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batboyblog · 3 months ago

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Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #31

August 9-16 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris announced together the successful conclusion of the first negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. For years Medicare was not allow to directly negotiate princes with drug companies leaving seniors to pay high prices. It has been a Democratic goal for many years to change this. President Biden noted he first introduced a bill to allow these negotiations as a Senator back in 1973. Thanks to Inflation Reduction Act, passed with no Republican support using Vice-President Harris' tie breaking vote, this long time Democratic goal is now a reality. Savings on these first ten drugs are between 38% and 79% and will collectively save seniors $1.8 billion dollars in out of pocket costs. This comes on top of the Biden-Harris Administration already having capped the price of insulin for Medicare's 3.5 million diabetics at $35 a month, as well as the Administration's plan to cap Medicare out of pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year starting January 2025.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have launched a wide ranging all of government effort to crack down on companies wasting customers time with excessive paperwork, hold times, and robots rather than real people. Some of the actions from the "Time is Money" effort include: The FTC and FCC putting forward rules that require companies to make canceling a subscription or service as easy as signing up for it. The Department of Transportation has required automatic refunds for canceled flights. The CFPB is working on rules to require companies to have to allow customers to speak to a real person with just one button click ending endless "doom loops" of recored messages. The CFPB is also working on rules around chatbots, particularly their use from banks. The FTC is working on rules to ban companies from posting fake reviews, suppressing honest negative reviews, or paying for positive reviews. HHS and the Department of Labor are taking steps to require insurance companies to allow health claims to be submitted online. All these actions come on top of the Biden Administration's efforts to get rid of junk fees.

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden announced further funding as part of the President's Cancer Moonshot. The Cancer Moonshot was launched by then Vice-President Biden in 2016 in the aftermath of his son Beau Biden's death from brain cancer in late 2015. It was scrapped by Trump as political retaliation against the Obama-Biden Administration. Revived by President Biden in 2022 it has the goal of cutting the number of cancer deaths in half over the next 25 years, saving 4 million lives. Part of the Moonshot is Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), grants to help develop cutting edge technology to prevent, detect, and treat cancer. The President and First Lady announced $150 million in ARPA-H grants this week focused on more successful cancer surgeries. With grants to Tulane, Rice, Johns Hopkins, and Dartmouth, among others, they'll help fund imaging and microscope technology that will allow surgeons to more successfully determine if all cancer has been remove, as well as medical imaging focused on preventing damage to healthy tissues during surgeries.

Vice-President Harris announced a 4-year plan to lower housing costs. The Vice-President plans on offering $25,000 to first time home buyers in down-payment support. It's believed this will help support 1 million first time buyers a year. She also called for the building of 3 million more housing units, and a $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction. This adds to President Biden's call for a $10,000 tax credit for first time buyers and calls by the President to punish landlords who raise the rent by over 5%.

President Biden Designates the site of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot a National Monument. The two day riot in Illinois capital took place just blocks away from Abraham Lincoln's Springfield home. In August 1908, 17 people die, including a black infant, and 2,000 black refugees were forced to flee the city. As a direct result of the riot, black community leaders and white allies met a few months later in New York and founded the NAACP. The new National Monument will seek to preserve the history and educate the public both on the horrible race riot as well as the foundation of the NAACP. This is the second time President Biden has used his authority to set up a National Monument protecting black history, after setting up the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument on Emmett Till's 82nd birthday July 25th 2023.

The Department of The Interior announced $775 million to help cap and clean up orphaned oil and gas wells. The money will help cap wells in 21 states. The Biden-Harris Administration has allocated $4.7 billion to plug orphaned wells, a billion of which has already been distributed. More than 8,200 such wells have been capped since the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2022. Orphaned wells leak toxins into communities and are leaking the super greenhouse gas methane. Plugging them will not only improve the health of nearby communities but help fight climate change on a global level.

Vice-President Harris announced plans to ban price-gouging in the food and grocery industries. This would be a first ever federal ban on price gouging and Harris called for clear "rules of the road" on price rises in food, and strong penalties from the FTC for those who break them. This is in line with President Biden's launching of a federal Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing in March, and Democratic Senator Bob Casey's bill to ban "shrinkflation". In response to this pressure from Democrats on price gouging and after aggressive questions by Senator Casey and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the supermarket giant Kroger proposed dropping prices by a billion dollars

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queerpunktomatoes · 3 months ago

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Here is the pdf version of Project 2025. It's long and dry, so here are some talking points for you.

Note the page numbers so you can back yourself up. Most people are not going to read the whole document (because it's awful to read tbh) so you need to be able to defend your critiques.

We don't need false arguments to weaken our entirely correct conviction that Trump is a fascist.

Page 5 "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children... should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered." Translation: Transgender people should be seen as pornographic, and those who make/distribute porn should be imprisoned. Being transgender should be illegal.

Page 94 "Sustain support for Israel." Translation: Continue funding the Palestinian genocide with taxpayer money.

Page 97 "Senior acquisition leaders should design a system that allows decision-makers to stay within the law but bypass unnecessary departmental regulations that are not in the best interest of the government and hamper the acquisition of capabilities that warfighters require." Translation: Reduce workplace safety regulations in the interest of making more money.

Page 103 "Require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding." Translation: Children in public schools have to take the military entrance exam. Children in private schools do not.

Page 104 "Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service." Translation: Keep trans people out of the military.

Page 155 "Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinformation efforts... The entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One." Translation: End FBI's effort to combat disinformation.

Page 246 "Conservatives will thus reward a President who eliminates this tyrannical situation. PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives." Translation: Don't publically fund anything that isn't explicitly right-wing, including children's entertainment.

Page 259 "The next conservative Administration should rescind President Biden’s 2022 Gender Policy. It should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on USAID websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms: 'gender,' 'gender equality,' 'gender equity,' 'gender diverse individuals,' 'gender aware,' 'gender sensitive,' etc. It should also remove references to 'abortion,' 'reproductive health, and 'sexual and reproductive rights'... produces unnecessary consternation and confusion among and even outright bias against men.” Translation: All language related to gender, equality, and sexual rights should be removed from all official USA websites and documents.

Page 260 "PLGHA requires foreign NGOs, as a condition of receiving assistance, to agree not to perform or actively promote abortions as a method of family planning in foreign countries... The new pro-life executive order should apply to foreign NGOs." Translation: American doctors are not allowed to perform abortions domestically or internationally.

Page 285 "The department [of education] is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states." Translation: The Department of Education should be eliminated.

Page 302 "Return to the Original Purpose of School Meals. Federal school meals increasingly resemble entitlement programs... To serve students in need and prevent the misuse of taxpayer money, the next Administration should focus on students in need and reject efforts to transform federal school meals into an entitlement program." Translation: Roll back free school lunches to apply to ~185% fewer people than it does currently.

Page 320-322 "In July of that year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after Congress reached a consensus that the mistreatment of [B]lack Americans was no longer tolerable and merited a federal response... In 1973, [Congress] passed the Rehabilitation Act, and, in 1975, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act... The next Administration will need a plan to redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government, eliminate those that are ineffective or duplicative, and then eliminate the unproductive red tape and rules by entrusting states and districts with flexible, formula-driven block grants." Translation: Repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Page 372 "The U.S. nuclear arsenal needs to be updated and reinvigorated... Fund the design, development, and deployment of new nuclear warheads, including the production of plutonium pits in quantity. Expand the U.S. Navy and develop new nuclear naval reactors to ensure that the Navy has the nuclear propulsion it needs to secure America’s strategic interests. End ineffective and counterproductive nonproliferation activities like those involving Iran and the United Nations." Translation: Withdraw from "let's not use nuclear weapons" agreements, build more nuclear weapons, and resume nuclear weapons testing.

Page 451 "Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society. Unfortunately, family policies and programs under President Biden’s HHS are fraught with agenda items focusing on 'LGBTQ+ equity,' subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage. These policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families. Working fathers are essential to the well-being and development of their children, but the United States is experiencing a crisis of fatherlessness that is ruining our children’s futures... homes with non-related 'boyfriends' present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be. HHS should prioritize married father engagement in its messaging, health, and welfare policies. In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them." Translation: The cishet nuclear family is the only valid, legally recognizable family.

Page 474 "Reissue a stronger transgender national coverage determination. CMS should repromulgate its 2016 decision that CMS could not issue a National Coverage Determination (NCD) regarding 'gender reassignment surgery' for Medicare beneficiaries. In doing so, CMS should acknowledge the growing body of evidence that such interventions are dangerous and acknowledge that there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such coverage in state plans." Translation: Remove all gender-affirming care coverage from government insurance plans.

Page 482 "Eliminate the Head Start program." Translation: Remove free education/health programs for low-income families.

Page 508 "Repeal climate change initiatives and spending in the department’s budget request." Translation: End all programs that address climate change.

Page 524 "Rescind the Biden rules and reinstate the Trump rules regarding... The Endangered Species Act rules defining Critical Habitat and Critical Habitat Exclusions." Translation: Remove protections for endangered animals.

Page 524 "Reinstate President Trump’s plan for opening most of the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska to leasing and development." Translation: Expand Arctic drilling.

Page 587 "The Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employees in the private sector the ability to choose between receiving time-and-a-half pay or accumulating time-and-a-half paid time off." Translation: Employers are not required to pay extra for overtime.

Page 592 "Employers and employees should be able to set a two- or four-week period over which to calculate overtime. This would give workers greater flexibility to work more hours in one week and fewer hours in the next and would not require the employer to pay them more for that same total number of hours of work during the entire period." Translation: The 40-hour work week should become a 160-hour work month, so employers can make you work extra hours with no overtime pay by cutting your hours later in the month.

Page 664 "The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories." Translation: Americans should not get free extreme weather warnings. We should have to pay for it, and watch commercials between segments.

Page 708 "The next conservative Administration should take affirmative steps to expose and eradicate the practice of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ... Treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment." Translation: Fire any/all government employees who participated in DEI training.

And remember:

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