GOP Candidates Fail Turing Test, Plus
their governments are trying to kill you
Links are at the end.
Very few politicians don’t take money directly or indirectly from companies the bottom lines of which—and sometimes the existence of which—wouldn’t be unfavorably affected by single payer universal health care. Call today to ask if your elected representative believes that corporations deserve to have a firehose of federal money directed into their gaping maws.
This and the belief that poor people should just go die help explain why we don’t have universal coverage, and why at the moment millions of people are getting kicked off Medicaid because the expanded pandemic coverage has ended.
Lots of people losing their coverage are still eligible but every state is combing through the rolls to see who is and ain’t, and in the process are shedding enrollees who fail to requalify for bureaucratic reasons: the paperwork can be a nightmare.
Others are losing their coverage because they now make a few dollars more than their state’s guidelines permit. Ideally these people would be steered into less-than-ideal Obamacare plans—which Republicans no longer call “Obamacare” because it works more than it doesn’t—but red states like the ones represented by last night’s Republican candidates are not helping people dumped off the Medicaid rolls to find low-cost purveyors of shaky access to health care, so those people are just adrift on the ice floes, where the ice floes haven’t melted.1
Full disclosure: I’m a Medicaid recipient and not an especially unaware one, and I almost got kicked off the Hawai’i plan because I wasn’t clear on what was happening. And Hawai’i is one of the better states at this.
Republicans generally won’t just up and say that the poors don’t deserve to live, but they will say that people like of my ilk are a drag on the rest of you, leaving the suggestion unspoken. Democrats, well, fuck ‘em; that’s just more of a cash transaction.
Trump is leading the Iowa polls by around 30 points, which prompts the question of why those other people were throwing down at the Reagan Library last night. It’s my belief that several of them would fail a sort of reverse Turing test, where they’re indistinguishable from a poorly programmed computer.
We already know that DeSantis is a lizard person in an ill-fitting skin suit, and possibly too the billionaire governor of one of those land-without-a-people states, in a much better skin suit because obviously he can afford one. Or he might only be one of those clever AIs with glaring areas of weakness.2 Whatever. Vivek Ramaswamy is obviously a deeply flawed AI.
Chris Christie, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley may all be (human) flesh and blood, but that doesn’t really mean anything in this context. I’ve not watched any of this grisly shit but I read some stuff by people who did, and clearly resent it (NYT link, not paywalled)3.
I’ve noted some people saying things like Reagan wouldn’t recognize today’s Republican party, as if he weren’t a ravening beast of a man who would rip your heart out in the most well-spoken way.
Tinariwen, “Amatssou;4” Tank and The Bangas, “Live Vibes 2.5”
That, Comrades, is all I got. Share if you like, consider subscribing if you’ve not—it’s free unless you want to pay.
Take care, be well.