This video explains what everyone on the real left already knew instead of forgetting the trans / woke culture wars and moving right, the center left keeps demanding which is simply code speak for leaning right. While all the same democratic strategists since the Bill Clinton days demand candidates move to the right to “triangulate” to capture republican voters these polls show what we already knew. The culture wars are losing for the republicans. After republicans spent nearly 3 million dollars in ads against trans people the polls showed almost no one felt those adverts influenced their vote. Even as red states rail against higher education, acceptance, and tolerance of people who are different it is losing them votes. Some thing the Christian nationalists who are in the height of their influence now in political circles don’t understand is that people who grew up with LGBTQ+ classmates, friends, and even dated some do not find them the evil that these hate religions preach they are.
*** Personal note. I explained to Ali in an email that I am not functioning. For what ever reason wheither it be anemia or something worse I am desperately tired from the time I manage to get up. I often get up only to a few hours later go back to bed for four or more hours. I have started taking vitamin B-12 and a woman’s one-a-day vitamin. That with more red meat which was recommended to me in the past every time I go into anemia. How ever I get up, I have coffee and stuff with Ron then I need to go back to bed for normally 4 hours, get up and do dishes while watching The Majority Report. How ever some days like yesterday I did not even get that far, going to back to bed by 2 pm only to have Ron wake me and beg me to eat.
I have done better today only going back to bed for 3 hours later in the morning. I wanted to go to bed two hours ago, but Ron was all upset he couldn’t sleep due to the neighbors having new skirting put around their home outside our bedroom. So I got him in his recliner and moved his CPAP out to his chair. Still he was not tracking. Good news as I was falling asleep at my desk he woke up and is fixing supper. At this point I am so tired I don’t really care whether I eat or not.
I tried to reply to comments, but I couldn’t. I even started to move old saved open tabs out by making a new cartoon / memes post but I simply couldn’t do it. Right now the best I can do to function is make doctors appointments and watch videos that don’t take too much thought to understand. That means most political videos are outside my ability. I am sorry but right now I am functioning at the level of a confused grandpa. Sorry. I hope to get better soon. Ron says if I don’t clear up by next week we will demand the primary care see me and deal with it. I’m not sure if I want that as my last visit he was insisting I think about getting a colonoscopy. Anyway. This is a good video and one I watched several hours ago when I was much sharper than I feel now. *** Hugs
Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Canadian emergency room physician who has been volunteering in Palestine joins the program from Gaza for a harrowing interview. If you can, please support Dr. Loubani’s Glia Project, a medical solidarity organization that empowers low-resource communities to build sustainable, locally-drive healthcare project.
The problem is the money AIPAC uses to either entrap politicians and these podcasters / influencers or uses its money to threaten and punish them. Hugs
Remember a couple of things as you read this below. First there is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+ and the feelings associated with those letters. Second most children are desperate to fit in to the majority, to be “normal”. The country was well on the way to reassuring these kids / adults that those feelings were normal and OK. That the child was not damaged not an abomination to god, and did not need to be fixed. Then the right wing religious hate machine managed to pass don’t say gay laws, bathroom bills, and “lets make those who are not straight or cis be attacked outcasts again” laws.
There are two errors not really mentioned here. Minors who are going to these “religious anti-LGBTQ+ be straight cis only” therapest / religious leaders are normally forced there by parents who have been convinced by religious leaders in their church that their child is damaged and needs to be fixed as they are sinning just for feeling as they do and so will be going to hell. (Side note Jesus never said anything like that. I remember being told that I was “acting gay / doing gay things” because I liked sinning. To which I replied, You have it backwards. I was born gay and I like doing / being gay and so I don’t care that it is sinning to you.) The child is often told this to the point where even if they don’t fully hate themselves they are willing to do anything their parents want to “be normal” or get their parents off their backsides about it. And often the child is threatened with being thrown out of the home if they don’t go to conversion therapy. And then the religious therapist reinforces the message that they are damaged, broken, that they cannot be as they are but must be fixed, must be healed of the sin / feelings. Every major medical association has reviewed and studied conversion therapy and they conclude it is harmful, has no basis in science and those kids who go through it are far more likely to try to end their lives so they recommend helping young people to accept themselves and their feelings except for the minor one started by a religious group that has rejected all the studies and findings for the religious belief that god wouldn’t create anyone that way and because we are not that so those people / kids that feel that way must be forced to change to make them and their god happy.
There are facts, and then there are religious beliefs that disregard those facts. The fact is that the data and medical studies show that helping non-straight non-cis children accept that they are normal also shows that gender afirming care is the most beneficial way to help young people who are LGBTQ+ and struggling with the idea of wanting to be “normal” or like the other students are. I did not want to be gay as a kid growing up. I knew my attraction perhaps sooner than most kids due to my childhood situation. But all the time growing up I heard about how bad and horrible people who had the feelings I did were and how doing what I was being forced to do made me the worst possible human. I was attacked at school even though I was not out but some thought I was different and that was enough. When I had to join the church to get to leave my abusive home to get to safety I heard constantly how bad / sinfull / an abomination I and people like me were to god who wanted mankind to wipe me out… wait why does god need mankind to do that, especially white Christian men to do that, can’t he just stop making gay people with out a demon in them?
At my church school a lot of the boys were flirting with same sex attractions as they were horny teen boys separated from girls. Similar to the situation I found in the military where I had a group of “straight” guys asking me to go on passes with them. And it was very fun, but they always claimed not to be able to remember what happened on those trips. But each of those kids and some of those adults I had consensual fun with blamed themselves for failing god and failing to be normal. I had one really cute fun guy who I would go on passes with who couldn’t wait to get into the hotel room to have sex. And it was not just one way either. He received as he gave and what he enjoyed he returned if you catch my trying not to be too explicit. But that was the same with all the guys, they were not hung up on straight norms while in a hotel room with me. But this one guy would always on the way back to base tell me we couldn’t do that again. It was wrong. It was something we shouldn’t do. I did not argue. But 3 weeks or a month later he was begging me to go on a four day pass with him.
My point was this guy was 18 / 19 like me. I had already long accepted who I was and how I felt. He had taken the be normal message to heart. He could have used therapy to accept his feelings and needs. But the one thing he did not need and would have been harmful was conversion therapy. That guy was with me in Germany, after a wonderful weekend he again said we couldn’t do that again, He got married and it lasted a year, then he got divorced. I lost touch with him. But lives were harmed because he just couldn’t face he was gay, couldn’t tell his religious parents he was gay, and would have been placed in conversion therapy if his parents had known as a teen he struggled with same sex attraction and was not straight. Hugs
The Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a major win for the free speech rights of counselors and therapists, ruling in an 8-1 decision that a Colorado law prohibiting licensed counselors from engaging in talk therapy to help a person “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies]” unconstitutionally violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
FRC President Tony Perkins called the decision “A Supreme Court win for free speech and biological reality.”
“I’m encouraged to see the muzzle removed from therapists seeking to help willing patients come to terms with, and be at peace with, how God created them,” reflected Perkins in a statement to The Washington Stand.
“The Left is using the levers of government to block families and individuals seeking help. Under Colorado law, a girl could legally seek a therapist’s help to change her gender but could not seek help from that same therapist to align her identity with her biological sex. Where is the fairness or logic in that? I commend the court for striking down this deeply invasive and unjust law.”
Read the full article. In 2013, Exodus International – then the nation’s largest ex-gay group – disbanded. Its longtime president Alan Chambers declared that not one of his group’s thousands of victims had ever become heterosexual.
Conversion therapy is discredited junk science that inflicts harm on LGBTQ youth.The Supreme Court’s decision is disappointing and puts vulnerable kids at risk.
Medicaid cuts threaten hundreds of hospitals, new report finds
Together, the hospitals provide care for nearly 7 million patients across the U.S., according to the analysis.
Across the country, hospitals have already warned they may need to lay off staff members or scale back care, including maternity and mental health care, because of Medicaid cuts.Image Source / Getty Images
More than 400 hospitals across the United States are at high risk of closing or cutting services because of the Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” according to an analysis from the progressive watchdog group Public Citizen.
The fallout could make it harder for millions of people to get care and put thousands of health care workers’ jobs at risk as hospitals lose a key source of federal funding. Medicaid covers about a fifth of all hospital spending.
The Medicaid cuts come in phases, with more significant changes, including work requirements, in 2027 and limits on how states raise funds in 2028. Overall, the law is expected to reduce federal Medicaid funding by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade.
“We’re seeing hospitals that are already under severe financial strain having to make decisions about how to stay financially solvent,” said Eileen O’Grady, a researcher in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division and the report’s author. “That has pretty clear implications for people who live in that community. It also has ripple effects on other hospitals in those communities.”
The analysis draws on hospital financial data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2022 through 2024, covering about 95% of U.S. hospitals. The group defined at-risk hospitals as those in which Medicaid and other low-income government programs made up at least 20% of revenue and that have been operating at a loss in recent years.
The report doesn’t estimate when hospitals could close or cut services.
“Closure is the worst-case scenario, but it also doesn’t preclude hospitals from having to make really tough decisions about cutting services that might be essential to those communities but are just no longer financially viable,” O’Grady said.
Across the country, hospitals have already made statements warning they may need to lay off staff or scale back care, including maternity and mental health care, because of the Medicaid cuts.
For many patients, hospitals are the last place to turn when there are few or no other options for care.
“When hospitals close, patients have less access to the care that they need,” said Gideon Lukens, director of research and data analysis on the health policy team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “They have to travel further or wait longer in other hospitals that become overcrowded. That additional time can be the difference between success and failure of time-sensitive, potentially life-saving treatments.”
The closures also add strain to the hospitals that take on the extra patients. O’Grady said doctors end up having “less patience, less time, less capacity to provide the highest quality care.”
“It can be very dangerous for hospitals to be under this kind of strain,” she said.
The analysis found a total of 446 at-risk hospitals, with at least one at-risk hospital in 44 states and Washington, D.C.
About 60% of the at-risk hospitals — 267 facilities — are in urban areas, even as much of the debate around Medicaid cuts has focused on rural hospitals. Black and Latino people stand to be the most affected by the cuts.
The hospitals span both Democratic and Republican-led states, though the states with the largest number of at-risk hospitals are California, New York, Illinois and Washington.
Republicans also represent several congressional districts with the highest number of at-risk hospitals. House Republicans who voted for the Medicaid cuts have 196 at-risk hospitals in their districts, while Senate Republicans — all of whom back the cuts — represent 146 at-risk hospitals in their states, according to the analysis.
The cuts could lead to a worsening crisis, especially for rural hospitals, said Zachary Levinson, the project director of the KFF Project on Hospital Costs.
He said that by his estimates, Trump’s law sets aside $50 billion to support rural communities, but could reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by far more — about $137 billion over a decade.
James Jackson, the CEO of Alameda Health System in Oakland, California, said the Medicaid cuts represent an “existential threat.”
Alameda Health System, which gets 60% of its revenue from Medicaid payments, announced in December that it would lay off nearly 300 employees and lose more than $100 million annually by 2030. (The health network was not included on Public Citizen’s at-risk list, though the report notes its financial troubles.)
The layoffs, set to take effect in March, have since been delayed.
Proposed cuts included mental health services, care for patients with chronic conditions and an ambulatory plastic surgery program. Jackson said closing hospitals is not on the table, but the system has continued to look at scaling back services.
“I don’t think the impact is going to be a positive one,” he said. “We are often the provider of last recourse, so if we’re not able to provide a service, there will be a delay in receiving care at one of the other systems in the area or they may not provide it at all.”
Trinity Health, a Michigan-based hospital system with facilities in other states, said it’s projected to lose $1.5 billion due to “recent and future government policy changes.”
In January, it said it was laying off 10.5% of its billing staff. One of its hospitals, St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital in rural northeast Georgia, announced last October it was closing its maternity unit.
In a statement, a Trinity Health spokesperson shared a previous statement that said in part that “more reductions” are being considered by the federal government and it’s “not possible to simply absorb such a significant financial impact without making thoughtful, forward-thinking changes.”
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. is a health and medical reporter for NBC News. He covers the Food and Drug Administration, with a special focus on Covid vaccines, prescription drug pricing and health care. He previously covered the biotech and pharmaceutical industry with CNBC.
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