Heidi Przybyla
@heidireports.bsky.social

The arc of history may bend toward justice.
But what an injustice that this took 43 years to come out, when Carter was 98 and in hospice care.

RIP, Jimmy Carter.

"Don't release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal."

"History needs to know that this happened," said Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month. "I think it's so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we've got to get it down some way."

"History needs to know that this happened," said Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month. "I think it's so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we've got to get it down some way."

A Four-Decade Secret: One Man's Story of Sabotaging Carter's Re-election
A prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda.

He was the best of us. RIP, President Carter.

Barack Obama:

For decades, you could walk into Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia on some Sunday mornings and see hundreds of tourists from around the world crammed into the pews. And standing in front of them, asking with a wink if there were any visitors that morning, would be President Jimmy Carter--preparing to teach Sunday school, just like he had done for most of his adult life.

Some who came to hear him speak were undoubtedly there because of what President Carter accomplished in his four years in the White House--the Camp David Accords he brokered that reshaped the Middle East; the work he did to diversify the federal judiciary, including nominating a pioneering women's rights activist and lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal bench; the environmental reforms he put in place, becoming one of the first leaders in the world to recognize the problem of climate change.

Others were likely there because of what President Carter accomplished in the longest, and most impactful, post-presidency in American history--monitoring more than 100 elections around the world; helping virtually eliminate Guinea worm disease, an infection that had haunted Africa for centuries; becoming the only former president to earn a Nobel Peace Prize; and building or repairing thousands of homes in more than a dozen countries with his beloved Rosalynn as part of Habitat for Humanity.

But I'm willing to bet that many people in that church on Sunday morning were there, at least in part, because of something more fundamental: President Carter's decency.

Elected in the shadow of Watergate, Jimmy Carter promised voters that he would always tell the truth. And he did--advocating for the public good, consequences be damned. He believed some things were more important than reelection--things like integrity, respect, and compassion. Because Jimmy Carter believed, as deeply as he believed anything, that we are all created in God's image.

Whenever I had a chance to spend time with President Carter, it was clear that he didn't just profess these values. He embodied them. And in doing so, he taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service. In his Nobel acceptance speech, President Carter said, "God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace." He made that choice again and again over the course of his 100 years, and the world is better for it.

Maranatha Baptist Church will be a little quieter on Sundays, but President Carter will never be far away--buried alongside Rosalynn next to a willow tree down the road, his memory calling all of us to heed our better angels. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to the Carter family, and everyone who loved and learned from this remarkable man.

Thanks for the info, TH.

Found this, which I haven't verified but sounds plausible:

The original version included $190M and what passed includes $63M in funding. So, the kids lost $127M (or about 2/3 of the funding).

"f/k U !! ...A whole.
dems are lying trash...."

It sure looks like not all the funding for pediatric cancer research was restored:

Chris Hayes
@chrislhayes.bsky.social

Big update! There were 5 separate bills having to do with pediatric cancer in the original CR. All got stripped out. BUT--the provision reauthorizing NIH pediatric cancer research already passed the house earlier this year. So Senate just put it into their bill and it no will get signed!

Here's the reality. One part of the proposed funding for pediatric cancer research was restored, but not all of it:

But in the end, the Senate on Friday renewed the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, named after a 10-year-old girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor in 2013, in a unanimous vote. The bill extended $12.6 million in annual cancer research funding through 2031, allowing the National Institutes of Health to continue researching the biology of childhood cancer and structural birth defects.

But three other cancer-related measures were scrapped at the end of 118th Congress. Those include a new policy that would have made it easier for low-income children on Medicaid to cross state lines for specialized cancer treatment, and two bills aimed at incentivizing pediatric cancer drug development.

I bet someone has the Matt Gaetz version of the Hunter Biden dick pics, but fortunately for Gaetz we'll never seen a big blown up poster of them at a Congressional hearing.

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.