Communion

Genuinely feels like one of the most consequential elections this cycle. I know he was a professor when I checked his TikTok the night he won the primary , but stuff like the below has made him so fascinating to me:

I know the good sis @Vermillion warned of personality obsession but that's likely the only thing to current grasp onto ddd. Kind of love progressive reps dominating social media discourse! Like, no, the R+15 moderate will NOT be adored for his personality! No one is clamoring to know what -spins wheel- Luke Bronin or -spins wheel- Sarah Trone Garriott plan to do their first day as a member of Congress! (Hasan's twink making it to Congress as an aide )

Co-Sponsor List for S.1506 - Medicare for All Act (2025-2026) + What New Senators Campaigned On. I do think the below ends up where people get into blackpilled territory when 88% of Democratic voters want M4A yet only 39% of Dem Senators do. People wouldn't expect the senator from Iowa to want it, sure, but then for senators from CT, NJ, etc. to not support it ends up being where "the influence of corporate money on politics" comes to a head. This is why progressives and liberals differ - because if the contradiction exists, by virtue of putting money over people, the only logical conclusion for the progressive is to further strain the contradiction and demand accountability and answers for why Democratic senators hate poor people and want them to die. I think a lot of the donor-*******, corporate PAC-backed figures like Neera Tanden and others going "now is not the time for progressivism!" simply don't understand why progressives hold progressive views and will ultimately have to be angry when progressives disrupt. There is no theory of politics where obtuse ideas like "growing electability" come before not letting people die. Everyone deserves a fair shot to show who they are, but if people show themselves as wanting poor people to die... well! You're then gonna be called out as wanting poor people to die! Co-Sponsor? Yes Co-Sponsor? No Bernie Sanders Ed Markey Jeff Merkley Elizabeth Warren Peter Welch Adam Schiff Chris Van Hollen Cory Booker Ron Wyden Alex Padilla Mazie Hirono Tina Smith Peggy Flanagan Tammy Baldwin Richard Blumenthal Brian Schatz Kirsten Gillibrand Sheldon Whitehouse Ben Ray Luján Martin Heinrich Juliana Stratton Abdul El-Sayed Troy Jackson Chris Murphy Lisa Blunt Rochester Andy Kim Angela Alsobrooks Dick Durbin Patty Murray Tammy Duckworth Maria Cantwell Raphael Warnock Jack Reed Tim Kaine Ruben Gallego Amy Klobuchar Chris Coons Elissa Slotkin Mark Kelly Gary Peters Chuck Schumer Jon Ossoff Michael Bennet Angus King Jeanne Shaheen Chris Pappas John Hickenlooper Mark Warner John Fetterman Catherine Cortez Masto Maggie Hassan Jacky Rosen Roy Cooper Sherrod Brown James Talarico Mary Peltola Adam Hamilton Josh Turek Annie Andrews Scott Collom

@nooniebao Interesting. Wyden is no longer a holdout on M4A.

Looking at Twitter days after a historic wave midterm election and seeing that the woman leading the most influential liberal thinktank to the Democratic Party is spending her morning trying to trigger Hasan Piker's eating disorder by retweeting people calling him fat.

You will, in fact, find no leftist in America promote the tactic of setting police officers on fire. Because leftists know the American surveillance and carceral state will come down upon them like a destructive hammer. This is why Western chauvinists are criticized as not caring about human rights abroad but whitewashing the human rights abuse of their Western nations or the Western nations who ally with their economic interests in regions abroad. Several leftists tried to do much more moderate versions of these protests - where the damage was property damage, not a police officer's skull - in both places like the US and the UK to try and stop arms shipments to Israel. In the best scenario, these protestors were charged with terrorism and in the worst scenario they've been given decades-long sentencing in blackbox style prisons, their identities now forever on government watch lists. No, there has never been and never will be American leftists -re-reads what the OP did- trying to overthrow the government. American leftists can't even easily decide when to hold a book club and you think they're getting away with being able to coup their own government while hypocritically denying people elsewhere of the chance to coup their own government too?

@nooniebao this being who replaced Angie "Proud Voter of the Laken Riley Act" Craig in the House. Even if Daniel Koh turns out to be a phony, that Eric Swawell was replaced by Aisha and Angie by Matt feels big. (Imagine if we had replaced Haley Stevens' seat with Aisha Farooqi instead of Jeremy "Israel First" Moss )

Hearing her as a sitting congresswoman talk about the CPC/New Dem divide (while also being like wtf is a Blue Dog) is such a kii and fascinating in itself.

Yes! I was looking at the New Dem and Blue Dog class photos and I don't see them there so that's good. I hope they don't get lost in the mix. For reference, these annoying stupid centrist *******: People being shocked that Manny Rutinel is there when the tea on him was that he was always an insane attention ***** with no beliefs ddd.

Non-DSA/JD freshmen who attended the CPC presser: CA-01 - Mike McGuire (Defeated Republican incumbent, probably moderate shift left) CA-14 - Aisha Wahab (Eric Swalwell expelled, major shift left) CA-22 - Randy Villegas (Defeated Republican incumbent, major shift left) IL -04 - Patty Garcia (Progressive Chuy Garcia retired, probably no meaningful shift left) IL-09 - Daniel Biss (Progressive Jan Schakowsky retired, probably no meaningful shift left) MA-06 - Dan Koh (Seth Moulton didn't run, moderate shift left) MI-07 - Will Lawrence (Defeated Republican incumbent, major shift left) MN-02 - Matt Little (Angie Craig didn't run, major shift left) NY-10 - Brad Lander (Defeated Dan Goldman, moderate shift left) TX-23 - Katy Padilla Stout (Defeated Republican in open R-seat, major shift left)

Oh! @nooniebao He's a Biden admin guy and can just be doing it cause he reps MA, but he also attended the CPC presser today. For reference, he's replacing Seth Moulton who wasn't a co-sponsor on M4A.

I think his question is in bad faith though because the legislation itself outlines how... providers can't opt-out. The options are to participate in Medicare or effectively have a cash-based black market. It's also why I questioned his push for having cash based transactions as an example of transparency. Like, yes, it's true that most people don't know how most individual tests or procedures cost, but it's very "corporate brain" of him to act as though private insurers can just be regulated into due diligence. The issue isn't the transparency - the issue is the cost distribution. Even in a cash system, most people could not afford to pay out of pocket if providers still want the inflated rates agreed on under private insurance agreements. You'd.. just have no patients! I also don't think most people want to treat healthcare as a business transaction. Providers' fee schedules can have thousands of itemized costs that then align with hundreds of CPT codes for pricing. Do we really want people to have to 'shop' for healthcare? I don't think most people want to have to add blood tests to their cart and see the charges individually. $28 for a CBC, $32 for a CMP, $45 for a Lipid Panel + $10 fee for the venipuncture? Ready to check out for $115? Cuban treats people as consumers when they're patients. There's a distinct effort by "Big Business" people to push "no, the insurers aren't the ones driving up the costs! it's the doctors!!!". And there needs to be cost transparency, especially on things like Big Pharma, but his entire approach reads as pushing us away from where we need to go. We need doctors to complete the delivery of care. We don't need third-party medical coders. So when he's completely aware of what the M4A legislation says and completely works to try and discredit it, it's like.. oh! This is a bad person explicitly using his wealth to lie and help make sure his other wealthy friends do not ever see their own wealth decrease!

Basically, while some pundits argue "not every major developed country uses single payer," the inverse is also true - there is no other major developed in the world that uses the same system as America currently: healthcare treated as an administrative jobs program before a unit of care, the proliferation of for-profit, private insurance companies inflating the care in delivery of care, etc.

We did this in 2020 already.

I think people do not trust Mark Cuban because he still is ultimately against single payer healthcare. His advocacy against pharma gets confusing when he's then advocating to push people in a direct-to-buyer, cash based kind of market for care. He has routinely made bad faith criticism of M4A due to not getting to craft the plan as a billionaire with interests in healthcare: