Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.
The insulin cap is a long-running ambition of Democrats, who want it to apply to patients on Medicare and private insurance.
Republicans left the portion that applies to Medicare patients untouched but stripped the insulin cap for other patients. Bipartisan talks on a broader insulin pricing bill faltered earlier this year.
Republicans singled out the insulin price cap—a vital, life-saving measure for which there is no rational objection—and blocked its inclusion in the bill, expressly to “deny Democrats a victory” at a cost of American lives. The ultimate expression of politics over all else.
There will be little reason for Dem voters to vote for Dems if the message of who did this to them is never mentioned on any campaign trail. And as we’re all painfully aware, Dems do not message or frame anything of value when they’re on the campaign trail.
The little girl, Alaa Qadooum, and her father were on a motorcycle passing the Palestine Towers building, on their way to buy some groceries. He was also killed, leaving his wife Rasha and three other children without a breadwinner.
Israel has imposed an economic and military siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, limiting the densely populated region’s imports and interfering with the building and repair of infrastructure. Under international law, Israel is the Occupying power in Gaza, which it seized by main force in 1967, and may not treat Gaza’s inhabitants in a brutalizing way, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Rome Statute of 2002 that underpins the International Criminal Court.
The strike on a civilian apartment building in a densely packed city was not reported on any of the US cable news channels I checked in on today. But were a retaliatory strike by some Gaza-based Palestinian group to manage to hit something in Israel, now that would be a news segment. It is one of the propaganda effects of US television news that correspondents very seldom are allowed to report on Israeli aggressive actions, so the reaction of Palestinians always comes out of the blue and looks like unprovoked barbarism.
Contrast the American reaction (yawn) to this Israeli bombing of the Palestine Towers apartment building, where civilians lived, with the outrage in this country when Russia behaves similarly in Ukraine.
[Russian] “Attacks have struck people in bread lines and on playgrounds, as well as apartment blocks, theaters and hospitals. After each one, Russia has denied or deflected responsibility, often accusing Ukraine of attacking its own people to sway domestic and global opinion against Moscow. Russia has claimed that it aims only at targets of military value — even though some were hundreds of miles from the front lines — and that whenever a civilian facility did get hit, it was one that the Ukrainian military had co-opted for use as a command post, a shelter for foreign fighters or storage for weapons.”
So Russia sounds exactly like Israel. They had to hit the apartment building because terrorists were hiding out in it, even (gasp) members of the feared 800-strong Azov Brigade.
The authors refuse to let Russia off the hook, going through one by one and examining the bombing of apartment buildings, and questioning the Russian rationale.
No paper of record in the US treats the Israelis the way the NYT treated Russia in this article, even when Israeli leaders order army snipers to shoot Palestinian civilians in Gaza for demonstrating, unarmed, near an Israeli security fence. They killed 266 protesters or medics and journalists over two years of weekly demonstrations, and wounded an unimaginable 30,000, many of them doomed to lose a leg.
Of course Israel has a right to defend itself from attack, as does everyone, though it is dreary that the US State Department stops once it has said that. But it doesn’t have the right to use force recklessly in disregard of innocent civilian life.
The Israeli propaganda machine, like that of the US far right, is very good at depicting them as beleaguered victims. Of the thousands of rockets from Gaza you’ve heard about, almost all land uselessly in the desert, though occasionally they do property damage and very occasionally hurt someone. The latter is extremely regrettable and condemnable, of course. Since the rockets have no guidance systems and are fired at civilian Israeli areas, their use is a war crime,
Proportionality matters, however, in the laws of war. Newsweek reports that “38 Israeli civilians have been killed between 2000 and 2020 by Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.”
From 2008 until May of this year, Israel killed 5,298 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the UN. B’Tselem says that from 2000 until 2007, the Israelis killed 2,997 people in Gaza.
So that is 8,295 killed by Israel to 38 civilians killed by rockets from Gaza. Admittedly, some of the 8,295 Palestinians killed in Gaza since 2000 were combatants, whose killing might be lawful. In 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, the UN said that Israel killed 2,104 Palestinians including 1,462 civilians, of whom 495 were children and 253 women. After that 2014 assault on Gaza, Israeli authorities boasted that they had killed “1,000 terrorists.” Well, they actually killed 642 combatants and the rest of the over 2,000 dead were civilians, fully one-third of them children.
That is roughly a 70% civilian death toll. If we extrapolate that out to the total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza over the past 22 years, that would yield 5,806 civilian deaths.
38 killed Israeli civilians. 5,806 killed Palestinian civilians. In two decades.
Each Israeli is worth 152 Palestinians.
And that is about the right ratio for US television news reporting on the Palestinians, who seem to be about 152 times more invisible than the Israelis. It is also just about the ratio of outrage at the squandering of innocent life.
Members of the state medical board have agreed to initiate rules that could ban physicians from providing gender-affirming care to transgender people under the age of 18, while also limiting access to care to adults.
The vote by the Board of Medicine on Friday means the Board will begin a several month process that Chairman and Winter Park physician David Diamond said would include public meetings across the state.
Board of Medicine Vice Chairman and Fort Lauderdale physician Kevin Cairns was the only Board member to oppose the rulemaking, which was sought by Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo last appeared on JMG earlier this week when he cast doubts on the efficacy of the monkeypox vaccine.
Ladapo, who has refused to disclose his own COVID vaccination status, is affiliated with the far-right anti-vax group, America’s Frontline Doctors.
Early this year the Florida Senate approved him as state surgeon general despite reports that he lied about having treated COVID patients while working at UCLA’s hospital.
During his confirmation hearing, he repeatedly refused to say if he believes that COVID vaccines are effective.
“I think this whole thing is dehumanizing to trans people.” One of the many transgender activists speaking to the Florida Board of Medicine today before they voted to initiate the rule-making process to consider restricting gender-affirming care. #transpic.twitter.com/xjNo3EN6nG
Still thinking about how @PatrickHunterMD , a pediatrician and sitting member of the Florida Board of Medicine, called transgender people a “social contagion” today.
Which came after their “expert witness” claimed that COVID isolation made young people transgender. 🙃
DeSantis replaced an elected Dem DA with an unelected GOP prosecutor because of his and his party’s culture wars on abortion and LGBTQ people https://t.co/qYyuPL4CcI
There’s also this shit. LGBT folks in Tampa now have a Federalist Society bigot as the top DA for their area. I wonder how she’ll be in interacting with LGBT folks?
I think it’s time for CA, OR, WA, HI, NY, NJ, VT, MA, CT, MD, etc. to officially declare Florida to be a “shithole country” (especially the parts immediately around Merde-A-Lardo and wherever Ron DuhSantis is at the moment) and require visas and vaccinations to travel to/from there.
This mofo DeathSentence won election by just four-tenths of one percent — just by 33,000 votes. And he governs as if he had an overwhelming popular mandate to drag Florida back into the Middle Ages.
This is one of the big differences between RepubliQans and Democrats.
Yes, and it’s a relevant one. Another big difference – they fall in line and goosestep down to vote. We have to fall in love before we even think about maybe showing up at the polls. If there’s nothing better streaming.
We have a bunch of fake Christians and far-right fascist idealogues promoting the end of personal freedom and the beginning of a theocracy for Florida. Hold onto your hats–it’s going to get very ugly there.
Scottie's Playtime 