In 2017 at the start of Trump's first term, the breakdown in Congress was:

241 Rs to 194 Ds in the House

51 Rs to 47 Ds & 2 Is (who caucused with Ds) in the Senate.

If they release the report, it's proof Gaetz made more enemies than friends while he was in Congress.

When Republicans lose, they claim they won. When Republicans win by a little, they say they won by a lot. When Democrats lose by a little, they act like they got massacred. I'm not saying Democrats don't have work to do with the working class, but my prediction is that if Republicans misread the 2024 election results and overplay their hand, they will go a long way in helping Democrats win back that segment of the populaiton.

#3 The second sentence of the Atlantic article I linked to, but cut out in the intro for the sake of brevity, reads:

"Compared with incumbent governments elsewhere in the world, Democrats' losses were modest."

TY for highlighting that fact and in greater detail.

The country is till pretty evenly divided, which is why I think if Republicans tried to go full steam ahead on Project 2025, they will be making a very big mistake:

By the way, did you know that Trump won the crucial blue wall states--Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin --by 231,000 votes? So if just 116,000 voters across those three swing states " or 0.7% of the total " had switched from Trump to Harris, it is the vice-president who would have won the electoral college ... and the presidency!

. . .In 2024, Republicans flipped the Senate and held onto the House but Trump still ended up having "limited coattails", to quote from the New York Times analysis. Of the five battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) which held Senate races in November, the Republican candidate triumphed in only one of them (David McCormick in Pennsylvania, by a narrow 16,000 votes). Democrats held on to the other four.

FTA:

"If the Democratic brand was fundamentally broken and needed to be thrown out, this election would have been a complete blowout. And it was not. It was way too close," Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of Swing Left, a Democratic organizing group, told me. Another Democrat, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, put it this way: "We lost an election. We didn't lose the country."

In some areas, the election looked like a red wave; compared with four years ago, the presidential vote swung to the right by about 10 points in some of the most populous blue states, such as New York, California, and New Jersey. But down-ballot races offer a solid case for Democratic optimism. The party label appeared to be far less of an albatross for Democratic congressional candidates than it was in strong Republican years such as 2010 and 2014. In the Senate this year, although Republicans flipped four seats, Democratic candidates prevailed in four battleground states that Kamala Harris lost to Trump. And according to the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, Democrats could have retaken the House majority with only 7,309 more votes across three congressional districts.

Bye-bye to Biden's cancer moonshot:

Steve Rattner
@steverattner.bsky.social
DOGE leaders Ramaswamy and Musk have proposed eliminating all NIH funding, which among other things supports life-saving cancer research, contributing to a 33% decline in cancer death rates over the last 30 years.

Vivek and Leon laying down some early markers:

Steve Rattner
@steverattner.bsky.social

Musk and Ramaswamy have already identified $516B dollars in government savings--it includes cutting all of Veteran's Affairs health care, eliminating the NIH, and ending funding for federal prisons.

Update:

Insurance company halts plan to put time limits on coverage for anesthesia during surgery

After sharp criticism from anesthesiologists, an insurance company is halting its plan to limit the amount time it would cover anesthesia used in surgeries and procedures. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield said on Thursday it would no longer move forward with the policy change.

"There has been significant widespread misinformation about an update to our anesthesia policy. As a result, we have decided to not proceed with this policy change," the company said in a statement. "To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines."

Last time Trump pretended to give a ---- about Americans, this time he has no such pretense.
He's just here to tear in all down.
Putin can't wait.
Posted by ClownShack

Yes, Trump isn't worried about re-election or impeachment or indictments, so he can do whatever he wants, the American people be damned.

"didn't know a preemptive pardon was possible."

Talk Of 'Preemptive' Pardons By Trump Raises Questions: What Can He Do?
December 2, 20201:27 PM ET

A presidential preemptive pardon sounds unusual, but it has been done before, most famously when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, who resigned because of the Watergate scandal in 1974 but had not been charged with any crimes.

"A preemptive pardon is a presidential pardon granted before any formal legal process has begun," American University professor Jeffrey Crouch tells NPR.

In an email, Crouch, author of The Presidential Pardon Power, says that "someone must have committed a federal offense, but as soon as that happens, the president can grant them clemency. He does not need to wait until the alleged offender is charged, stands trial, and so on."

Crouch continues: "These pardons are not common, but they do happen occasionally."

Hillary wanted to expand Medicare to people 50 and older if they wanted to buy into it, which I thought would have been a good option for many people who are getting older and have increasing health problems but aren't yet near at retirment age. Instead with got DonOLD who wanted to get rid of the ACA with no plan to replace it and only McCain stopped him. But guess what? He's b-a-c-k with the same desire and the same lack of a feasible replacment plan. Winning!

"Ignorant citizens elect ignorant leaders. It's a simple as that." George Carlin

We are about to reach the find out stage in so many ways:

"Six of the nine states with trigger laws-- Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina and Utah--went for Trump in the 2024 election."

Wait, what??? I thought the economy was booming, the markets were on fire, inflation was down and unemployment was near nonexistent. What happened?
#59 | POSTED BY LFTHNDTHRDS

Nothing new happened. It's the same old story. The rich keep gettig richer, and Trump's billionaire boys club cabinet and proposed upcoming tax cuts for the ultra wealthy aim to increase the divide between the wealthy and the rest of us. Winning!

FTA:

The company said that the standards it's using to determine how long a surgery should last are consistent with industry standards and formulas set by the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Maternity-related care and pediatric services for patients younger than 22 will be excluded from this change, as there is more variability in the time needed for surgeries and procedures for these groups, Anthem said.

But the American Society of Anesthesiologists has called for an immediate reversal of this policy, saying that Anthem has set an "arbitrary time limit" on surgeries that threatens individual patient care.

Now reporting that the words - "deny", "defend" and "depose" - were meticulously written on the recovered shell casings.
#53 | Posted by REDIAL

Delay Deny Defend
Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
by Jay M Feinman (Author)
Paperback January 1, 2010

An expose of insurance injustice and a plan for consumers and lawmakers to fight back. Now a paperback version of the hard-hitting original. The denial of valid insurance claims is not occasional or accidental or the fault of a few bad employees. It's the result of an increasing and systematic focus on maximizing profits by major companies such as Allstate and State Farm. Citing dozens of stories of victims who were unfairly denied payment, the book explains how people can be more careful when shopping for policies and what to do when pursuing a disputed claim. It also lays out a plan for the legal reforms needed to prevent future abuses.

Trump set to take funds from Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. More to follow.

Copy of document available at link:

Federal Inquiry Traced Payments From Gaetz to Women

A document prepared by federal investigators bolsters claims by women who say they were hired for sex by Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald J. Trump's choice for attorney general, who denies wrongdoing.

Federal investigators have established a web of payments among Matt Gaetz and dozens of friends and associates who are said to have taken part with him in drug-fueled sex parties, according to a document obtained by The New York Times. . . .

The document obtained by The Times was assembled by federal investigators during a sex-trafficking investigation into Mr. Gaetz, who is President-elect Donald J. Trump's choice for attorney general. It shows how Mr. Gaetz and a friend sent thousands of dollars through Venmo to dozens of people who, according to testimony that is said to have been given to federal and congressional investigators, were involved in sex parties from 2017 to 2020. . . .

Titled "VENMO TRANSACTIONS BETWEEN ALL INDIVIDUALS AS OF 09/14/20," the document uses thumbnail photos of Mr. Gaetz, dozens of women and several other men to show how payments flowed between them. Lines with arrows connect the men and the women, showing, among other things, how much Mr. Gaetz and his associates paid the women.

Okay, so I was off by a couple of weeks:

#7 I think that's right. Trump ias helping Gaetz get out of having the Ethics reports released by using the excuse he was going to be AG. After the Thanksgiving, Gaetz is likely to withdrawal his name from consideration. . . .
Posted by Gal_Tuesday at 2024-11-14

FTA:

Hospitals around the country are conserving critical intravenous fluid supplies to cope with a shortage that may last months. Some hospital administrators say they are changing how they think about IV fluid hydration altogether.

Hurricane Helene, which hit North Carolina in September, wrecked a Baxter International facility that produces 60% of the IV fluids used in the U.S., according to the American Hospital Association.

The company was forced to stop production and is rationing its products. In an update posted Nov. 7, Baxter said its North Cove facility had resumed producing some IV fluids. In an email to KFF Health News, the company wrote that customers will be able to order normal quantities of "certain IV solutions products" by the end of the year, but there is no timeline for when the North Cove facility will be back to prehurricane production levels.

Maybe Madison Cawthorn was right:

Congressman Madison Cawthorn under fire over claims of DC drugs and orgies

Asked if the Netflix hit House of Cards, about amoral Washington politicians and fixers, was anything like reality, Cawthorn said: "The only thing that isn't accurate about that show is that you could never get a piece of legislation about education passed that quickly."

The 26-year-old added: "I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70--you know, I look at all these people, a lot of them that I've looked up to through my life--I've always paid attention to politics.

"Then all of the sudden you get invited to, 'Well, hey, we're going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come.'

"I'm like 'What did you just ask me to come to?' And then you realise they are asking you to come to an ----."

The Republican also claimed: "You know, some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them do, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it's like, Wow, this is wild.'"

This morning on Morning Joe. The method behind Trump's Cabinet appointment madness:

Ed Luce: You have a dismantling of the federal government in these picks

And just a reminder, as of yesterday, this is what the popular vote count looks like:

Updated popular vote count per Cook Political Report

Trump 76,666,332 (49.93%)

Harris 74,086,596 (48.25%)

*Did MSNBC's top brass sign off . . .