First focus," Ogles wrote, adding that the employee had been reprimanded.

[...] Rep. Mike Lawler, a New York Republican, called the statement "absolutely idiotic," writing that Ogles has family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and constituents who are gay and lesbian. Homosexuality exists. In America,” Lawler wrote. “It doesn't make them less than or somehow unworthy of being an American.” Another Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, also distanced himself from Ogles' message. Speaking to TMZ on Capitol Hill, Cruz said that "for all of recorded history, homosexuals have been part of humanity" and added that "the behavior of consenting adults is their business."

Like 85% of tumblr users hate and loathe embarrassment based comedy with every fiber of their beings, but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure their audience that the embarrassing scenes are skippable.

Lots of people dislike tragedy but never in my life have I ever seen an author reassure the audience that the death and grieving scenes are skippable.

Stop trying to pass off self-censorship as “accommodation.” Stop trying to pass off pandering as “inclusivity.”