You may want to see what some of your fellow Americans are telling our FTC and DOJ about how they want stronger antitrust enforcement. First off: in 2010, our FTC received 32 comments about antitrust enforcement rules; so far they've received over 100 times that amount! Second, a lot of these folks really know their stuff, and a lot of them have suffered serious abuse from their monopolist employers; after reading them, you will not be able to tolerate some corporate lobbyist telling you that most public comments come from people who don't know what they're talking about and only corporations really know what's going on.
From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted!" file: a whistleblower informs us that privatized Medicare plans are stealing millions of dollars from Medicare (and therefore the taxpayer, i.e., you and I). You may not read anything that surprises you -- OK, the woman who got diagnosed with prostate cancer might surprise you -- but the "aggressive medical record coding" will likely strike you as a euphemism for "inventing diseases so one can overbill for treatment." Remember that if Republicans take control of Congress, they'll refuse to fund going after Medicare fraudsters because "we can't afford it," just like they did last time. Law and order!
Should I have anticipated that a propagandist would one day slap the word FAKE over real video footage of dead war victims, as Russia has done in its war on Ukraine? Maybe, but if I'd put a detail like that in a short story back in the day, my creative writing professor would have rapped my knuckles. If I'd put in details about TV talking heads describing the dead bodies as "actors" or people Ukrainians supposedly killed after the Russians left to make the Russians look bad -- or about the whole "fact-checking" organ that just regurgitates state propaganda -- he'd still have rapped my knuckles, though he might have at least applauded all the effort I put in. The way things are now, I wouldn't even write satire about any of that.
David W. Moore at FAIR advises us not to trust polls on Florida's notorious "Don't Say Gay" law, mainly because pollsters tend to give folks incomplete information about the law when they ask them about it, rather than simply asking them about it. They give really incomplete information about the law, too -- how many Americans would support it if they knew it actually restricted instruction about sex through 12th grade and forced school counselors to rat on kids who tell them they're gay to their parents? I suspect folks don't actually approve of those things regardless of how they feel about gay and trans students.
Ho hum, TV ad claims that illegal ballot harvesting delivered both of Georgia's U.S. Senate seats to Democrats in 2020 -- as a way of attacking incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp, whom they see as inadequate to the task of fighting "voter fraud." Even the notorious True the Vote, which lodged the ballot harvesting complaint to which the ad refers, would not say the ballots harvested were themselves fraudulent, but of course that's only because saying so absent evidence would invite a lawsuit they'd almost certainly lose. Still, that doesn't prevent the masturbatory rage machine from churning onward, which I think is the whole point anyway.
Finally, people will give you a lot of reasons Donald Trump endorsed J.D. Vance for the Republican nomination in the Ohio Senate race, but let me be the one to say: don't believe any of it! Donald Trump latched on to J.D. Vance because Mr. Vance was starting to gain ground on Josh Mandel in polls, and with the primary less than three weeks away, Mr. Trump didn't want to get left behind, or be seen endorsing a "loser." I especially don't believe that Mr. Trump was "soured" by the Josh Mandel/Mike Gibbons chest-to-chest moment; the only thing that would have "soured" him about it, I would think, would be that it didn't come to actual blows.
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