Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, June 26, 2025 09:42
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Wednesday, June 25, 2025 8:25 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump’s big, beautiful bill has a price paid in blood

Republicans are proposing huge cuts to Medicaid. The impact on Americans’ health would be devastating.

By Dylan Scott | Jun 25, 2025, 6:30 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/health/417639/trump-medicaid-health-insurance-big-
beautiful-bill

While public attention has largely been focused on the Middle East and on President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, Republicans in Congress are on the verge of passing massive Medicaid cuts as part of a budget bill that could lead to millions of Americans losing their health insurance benefits and, according to one recent estimate, thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.

While the GOP’s so-called “big, beautiful” bill is a smorgasbord of policy — potentially including everything from blocking AI regulation to restricting the power of the federal courts — perhaps the most consequential changes would be to Medicaid. The program, which covers low-income Americans of all ages, is now the country’s single largest insurer, covering more than 70 million people. The legislation approved by House Republicans, which is now being debated and amended by the Senate, would cut Medicaid spending by $793 billion over 10 years. The upshot is that 10.3 million fewer people would be enrolled in the program by 2034.

Those coverage losses would more than undo the progress the US has made in reducing the ranks of the uninsured over the past few years. On Tuesday, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the number of US adults without insurance in 2024 had fallen to 27.2 million, down from 31.6 million in 2020. The GOP bill would reverse those gains and then some within a decade.

The consequences would be much more severe than the mere loss of a government health insurance card. According to one analysis of the House bill published last week in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a trio of Harvard-affiliated researchers, those losses of Medicaid coverage would lead to fewer Americans reporting good health, fewer patients getting preventive health screenings, and, at the end of the day, between 8,200 and 24,600 additional annual deaths.

Senate Republicans are not going to adopt the House bill exactly as it is, which means any estimates of its effects are preliminary. But it appears likely GOP senators will keep at least two impactful provisions: new work requirements for many of the people on Medicaid and limits on the financing tools that the states can use to access more federal Medicaid funding. The Harvard study broke out the estimated effects by provision and the results are still foreboding: between 3,000 and 9,000 annual deaths attributable to Medicaid work requirements, and between 4,200 and 12,600 deaths if state provider taxes were completely eliminated.

Even short of the worst-case scenario, Americans’ health would be worse off under the Republican bill, according to researchers Adam Gaffney, David Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler. The number of Americans who have a personal doctor would drop by 700,000 under Medicaid work requirements; 285,000 fewer people would ever get their blood cholesterol checked, and 235,000 fewer patients would ever have their blood sugar tested. The number of women getting a recommended mammogram within the past 12 months would drop by nearly 139,000. And an additional 385,000 people would have to borrow money or skip paying other bills to afford their medical care. The people affected are low-income and disproportionately Black and Hispanic.

There is plenty of uncertainty in these projections. It is also hard to be sure how these policies would interact with each other: The Harvard researchers noted in their cumulative estimate of the House bill’s effects that there would likely be some overlap in the policies’ projected effects when combined together. Some of the people who lose their Medicaid coverage would be able to get insurance by other means, offsetting the losses to a degree that can be difficult to predict.

But the takeaway from the analysis is clear: A lot of people are going to suffer if these proposals become law.

The US is sabotaging its own health care system

The debate in the Senate has not yet concluded, and the bill could still change. Hospitals are busy on Capitol Hill, lobbying Republicans to reduce the spending cuts and warning lawmakers of the devastating consequences that the legislation would have. Some GOP senators are reportedly open to providing additional funding for rural hospitals, to relieve the impact on the facilities that would be hardest hit by the proposed Medicaid cuts.

But after Republicans narrowly failed to roll back Medicaid during Trump’s first term, they seem likely to succeed this time — a step backward from building a true universal health care system.

America’s lack of universal health care is the main reason we spend more money than any other country in the world while seeing worse outcomes. One recent JAMA analysis found that deaths that could be prevented by accessible health care increased in the United States from 2009 to 2019, while declining in most other comparable countries.

You can achieve universal health care via a variety of strategies, including the expansion of private health insurance, but the Republican bill could instead lead to more unnecessary deaths by taking existing benefits away from people, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine study.

Medicaid has actually been a rare bright spot in America’s often dysfunctional health care system. The program has its own problems — not enough doctors participate because of its low reimbursement rates, for one — but since its expansion through the Affordable Care Act in 2010, research has shown that Medicaid allowed more people to access health care, reduced their financial burden from medical services, and improved their physical and mental well-being.

Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials justify the Medicaid cuts by saying that people who can work should be required to work in order to receive government benefits. They claim nobody who deserves to be on Medicaid will lose their coverage. As one White House official put it to Politico earlier this month: “Medicaid does not belong to people who are here illegally, and it does not belong to capable and able-bodied men who refuse to work. So no one is getting cut.” (Undocumented migrants are already ineligible for federal Medicaid funding. Six states cover undocumented adults through Medicaid using the state’s own funds, and 14 cover undocumented children.)

But independent analysts say that most of the people on Medicaid are either children, elderly, disabled — or adults who are already working or caring for another person — meaning they are limited in their ability to work. Most of the projected coverage losses result from people having paperwork problems in documenting their work or proving they should be exempt from the requirements, not because people are actually ineligible under the new rules.

That aligns with the experience of Arkansas during Trump’s first term. That state tested work requirements in the real world for the first time and 18,000 people lost their health insurance in a matter of months, with no meaningful effect on their employment.

The US has made halting progress in its pursuit of a better health system. In 2010, the uninsured rate was 16 percent. Today, it’s half of that. But in the GOP’s proposed future, the problems that have left Americans so frustrated with their health care system are going to get worse.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, June 25, 2025 9:41 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I haven't worked for 5 years and I still have more money than you've ever had at any single point of your life, Ted.

Oh... and a paid for house, and a paid for car, and an entire 2 1/2 car garage full of tools. And zero debt to anybody.

Keep pretending like you did well in that sad little lonely apartment you wish your dead whore of a mother were still alive to share with you.

Me, I'm just enjoying making you dance, jump through hoops Gilligan. I find making you constantly justify your very existence, enjoyable.

Are you starting to get it? Are you beginning to understand?

Laughing in your face again Gilligan.

T

You're not laughing in anyone's face, Theodore.

I doubt you've been face to face with anyone in real life for months, loser.

Everybody you know in real life hates you just like they do online.

You have no friends. You drove them all away with your politics. And your family is all dead. All you have left is your politics, and they're dying too.

You're liable to just fade away with them soon. And nobody will even be left to remember you when you do.

The sad truth is, son... I'm the closest thing you've got to a friend. I'm one of two people in your life that show you any attention at all. The other one is Sigs. There once was a third person, but you fucked that up, didn't you?

Poor Gilligan. Here is a good example of what he is like when he is in destress. He has no good response so in his anguish he lashes out. He invents a likeness of his antagonist that makes him feel better. That makes him feel superior because his nemesis keeps showing him, he is anything but.

As his antagonist, I am enjoying watching him implode, again.

Too funny...

T

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Wednesday, June 25, 2025 9:56 AM

THG

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Looks like they've got all you faggots across the spectrum obsessing over Iran now.

Well, Trump sure is. Your neocon warmongering President just bombed them.

T

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Wednesday, June 25, 2025 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Looks like they've got all you faggots across the spectrum obsessing over Iran now.

Well, Trump sure is. Your neocon warmongering President just bombed them.

T

My "NeoCon warmongring President" just said that Isreal "doesn't know what the fuck they are doing".

Kind of like the Democratic Party that he single-handedly destroyed.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 7:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

My "NeoCon warmongring President" just said that Isreal "doesn't know what the fuck they are doing".

Kind of like the Democratic Party that he single-handedly destroyed.

Did you know that Trump was prophesied in the Bible? The Book of Revelations says War with Iran is the key to bringing Jesus back to Earth

'Biblical prophecy': Christian nationalists pushing Trump to 'usher in the End Times'

By Alex Henderson | June 25, 2025 | 09:29AM ET

Before launching his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump didn't have a lot of contact with evangelical Christian fundamentalism.

Trump was raised Presbyterian/Mainline Protestant — not evangelical — in Queens by a Scottish immigrant mother and an American father. And religion, even non-fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, wasn't a high priority for him.

In 2016, 2020 and 2024, however, white evangelicals were a key part of Trump's MAGA base. And he gets a lot of input from them, often attacking Democrats as anti-religion even though many prominent Democrats — from Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) to MSNBC's the Rev. Al Sharpton to Catholic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) — are quite religious and can quote the Bible with much more detail than Trump.

In an article published on June 25, Salon's Amanda Marcotte warns that Trump is getting a lot of input from far-right white Christian nationalists on the Middle East and explains why that is dangerous. https://www.salon.com/2025/06/25/evangelicals-push-trump-into-conflict
-with-iran/

"The wild claims made by leaders of the Christian Right have also been in the mix: that Trump is a prophet sent by God to usher in the End Times, and that attacking Iran is necessary to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ," the Philadelphia-based Marcotte explains. "It's this delusion that (Sen. Ted) Cruz was winking at, and it was likely a powerful reason Trump decided to escalate."

White evangelical Christian fundamentalists have a complex relationship with Israel. On one hand, they believe that Jews are damned to eternal hell because they don't accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah; on the other hand, they consider themselves very pro-Israel because of the role they think Israel will play in the End Times.

"Anthea Butler, a religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Salon that Cruz was referencing evangelical belief in a Biblical prophecy that war involving Israel and the larger Middle East is 'only one more step in ushering in Jesus' return," Marcotte notes. "As journalist Sarah Posner explained at Talking Points Memo, 'this movement holds that a series of prophesied events, including Jews' return to Israel and invasion by armies of foreign countries including Iran, will culminate in a bloody, victorious battle at Armageddon.'"

Marcotte continues, "As a result, the conflict between Iran and Israel has launched a frenzy within evangelical circles, as they hope the final battle is coming and they will get to witness the End Times…. Family Research Council head Tony Perkins was one of the architects of Project 2025, the far-right plan for a government takeover being implemented by Trump's administration. He's also a big believer in this Biblical prophecy and, as Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch documented, has been using his podcast to frame war with Iran as the key to bringing Jesus back to Earth."

According to Marcotte, the "pressure from Trump's evangelical base" on the Middle East "offers insight into why he is cracking."

"He almost certainly would like to leave his intervention in Iran behind," Marcotte observes. "But he can't say no to evangelicals, because he knows that he’s nothing without them."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 8:00 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

My "NeoCon warmongring President" just said that Isreal "doesn't know what the fuck they are doing".

Kind of like the Democratic Party that he single-handedly destroyed.
Did you know that Trump was prophesied in the Bible?

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 8:53 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trump said shut up about Air Force’s failure in Iran. Instead, all employees must falsely claim it was successful and that there absolutely was something valuable at the bottom of those 14 holes punched into Iran that look like water wells that didn't go deep enough to reach water.

White House to limit intelligence sharing, skip Gabbard at Senate Iran briefing

By Emily Davies, Theodoric Meyer, Dan Lamothe

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/06/25/iran-intel
ligence-sharing-gabbard/

The White House plans to limit classified intelligence sharing with Congress after leaks to the press of an early assessment undermined President Donald Trump’s claim that U.S. airstrikes obliterated Iranian nuclear facilities, a senior Trump administration official said, setting the stage for a contentious classified briefing before senators Thursday.

Amid a political battle over what the intelligence shows, the White House is expected to send four of its top national security officials to brief lawmakers: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, administration officials said.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, will be notably absent.

“Ratcliffe will represent the intelligence community,” the senior Trump administration official said of Gabbard’s absence, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans not yet made public. “The media is turning this into something it’s not.”

Trump has called Gabbard’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear program “wrong” and largely sidelined her in navigating the United States’ role in the war between Iran and Israel, current and former U.S. officials and people close to the White House told The Washington Post. White House officials have insisted that she is doing critical work.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) on Wednesday called on the White House to “immediately undo” its decision to limit classified information sharing.

“The administration has no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad.”

Axios first reported the White House plans to limit classified information sharing.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/25/iran-bombing-intelligence-trump-congr
ess

The initial U.S. intelligence assessment, first reported by CNN, found that the airstrikes ordered by Trump against Iran’s nuclear facilities set back Tehran’s program by months but did not eliminate it. Trump and White House officials have since adamantly pushed back against the assessment and maintained that the B-2 bombers and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles fully destroyed the sites.

Ratcliffe, however, released a statement Wednesday saying the airstrikes had “severely damaged” the nuclear program — previewing a refined White House posture that the administration might offer senators Thursday.

Nonpartisan military officers, including Caine, have been more restrained in their assessments so far, describing significant damage but stopping short of saying the facility was “obliterated.” Caine, speaking Sunday, said that final battle-damage assessments will take time to develop but that initial reviews indicated “extremely severe damage and destruction.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) echoed Ratcliffe’s assessment Wednesday. “There’s no doubt that Iran’s nuclear program was severely set back,” Thune said on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”

The Trump administration’s tour to convince lawmakers and Americans of the mission’s success will include a Thursday morning stop at the Pentagon, where Hegseth and unnamed “Military Representatives” will hold a “Major News Conference” to “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots,” Trump announced on Truth Social on Wednesday.

“These Patriots were very upset!” Trump said, without offering any evidence.

The president erroneously said that pilots had endured “36 hours of dangerously flying through Enemy Territory” — conflating the length of the entire round trip, including over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, with time over target — and lambasted media reports about the initial intelligence assessment.

Democrats on the Hill have been sharply critical of the Trump administration for failing to brief lawmakers on Iran — with multiple members pointing to the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of military action and provide a classified briefing. Trump on Monday sent a memo to lawmakers saying that the U.S. military had carried out the strikes under his constitutional authority to “protect the United States citizens both at home and abroad as well as in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests.”

The classified briefings for Senate and House lawmakers were initially scheduled for Tuesday. They were postponed to Thursday for the Senate and Friday for the House as Trump worked to negotiate a ceasefire and to accommodate travel schedules, the senior Trump administration official said. Hegseth and Rubio spent Wednesday at The Hague with Trump.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 9:33 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 9:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Trump’s reckless bluster about his “spectacular military success” in Iran has just been thoroughly debunked. A classified defense report has surfaced, indicating that the US targeted bombing campaign barely made a dent in Iran’s nuclear program.

https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/trump-iran-2672439415/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, June 26, 2025 9:42 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
Trump’s

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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