Ideological bumper stickers are for fundraising, not life

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported the Big Brutal Bill has passed the Senate. Three Republican senators voted no so the vice nasty broke the tie in favor of passage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska seemed to be heading towards no, but the Republican leadership gave her a deal that the Medicaid cuts won’t hit Alaska and threw in some other goodies so she voted yes. How sweet that Alaska is protected from a bill that screws over all the other states. How annoying that Murkowski doesn’t care about all the other states. And then said she hoped the House would correct some of the bill’s problems. The bill goes back to the House because the Senate made changes to what the House passed. One of those changes was deeper Medicaid cuts. Already some of the Freedom Caucus members are saying the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid and the social safety net enough. They don’t like how the bill will balloon the national debt and they certainly aren’t going to give up on tax cuts to the wealthy. Singer reported the vice nasty wrote on X:

The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem. And therefore it must pass. Everything else—the [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

Yeah, he wrote that throwing millions of people off Medicaid is “immaterial” and just “minutiae.” Singer rebuts the opening lie: Immigrants lower budget deficits by about $100 billion a year because undocumented workers pay taxes but can’t receive benefits. Then Singer quoted several Democrats who say the loss of Medicaid is not “minutiae.” Merlin196360 of the Kos community used a term I like: “MAGAcaid.” They started their post with a tweet from digby:

One more time, folks. This isn't a Trump thing. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”--Vice President Dick Cheney "They'll get over it." - Mitch McConnell This is all performative nonsense meant to secure tax cuts and keep working America poor, sick and desperate. It's their raison de'etre.

Merlin196360 added:

While some element of fear of Trump supporters may have played a role in MAGAcaid, what’s really going on is that the current GOP is filled with people who simply hate to pay taxes for the social safety net. Full stop. The legacy media still talks about — cough, cough — “moderates” in Congress, but I’m with Catherine Rampell of now MSNBC: GOP moderates on the Hill are like Bigfoot sightings. There is no proof they exist.

Republicans say they vote for the bill because they fear the nasty guy. But what this post says, and what I’ve concluded, is Republicans, nearly all of them, want the Medicaid cuts because they hate paying taxes so that other people get “free stuff.” I don’t know the origins of the various pieces of this gigantic bill. I know the nasty guy campaigned on extending the big tax cuts that favor the wealthy. Did he also say the cuts should be “paid for” by cutting Medicaid? Or did that cruel mess come from Congressional Republican leadership? Oliver Willis of Kos reported that Elon Musk decried the bill the Senate passed because it isn’t cruel enough, it doesn’t cut the social safety net enough. When one hast $400 billion (didn’t Musk lose about half that over the last half-year?) why does the cost of Medicaid matter so much to him? Why does he demand to make the lives of poor people even worse? From what I’ve figured out he doesn’t value his life for who he is or for the huge amount of money he has. He values the difference between what he has and what the lowest people have. The further he beats them down the better he thinks he looks. Musk’s comments did not please the nasty guy, so their “feud” is back on. The nasty guy is talking about having DOGE examine Musk’s billions in government contracts. He also mentioned perhaps deporting Musk, sending him back to South Africa. That is one worth sending back. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a few good quotes. A tweet from Greg Sargent commented on the vice nasty’s quote above:

What JD Vance is really doing here is telling MAGA voters who are set to lose health coverage due to Medicaid cuts not to think too much about that eventuality. It'll all be worth it once they get to see lots more migrants detained and frog-marched on to deportation planes.

Jilll Lawrence of The Bulwark talked about transgender kids:

Studies do not support the idea that peer pressure leads to “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among susceptible teens or young adults (the “social contagion” effect). In addition, research shows that the prevalence of regret among people who transition is “extremely low.” And intriguing recent research points to possible factors in brain anatomy that correlate with identifying as transgender—which suggests it is wrong to describe transgender identity as a “subjective preference,” as the Ohio attorney general did in 2023. So let’s be clear: Trump’s “two-genders-only” is not science, it’s an ideological bumper sticker. Fundraising pitches are just that simple, but life is not. Here’s what the American Medical Association told governors in 2021: “Empirical evidence has demonstrated that trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

G Elliott Morris tweeted a graph about Medicaid. Before I got to that I thought to check what the government spends on Medicaid. The number isn’t straightforward because Medicaid is open-ended. The federal program pays a particular percent of whatever the state Medicaid programs incur under the rules of the time. At least that’s what I came up with while scanning a Medicaid financing document put out by Congress. The closest I came up with for a dollar amount was from Figure 2: All personal health care in 2023 was $4.1 trillion. Medicaid paid 18.8% of that total or $771 billion. Figure 3 says that for 2023 federal spending was $614 billion and state programs paid $280 billion. However, news organizations have been saying there would be $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid. I didn’t flunk arithmetic all those decades ago and I’m pretty sure $771 billion is less than $800 billion. Then I see, as in this article from CBS News, there is a missing phrase (at least in my memory): “over a decade.” So $80 billion a year (or $93 billion a year in the Senate version). That makes more sense. Which means (a guess here) that for 2026 the cut is about 10%. So back to that graph that Morris tweeted. It divided up the Medicaid recipients in 2022 into groups. 37% were children and 9% were 65 and over. That meant 54% were working age. Out of that 54%, 48% (or 26% of the total) worked that year. 7% worked the next year 27% were disabled. 12% would soon leave Medicaid. And only 6% (or 3% of the total) were not working. From the way Republicans say it (and I quite possible have mixed this up) they want to get that 3% working so they institute work requirements and figure Medicaid expenses will go down by 10%. Yeah, my math isn’t mathing. In the comments are several good cartoons and memes. One by Kevin Kallaugher shows a globe with dynamite attached that is labeled “US Gov’t, Int’l Relations, Int’l Trade, The Environment, ETC.” The nasty guy is about to set off the dynamite. Behind him is this discussion:

Lady Liberty: “Are you going to watch and do nothing?!” Elephant: “NO!! I’m going to close my eyes and do nothing!”

Art Garfunky posted a cartoon of a cop holding up a skin color chart beside a stopped driver. The pale colors on top are labeled “Ignore” while the darker shades are labeled “Yank out of car.” Garfunky added:

There are almost a million people residing here illegally from Europe, Canada, and Australia, but you don’t see footage of ICE hassling them.

In a cartoon Lalo Alcaraz has a better name for the new detention center in Florida I wrote about yesterday. He calls it “Alligator Auschwitz.” exlrrp posted a tweet from the Florida GOP. They are indeed selling “Alligator Alcatraz” shirts and other merch. paulpro posted a meme that starts with a tweet from Adam Kinzinger, “Imagine being a grown man waiting for Donald Trump to tell you what to do. Lol. Super beta.” paulpro replied to that with a cartoon by Clay Bennett showing a man in his hands and knees wearing a GOP shirt and red hat with a dog collar around his neck and holding a leash in his mouth looking up at a guy in a dark suit and red tie. In another tweet paulpro quoted a tweet by The Serfs: “If it took 8 days to build a massive concentration camp in Florida then it means they could build and house the homeless at any point but choose not to.” Then paulpro quoted chris.writes.books:

Elon Musk said, “Homelessness is a lie.” Hear that? A billionaire thinks you’re faking your poverty. You genuinely can’t make this up. Even comic book villains are less cartoonishly evil.

Captain Frogbert responded to cartoons about abortion (which I won’t describe) first with a quote:

The conservative solution to any problem is always the proximate cause of the problem to begin with.

Then Frogbert added:

How to have fewer abortions: + Provide universal, age-appropriate sex education. + Safe and effective birth control to everyone asking for it. + Universal healthcare including pre- and post-natal care. + Ensure a living wage for all Americans. + Secure the civil rights of women. + Investigate and punish all rape severely. + Teach boys to be better men. + Do the work needed to make abortions safe, legal, and rare. How NOT to have fewer abortions, but ensure more women die: + Criminalize abortion. Conservatism is ignorant and harmful to humanity. Conservatism is not Christian.

In June, the views of this blog set a record of 48,310 views. It is quite a bit higher than any month in over a year. In the last 30 days (which doesn’t line up with June, but it is info I can get), 18 thousand views came from Brazil, 13.5 thousand from the US, 8.9 thousand from Vietnam (!), and about 1.5 thousand from both Britain and Argentina. Blogger will give me view counts from 19 countries and at the bottom of the list is Colombia with 133 views. In the last 7 days there were 7.5 thousand views from Brazil, 6.8 thousand from the US, 2.2 thousand from Vietnam, down to 38 from Russia. In overall statistics (from when Blogger started keeping stats for me in 2010) the top ten countries are the US (238 thousand), Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, France, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Vietnam, and Sweden (9.8 thousand). Brazil hit the top ten in January and is now at 6th. Vietnam didn’t have enough views for me to notice until mid May and is now at 9th. The number of views has been climbing since March 2024, when it was 2668 views. There were a few months in the year before then that had high counts, but not consistently. After 17 years of writing the world has found my blog and declared it worth reading.