Biden orders agencies to look at hospital consolidation, costs of drugs and hearing aids

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Order supports Trump mandate on price transparency

The wide-ranging executive order President Joe Biden signed Friday includes plans to boost market competition in health care and other industries.

The order, which White House officials have promoted throughout the week, touches on issues ranging from prescription drug prices to hospital and insurance consolidation, in a combination of policy directives that also incorporates priorities shared with the Trump administration.

“What we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back. We see it in big agriculture and big tech and big pharma and the list goes on,” Biden said before signing the executive order at the White House Friday. Continue reading.

Ex-Trump campaign aide pleads guilty in disturbing child pornography case — fantasized online about killing babies

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A former Donald Trump campaign aide faces 12 years or more in prison after pleading guilty to a child pornography charge in a case as luridly disturbing as any QAnon conspiracy theory.

Ruben Verastigui admitted possession of 152 videos and 50 images of child pornography and to receiving and distributing sexual depictions of children as part of a plea agreement in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., reported Politico.

Prosecutors said the 27-year-old Verastigui, who had been president of the Northwest Vista College Students for Life before going to work on Republican campaigns, sought out images of the rape of infants during an online chat last year and fantasized online about killing children and babies while abusing them. Continue reading.

Trump’s Oval Office was nicknamed ‘the Star Wars bar’ because so many bizarre characters would hang out there, Wolff says

White House staffers got so used to seeing a vast retinue of unlikely figures in President Donald Trump’s Oval Office that they nicknamed it the ‘Star Wars bar,’ according to Michael Wolff, author of a new exposé on the Trump administration. 

In an interview with The Times of London published Wednesday,Wolff discussed his new book, “Landslide,” which the newspaper has been publishing excerpts of.

In the interview, Wolff claims that he travelled to meet Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort despite the unflattering portrayal of the former president in his two previous books on his time as president.  Continue reading.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy secretly assigned an aide to clean up Marjorie Taylor Greene’s messes: CNN

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According to a report from CNN’s Melanie Zanona, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) still fears publicly criticizing some of the extremist members of his caucus and, behind the scenes, has assigned a staff member to advise Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on how to dig herself out after she goes too far with her inflammatory comments.

According to CNN’s “New Day” host Brianna Keilar, “A top adviser to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was involved in a behind the scenes effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. This adviser facilitated Taylor Greene’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial from last month after which she publicly apologized for her anti-semitic remarks.”

“Here is the thing though,” the CNN host added. “That remorse didn’t stick. She invoked Nazi-era imagery again this week to mock Covid safety practices.” Continue reading.

GOP lawmakers who oppose background checks now very concerned about shootings

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Republicans continue to block efforts in Congress to pass gun control legislation.

House Republicans, nearly all of whom voted against legislation to require a background check prior to all gun purchases, are now blaming President Joe Biden and other Democratic officials for a rise in the number of shootings and homicides.

In a series of tweets from their official caucus Twitter account on Tuesday, Republicans in the House noted a recent Fox News story about an increase in the number of shootings in major cities in 2021 so far compared to the first half of last year. “Welcome to Joe Biden’s America,” they tweeted, and paraphrased Fox contributor Joe Concha: “The common thread these are all cities run by Democrat Mayors.”

Several members of the caucus shared the tweets or offered their own similar assessments. Continue reading.

Weisselberg out in Scotland: First indication that indictment affects Trump Organization operations

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Allen Weisselberg, the indicted Trump Organization executive, was removed today as a director of Donald Trump’s golf resort in Aberdeen, Scotland, public records show. The move is the first to indicate how the indictment is affecting operations of the Trump Organization.

His removal comes as Scottish lawmakers and Avaaz, a global do-gooder organization, are pushing for an “unexplained wealth” inquiry into how Trump got the money to buy and refurbish both of his money-losing Scottish golf courses.

A 2018 British law lets investigators examine company and personal financial records to determine sources of money and riches that they deem suspicious. It’s been called the McMafia law. Continue reading.

Giuliani compares defending Trump in court to defending ‘terrorists’

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Rudy Giuliani’s law license was suspended in the state of New York over his ‘professional misconduct.’

Responding to his recent suspension from practicing law in the state of New York, Rudy Giuliani on Saturday compared his work as former President Donald Trump’s lawyer to that of lawyers defending terrorists who “have killed innocent people.”

A panel of judges of the New York Supreme Court determined in June that Giuliani had violated the New York Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers by making false claims that there had been fraud in the 2020 presidential election win by Joe Biden and that “false statements made by respondent constitute uncontroverted proof of respondent’s professional misconduct.”

In its decision, the panel pointed out, “Respondent repeatedly represented to the court that his client, the plaintiff, was pursuing a fraud claim, when indisputably it was not. … Respondent’s mischaracterization of the case was not simply a passing mistake or inadvertent reference. Fraud was the crown of his personal argument before the court that day.” Continue reading.

Here’s how extremism not only goes unpunished in today’s GOP — it is encouraged

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Joe Scarborough, the Never Trump conservative and former Republican congressman who co-hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC with his liberal wife, Mika Brzezinski — and who rooted for now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election — recently described his former party as consisting of ultra-conservative politicians like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and QAnon extremists who think Cheney is too far to the left. Journalist Molly Jong-Fast, in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast on July 8, discusses extremism with the 2021 GOP and argues that extremism is difficult to resist among modern Republicans.

“This is the Republican brand now: death before decency,” Jong-Fast writes. “What Roy’s colleague Paul Gosar learned from Trumpism is that working with terrifying far-right extremists is totally cool. Gosar is now even more far-right than Steve King, who was censured for his white nationalist statements back when Republicans at least pretended to give a shit. Now, Gosar is being praised by White nationalist Nick Fuentes — and minority ‘Leader’ Kevin McCarthy is fine with that, just like he’s fine with Marjorie Taylor Greene raving about the Jews and Matt Gaetz (R-Sex Creep) staying on the House Ethics Committee so that he could question the head of the FBI while continuing to be investigated by the FBI.”

Jong-Fast continues, “Meanwhile, Stop the Steal speaker Mo Brooks is now running for Senate in Alabama. Brooks, who was a planner of the January 6 rally, according to a deleted video from Ali Alexander, claims in a new civil filing that he only spoke at the rally-turned-riot because the White House told him to. That was in the same legal filing in which he said he believes that Trump still won the election. Trump did not.” Continue reading.

In the Know: July 12, 2021

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Governor Tim Walz
Walz, Flanagan Announce Statewide School Tour To ‘Celebrate Historic Investments In Education,’ CBS Minnesota

Minnesota Legislature
New Minnesota law requires sprinklers in public high-rise apartments by 2033, Star Tribune
Minnesota legislators made these last-minute additions to the state budget, Star Tribune

Minnesota News
Minnesota phasing out most state-run mass vaccination sites, KARE 11
Air quality warning issued for Northeastern Minnesota, Duluth News Tribune
With thousands of Minnesota tenants behind on rent, a new state law sets the rules for assistance, Star Tribune

Continue reading “In the Know: July 12, 2021”

Nullification is the true threat to voting rights in America

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As Republican lawmakers continue their efforts to prevent voting expansion across the United States, it appears there are bigger issues than just voter suppression. In a piece published by The Bulwark, the author Linda Chavez explained how and why the bigger problem actually centers on nullification. 

“The biggest threat to democracy now is less that voting laws are too restrictive than it is that votes, once lawfully cast, are counted and the results accepted by losers as well as winners,” she wrote.

Expressing concern about Republican efforts to reconstruct the Voting Rights Act (VRA) she touched on how dangerous their efforts are to democracy. “Instead of trying to re-write the VRA to overturn court decisions that were anything but radical, democracy advocates should concentrate on limiting the power of partisan losers to overturn the will of the people.” Continue reading.