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The polls in 2016 were proven to be within the margin of error, and she did win the popular vote. Just saying.

For any of you with Obamacare or that have pre-existing conditions-at least you know the consequences of your vote...


House Speaker Mike Johnson criticizes Obamacare and promises 'massive reform' if Trump wins
The Republican speaker said at an event in Pennsylvania that overhauling health care would be a major focus and that “Trump’s going to go big” if he takes the presidency.




Oct. 29, 2024, 4:06 PM EDT
By Sahil Kapur
House Speaker Mike Johnson took a dig at Obamacare at an event in Pennsylvania on Monday, telling a crowd there would be “massive” health care changes in America if Donald Trump wins the election.

“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Johnson, R-La., said in Bethlehem as he campaigned for GOP House candidate Ryan Mackenzie, according to video obtained by NBC News.

“No Obamacare?” an attendee asked Johnson, referring to the law Democrats passed in 2010, also known as the Affordable Care Act.

“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, rolling his eyes. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”

Johnson made his remarks eight days before a presidential election in which Kamala Harris and Democrats are campaigning on protecting and expanding the ACA. Trump, who tried and failed to wipe out the ACA as president, has called for reopening the fight, saying on his social media platform that “Obamacare Sucks.” He has vowed to replace it but without offering specifics, saying only that he has “concepts of a plan.”


Speaker Johnson criticizes Obamacare, promises 'massive reform' if Trump wins
06:49
Harris insists that Trump’s only plan is to undo the ACA, which has extended coverage to nearly 50 million people in the U.S. since 2014, according to government figures.

Johnson, who voted in 2017 for a Trump-backed bill to repeal key parts of Obamacare, did not explicitly call Monday for ending the Affordable Care Act. His office didn’t have anything to add to his remarks when it was asked for comment on what reforms he’s eyeing or whether he supports extending the ACA subsidies that are expiring at the end of 2025. (Harris and Democrats have called for extending that money.)

Johnson held a back-and-forth about health care with the audience at Monday's campaign event in Pennsylvania, saying that physician members in the House Republican caucus had “a menu of options” for how to revise the system and “take government bureaucrats out of the health care equation.”

He didn’t detail what changes he would seek, but he made it clear that deregulation would be part of it.

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A lot of state poll results show ties. Is that because of voters — or pollsters?
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” Johnson said. “And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy, and we’re going to fix these things.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who is running to be the No. 3 GOP leader in the next Congress, has called for tackling a major health care overhaul and extending the Trump tax cuts in one big bill in 2025. It's unclear who will replace Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as Senate GOP leader next year.

Any major rollback of ACA would require Republicans to win the presidency and control of both chambers of Congress, as Democrats would be all but certain to block such an effort. It’s also unclear what changes the GOP would find the votes to make, as some in the party have called for turning the page on the ACA fight.

The 2010 law slapped new regulations on insurance companies to prohibit turning away people with pre-existing conditions or charging higher prices to sicker customers. It also provided billions of dollars in subsidies for lower-income people to buy coverage in private marketplaces while it expanded Medicaid eligibility.

Johnson, who has crisscrossed the country to campaign for GOP House candidates, spoke only in broad terms at his event Monday.

“If you take government bureaucrats out of the health care equation and you have doctor-patient relationships, it’s better for everybody. More efficient, more effective,” he said. “That’s the free market. Trump’s going to be for the free market.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/co...ises-massive-reform-trump-win-rcna177853

Threat actors likely to take advantage of election fraud claims to fuel violence, bulletin warns

Threat actors are likely to leverage claims of election fraud to drive election-related violence, according to a federal bulletin obtained by CBS News.

"Some individuals are calling for violence as a response to election fraud narratives, primarily targeting election officials and populations that threat actors perceive as threatening the integrity of the 2024 general election," the bulletin says.

The bulletin, which was published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security, warned that online forums used by domestic violent extremists contain threats of violence against election officials and infrastructure "to prevent perceived fraud or to retaliate against it." Many of the posts are promoting narratives about election fraud linked to mail-in ballots or electronic voting machines, it said.

"Some individuals motivated by this narrative have stated their intent online to intimidate voters or elections staff through surveillance of election infrastructure or personnel, including by armed individuals," the bulletin continued. "Some of these online users have encouraged violence against ideological opponents related to the use of mail-in voting while others promoted methods of sabotaging ballot drop boxes. Other individuals are using online forums to call for violence against local election officials in response to allegations of fraud."

Federal investigators believe there are several factors that could increase threat actors' perceptions of election fraud, including "a contested or close election, variations in state election laws and regulations impacting the release of results, unforeseen events that delay vote counting, or technological or administrative errors impacting vote counting processes."

The warning comes as ballot boxes have been set on fire in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, destroying hundreds of ballots. A number of mail-in ballots were also damaged when a U.S. Postal Service mailbox was recently set on fire in Phoenix, Arizona. The incidents are under investigation.

Last week, intelligence and law enforcement agencies said Russian actors had "manufactured and amplified" a video purporting to show someone destroying mail-in ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania "as part of Moscow's broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions among Americans."

A joint intelligence bulletin issued earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security and FBI warned of the potential for domestic violent extremists "with election-related grievances" to target political candidates and elected officials in the coming weeks. It said domestic extremists "pose a threat of violence to a range of targets directly and indirectly associated with elections through at least the presidential inauguration" on Jan. 20, 2025.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Monday that the U.S. remains in a "heightened" threat environment.

"The Department continues to advise federal, state, and local partners to remain vigilant to potential threats and encourages the public to report any suspicious activity to local authorities," the spokesperson said.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-fraud-claims-fuel-violence-dhs-bulletin/

Sadly the Republican nominee for president didn't list any of these people on his description of "the enemy within".

What are those ideas??? Honestly, what the hell are the ideas? Trump has had almost 10 years to talk about his alternative, and/or pass an alternative while he was actually in office, and.....nothing.

After all that time, all we've gotten to is a "concept of a plan." Honestly, wtf does that mean???

I'm all for listening to legitimate alternatives, but not if I don't know what those alternatives are...or if the alternative is just to get rid of the first solution that was implemented?

It gives credence to the fact that he's just trying to go on a revenge tour.

For anyone voting for Trump, what alternatives to the ACA are you hoping for?

Much easier to stir up hate and call opponents names and pander to the supremacists than it is to find and propose solutions.

It's odd how people say that Kamala isn't answering questions with any details while trump doesn't give any details either and the rest of the time he's lying. That doesn't seem to be an issue with those same people though.

Biden called Trump supporters "garbage"

I'm sure glad that Biden isn't running for president. Sadly the republicans love their demented old man.

Republicans saying we should keep government out of healthcare and leave it to the doctor-patient relationship?

Center on Budget and Policy did a review of the "concepts of a plan" that are in Project 2025 using that as a roadmap. Of course, anything that gets passed would depend on who has the house and senate. But the last time this was tried, trump was going to shutter the ACA without anything to replace it. But this is a pretty detailed review and not good for consumers. And this review was only about 6 weeks ago.





Republican Health Coverage Proposals Would Increase Number of Uninsured, Raise People’s Costs
An Overview of the Project 2025, Republican Study Committee, and House Budget Committee Plans

September 3, 2024 | By Allison Orris and Claire Heyison
The Medicaid and marketplace proposals from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025[1] blueprint, the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) fiscal year 2025 budget,[2] and the Republican House Budget Committee’s (HBC) fiscal year 2025 budget resolution[3] would undermine Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage protections, make health coverage more costly and less comprehensive, shift more costs to states, and increase the number of uninsured people in the U.S. These proposals would result in a future in which millions more people go without coverage, pay higher premiums if they have pre-existing conditions, or end up with skimpy health plans that don’t cover benefits they need.[4]

This paper focuses on the three plans’ proposed changes to eligibility requirements, consumer protections, financing, and coverage generosity for Medicaid, ACA marketplace insurance, and other health insurance. These and other conservative proposals set forth a vision that contrasts dramatically with recent coverage and affordability gains. This paper does not address these plans’ full range of health proposals, which also include scaling back rights and revoking access to health and economic supports for specific groups, including women, people of color, people with low incomes, people who are immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people. In particular, Project 2025’s health care agenda predominantly focuses on banning abortion and limiting access to contraception, rather than addressing high health care costs or reducing uninsurance.

"These proposals would result in a future in which millions more people go without coverage, pay higher premiums if they have pre-existing conditions, or end up with skimpy health plans that don’t cover benefits they need."
While the proposals do not present themselves as repealing the ACA, the results would be much the same: higher costs for health coverage, loss of protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and an increase in the number of people without insurance. The plans call for undermining the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and making deep additional cuts in Medicaid, which would take away health coverage, raise the cost of health care, or reduce access to needed health services for millions of people. Children, parents, and people with disabilities could face higher costs and lower access to health coverage, and millions of low-income adults could be left with no options for affordable coverage. (See Figure 1.)

The RSC proposal would slash $4.5 trillion in federal investment in Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and marketplace coverage.[5] The similarly harsh HBC budget resolution includes $2.2 trillion in cuts to health coverage, and the report accompanying the resolution suggests that all of the cuts would come from Medicaid; if true, the cuts would amount to 30 percent over ten years, on average, and 40 percent in 2034.[6] The size of the cuts under Project 2025 is less clear but would also be extremely large.

The U.S. has made significant progress toward universal health coverage since the ACA’s enactment.[7] Uninsured rates have also fallen significantly across racial and ethnic groups since the ACA’s major coverage provisions took effect.[8] The proposals described here would roll back that progress via huge cuts to Medicaid and federal premium tax credits and by weakening protections for people with pre-existing conditions, taking the nation back to the pre-ACA era[9] — or worse —and disrupting and making health care unaffordable for millions of people.

figure 1
Republican Policy Agendas Would Cut Crucial Health Benefits for Tens of Millions of People
Proposals Would Undermine Medicaid
Medicaid covers nearly 74 million people,[10] pays for 2 in 5 births in the U.S.,[11] and is the nation’s largest payer of behavioral health services, which include mental health and substance use disorder treatment.[12] Project 2025, the RSC budget, and the HBC budget plan contain proposals that would undermine Medicaid by destabilizing its financing and severely reducing access to services. These proposals would increase health inequities and erase gains made since the ACA was enacted.

The proposals would jeopardize comprehensive coverage for people with low incomes by restructuring and cutting federal funding for the program, altering long-standing benefit protections, and denying Medicaid funding to providers who provide abortions.[13] They would also shift costs to states, which would lead to cuts in eligibility, benefits, and provider payment rates, effectively gutting many of the enrollee protections that are a hallmark of Medicaid.


Cost Shift to States Would Likely Result in Cuts to Benefits, Eligibility, Provider Rates
Medicaid is states’ single largest source of federal funds.[14] Therefore, policies that reduce or withdraw federal Medicaid funding have outsized impacts on state budgets. And because states must balance their budgets, federal Medicaid cuts lead states to cut other critical services or, more likely, cut Medicaid eligibility, benefits, or payments to providers and managed care plans. By shifting costs to states, Project 2025, the RSC budget, and the HBC budget plan would likely force states to cut the program in ways that would jeopardize coverage for millions — a fact that most of these proposals fail to mention.

Capping or Block-Granting Medicaid Funding

Project 2025 and the RSC and HBC budgets are designed to cut Medicaid spending, not to ensure that people have access to coverage. This goal is clear in their proposals to cap or block-grant Medicaid funding.

Since Medicaid’s inception, its funding model has been one where states put up a share of the cost of covered health care services and the federal government matches that state spending through a formula based on states’ per capita income; states with lower incomes receive a larger federal match than higher-income states. Requiring states to share in the cost of covered services gives them an important incentive to keep costs low when possible. But the federal government shares in all of the costs, and enrollees are assured of receiving all covered services that they need.

The three proposals include policies that dramatically change the federal government’s commitment to sharing in states’ Medicaid costs. By artificially capping Medicaid funding regardless of the health care needs of people in each state and by providing states with new flexibilities to curtail offered health services and/or eligibility, these proposals would result over time in fewer people being enrolled and in enrollees likely having less-robust coverage.

The HBC budget proposes a per capita cap, with the federal government paying state costs only up to a defined amount for various enrollee categories. The Project 2025 blueprint calls for per capita caps on federal spending, aggregate caps, or block grants, any of which would cut Medicaid spending substantially over time.

The more specific RSC plan would create five separate block grants, segregating spending for children, adults over 65, people with disabilities, pregnant women, and all other adults (including parents). But states would be able to shift funding from the “all other adults” category to other categories and could scale back or stop providing coverage to this group entirely, which would enable them to undermine or end the coverage that adults receive through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Spending for each block grant would grow based on population increases, but the RSC budget is silent about how the block grants would account for health care cost growth. Typically, block grant proposals base funding amounts on current or historical spending and then increase funding annually at a slower rate than Medicaid spending is expected to grow, which means the cut would deepen over time as funding falls further and further behind what is needed to provide health care services to beneficiaries.[15]

Compounding the block grant proposal’s potential damage, the RSC plan would eliminate standards that require states to provide Medicaid to children in families with incomes below a set level. And, for states that opt to continue covering parents and other adults with low incomes even with vastly reduced federal resources, the RSC plan would threaten people’s coverage a second way: by requiring states to take coverage away from people who don’t meet rigid work reporting requirements, described in more detail below.

As we have written, both per capita caps[16] and block grants would lead to cuts in eligibility, benefits, and provider reimbursement rates.[17] Caps would be set to generate savings, likely by indexing future growth at a rate that fails to keep pace with rising health insurance enrollment, health care costs, or both. (See Figure 2.) States could be forced to make even deeper cuts if enrollment or health care costs are higher than expected due to a recession, pandemic, new drugs and other high-cost technologies, or cost growth across the public and private health care system.

Any block grant proposal would likely be paired with provisions wiping away long-standing Medicaid rules in order to allow states to make draconian cuts — including eligibility changes that would undermine Medicaid’s basic tenet, since its inception, that program spending must respond to cover all people who apply and are found eligible. To stay within capped funding, states would likely be empowered to take steps such as capping overall enrollment, cutting coverage for certain eligibility groups (such as groups currently considered “optional,” which includes some children, some people with disabilities, and many adults), reducing health benefits (either broad reductions or those more narrowly tailored to “optional” services such as home- and community-based services), lowering payments to health care providers, or some combination of these.

figure 2
Total Medicaid Cuts From a Per Capita Cap Would Grow Over Time
Lowering provider payments can restrict access to care, particularly because Medicaid provider payments are already well below payments from Medicare and private insurers for the same services. Because people of color disproportionately use Medicaid for their health coverage, a block grant or per capita cap and the resulting cuts would deepen inequities in coverage, access to health services, and health care quality across racial and ethnic groups.[18]

Lowering Medicaid Matching Rates

State budgets depend on federal Medicaid matching funds. Reducing some or all states’ Medicaid matching rates, as Project 2025 and both the RSC and HBC budgets propose, would undermine Medicaid’s financing and drive deep cuts to state Medicaid programs.

Today, the federal government pays between 50 percent and 77 percent of the cost of providing most health services to most Medicaid enrollees. The federal share is generally higher in states with lower per capita income than in states with higher per capita income, reflecting the fact that higher-income states can afford to pay a larger share of Medicaid costs.[19] As a result, the federal government pays a larger share of program costs in states with lower average income. Some services, such as family planning, are matched at a 90 percent enhanced rate in all states, as are services for people newly covered by the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

The RSC budget would replace the long-standing matching rate formula with a 50 percent rate for all states. This would shrink the federal government’s commitment to sharing in Medicaid costs in the 40 states and the District of Columbia that would otherwise have a standard Medicaid matching rate over 50 percent in fiscal year 2025.[20] (U.S. territories presumably would face a cut as well, since their matching rates now exceed 50 percent.) The HBC proposes to reduce only the District of Columbia’s regular matching rate. Both proposals would eliminate the enhanced matching rate for the Medicaid expansion, likely leading states to cut millions of people who newly gained coverage under the expansion, or to perhaps substitute less robust, more expensive private market coverage for comprehensive Medicaid coverage for some enrollees.

Project 2025 proposes reducing the enhanced expansion matching rate but is less clear about how it would cut the regular matching rate, simply calling for a “more balanced or blended matching rate.”[21] One recent proposal by the Paragon Health Institute provides clues about what conservative policymakers might suggest.[22] As part of a broader plan to overhaul Medicaid, Paragon has proposed phasing out the 90 percent matching rate for expansion enrollees and changing the federal matching rate formula to drop the minimum regular matching rate from 50 percent to 40 percent, which would result in a cut for ten states as well as the District of Columbia.[23]

The Paragon proposal also would let states that maintain the Medicaid expansion despite the significant funding reduction move people with incomes over 100 percent of the federal poverty level from Medicaid to the marketplace. Without extra financial assistance, individuals with such low incomes are not likely to be able to afford coverage. That’s especially true given that the Paragon Institute also suggests ending the premium tax credit improvements that make marketplace coverage more affordable.

By Paragon’s own estimate, its proposals would cut federal Medicaid spending by $592.4 billion over ten years. The report, however, fails to consider additional ways in which states would certainly cut benefits, eligibility, or provider rates to balance their budgets if federal support is cut to the degree Paragon proposes, making the potential impact much greater.[24]

Eliminating Provider Taxes, Which Help Support State Medicaid Programs

Today, states have flexibility in how they finance the non-federal share of Medicaid matching funds. States must only follow Medicaid law and regulations designed to ensure that they contribute a minimum amount of support to the program, do not use federal Medicaid dollars as the source of the non-federal share, and use federal funds to serve Medicaid enrollees. Project 2025 and the RSC budget would disrupt these rules in an effort to further reduce Medicaid spending.

Both proposals aim to restrict — or, in the words of the RSC budget, “effectively eliminate” — health care taxes on providers. All states except Alaska use provider taxes to help finance a portion of the state Medicaid share. In recent years, states have used new or increased provider taxes to help pay for adjusting provider reimbursements to keep pace with increases in health costs, averting Medicaid benefit cuts, and expanding Medicaid benefits, including supporting the ACA Medicaid expansion.[25]

Restricting or ending states’ ability to use these revenues would create a hole in state budgets and have serious consequences for Medicaid enrollees.[26]Eliminating provider taxes would cut $526 billion in federal Medicaid spending over ten years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated, as the likely state Medicaid cuts would reduce federal matching payments; that $526 billion represents 8.7 percent of federal spending on Medicaid over this time period. The total Medicaid cut, including the decline in state spending, would be significantly larger.[27]Project 2025 may also eliminate other approaches that states use to generate the necessary non-federal share of Medicaid funds: the use of public funds transferred from or certified by other entities, such as local governments and public hospitals.

It is unlikely that states could fill the gap from limiting these revenue-raising options. Instead, they would cut benefits or eligibility, cut provider rates, or otherwise limit health care access for Medicaid beneficiaries.

Dismantling the ACA Medicaid Expansion
The Project 2025, RSC, and HBC proposals would gut the ACA’s Medicaid expansion by eliminating the higher expansion matching rate, block-granting expansion funding, or both.[28]

The ACA expanded Medicaid to adults with household incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty level ($20,783 a year for an individual). The Supreme Court later made the expansion optional. Forty states plus the District of Columbia have expanded Medicaid, filling a critical gap in coverage for nearly 18 million adults aged 19 to 64 who would otherwise lack an affordable source of health care coverage.[29] As noted above, the ACA provided a 90 percent federal matching rate for this population, assuming most of the cost of expansion — similar to the federal government’s assumption of the full cost of providing premium tax credit assistance for ACA marketplace coverage.

Dismantling the Medicaid expansion would drive an unprecedented increase in the uninsured rate, as many current expansion enrollees would have no alternative source of affordable coverage. In addition, evidence from a decade of implementation shows that the Medicaid expansion has led to important gains not only for newly eligible adults but also for children, older adults, and people with disabilities. These groups are traditionally eligible for Medicaid, but some individuals may not have realized they qualified until the expansion simplified Medicaid eligibility rules and generated a “welcome mat” effect.[30] If the ACA’s Medicaid expansion ends, over time some people in these groups may also lose coverage as the simple message that people with low incomes are eligible for Medicaid is replaced by the more complicated structure prior to expansion, when only certain groups of people with low incomes qualified. Reduced coverage for parents, in particular, has been shown to lead to fewer eligible children enrolling.

The ACA’s Medicaid expansion also reduced the burden that uncompensated care places on state, local, and hospital budgets and improved hospital operating margins, particularly for rural and safety net hospitals.[31] States have also realized budget savings and revenue gains as a result of the expansion, and providers have reported overall positive financial impacts.[32] Undermining the Medicaid expansion would lead to an increase in uncompensated care and leave millions of people nationwide without an affordable health care option.

Gutting Protections for Medicaid Enrollees
A hallmark of Medicaid coverage is its strong protections for enrollees. Robust benefit packages and little to no out-of-pocket costs are essential to appropriately serving people with low incomes, who often struggle to meet their basic needs for housing, food, and health care. In addition to the funding threats described above, which would drive cuts to eligibility and benefits, all three proposals include policies that would prevent Medicaid enrollees from getting needed care.

The proposals would:

Take coverage away from people who do not meet harsh work requirements. All three plans would take Medicaid coverage away from people who do not meet a work requirement.[33] Experiments in Arkansas’ Medicaid program[34] and policies in other public benefit programs[35] show that work requirements not only fail to increase employment but also kick many people off coverage due to excessive red tape and paperwork. Georgia is the only state currently implementing work requirements for a portion of its Medicaid population, and the primary effect appears to be keeping people out of coverage.[36]

Work requirements are based on the false assumption that people who receive benefits will only work if compelled to do so. This assumption is rooted in stereotypes based on race, gender, disability status, and class. It ignores the realities of the low-paid labor market, ongoing labor market discrimination, the lack of child care and paid sick and family leave, and the impact of health issues, disabilities, and the need to care for family members on people’s ability to work at various times.[37] Most people enrolled in Medicaid either work or would qualify for an exemption from work requirements,[38] but complex administrative barriers make it difficult to claim such exemptions and the reporting regimes are complicated and error-ridden, keeping yet more people out of coverage.

Increase consumer costs. Today, Medicaid strictly limits how much enrollees can be required to pay out of pocket, with caps on co-pays, prohibitions on co-pays for children and pregnant enrollees, prohibitions on charging premiums to people under 150 percent of the poverty level, and limits on allowable premium amounts for people above that income level.[39] The Project 2025 blueprint guts these protections.
Expose Medicaid enrollees to higher-cost private coverage. Both the RSC and Project 2025 plans would permit the use of Medicaid dollars to buy private coverage. Project 2025 would let enrollees buy catastrophic coverage combined with a health savings account-style account, which would leave them with skimpier coverage and higher out-of-pocket costs than they now have through Medicaid. The RSC budget would apparently let states reallocate block grant funding for low-income adults to provide subsidies to adults who can show they meet a work requirement to buy private coverage. This coverage would likely be less comprehensive and more costly than the Medicaid benefits now available to parents and to low-income adults covered through the Medicaid expansion.
Cut people off coverage by imposing lifetime limits. In addition to weakening coverage, the Project 2025 plan would put unspecified time limits or lifetime caps on coverage. In an economy where many jobs do not include affordable health coverage or pay living wages sufficient to cover child care costs and other work support necessities, denying coverage for some or all enrollees who reach such limits would be counterproductive; the policy would drive up the number of people who are uninsured and increase uncompensated care costs, since people’s health needs won’t go away. In fact, coverage time limits are likely to make people sicker, diminish their ability to hold down jobs, and add to economic instability.[40] Time limits would have a particularly negative impact on people with disabilities and chronic conditions unless they are exempted.
Leave people worse off and expose them to new costs by weakening Medicaid benefits. Project 2025 would severely reshape Medicaid’s long-standing and robust benefit package by eliminating benefits that exceed those provided in the private market. Most notably, this could threaten the robust Early Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) benefit that children are entitled to. It could also threaten long-term services and supports, both institutional services and home- and community-based services.

Project 2025 would also rescind provisions in recent section 1115 demonstrations (or waivers) that authorize states to provide non-traditional services to help address people’s unmet health-related social needs. Allowing Medicaid to support time-limited nutritional and housing-related needs can help improve Medicaid enrollees’ health; these new projects should be carefully evaluated, not eliminated.[41]

Incentivize states to erect barriers to Medicaid eligibility. Project 2025 and the HBC both cite concerns about program integrity and propose more arduous eligibility verification and determination procedures that would make it harder for eligible people to enroll or to stay enrolled in Medicaid. Improper payments in Medicaid typically don’t result from fraud or abuse but rather from state procedural mistakes caused by shortcomings in the eligibility system or documentation errors by overwhelmed eligibility workers.[42] Program integrity efforts should therefore focus on how well state systems function so that people who are eligible can get and stay enrolled — not on keeping eligible people out of Medicaid.[43] For example, ensuring that states are in compliance with long-standing eligibility rules that maximize reliance on electronic data sources can both improve accuracy and minimize burdens on applicants and enrollees.
Weaken oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Project 2025 calls for weakening CMS oversight of state Medicaid programs by letting states make payment reforms and other changes without seeking federal approval. Devolving the balance of responsibility for Medicaid program management to states would remove an important underpinning of Medicaid’s state-federal partnership: states receive federal funding in exchange for complying with minimum standards set by the federal government, including covering all individuals who meet eligibility requirements and providing them with certain minimum benefits. Giving budget-strapped states expanded authority to cut back health services and eligibility — and then reducing oversight of the remaining federal protections — would leave people who need Medicaid unprotected if states fail to meet program standards or make changes that restrict access to services.
Proposals Would Undermine ACA Marketplace Coverage
The ACA transformed people’s access to comprehensive individual health coverage. Today, more than 20 million people are enrolled in ACA marketplace coverage. But both Project 2025 and the RSC budget would weaken or eliminate key consumer and financial protections introduced by the ACA, further fragmenting the U.S. health care system, raising costs for millions of people, and reducing the number of people with health coverage. Rather than improving health coverage, these proposals would expand tax shelters for the wealthy and bring back challenges that people faced when trying to buy health coverage before the ACA was enacted.[44] These proposals attempt to dismantle the ACA piecemeal, with many of the same likely effects as prior ACA repeal proposals: more uninsured people and higher costs, especially for people with health conditions who need coverage the most.

The ACA set up online marketplaces where people can compare and enroll in coverage, and it provided income-based financial assistance for marketplace coverage. It also set standards for individual health coverage (whether or not it is provided through the marketplace), prohibiting insurers from denying people coverage, raising their premiums, or excluding certain benefits because of a pre-existing condition.

The ACA marketplaces have contributed to a decrease in uninsurance, particularly among people who are Black or Latino or have low incomes. They have also served as an important source of coverage for self-employed people, employees of small businesses, and others who do not have access to affordable health coverage through an employer, Medicare, or Medicaid.[45]

And thanks to recent improvements to the premium tax credits (PTCs), marketplace plans are more affordable than ever before, with 90 percent of enrollees qualifying for some financial assistance and 51 percent of enrollees paying $10 per month or less for their health coverage.[46] These affordability improvements have increased marketplace enrollment from 12 million in 2021 to 21 million in 2024, with the greatest gains occurring among Black, Latino, and low-income people.[47] Public opinion research shows broad support across party lines for the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions and its limits on out-of-pocket spending.[48]

Reducing Marketplace Financial Help, Raising People’s Premiums
The RSC and HBC plans would raise people’s costs in the ACA marketplaces by reducing the financial assistance that most marketplace enrollees receive to reduce their premiums, deductibles, and other costs under comprehensive health insurance plans.

The RSC and HBC plans call for ending the PTC improvements that have been in place since 2021.[49] This would cause nearly all marketplace enrollees to face significantly higher premium costs; for example, a typical 60-year-old couple making $80,000 (405 percent of the poverty level) would see their premiums more than triple, to over $24,000 per year.[50] An estimated 4 million people would become uninsured as their premiums rose to unaffordable levels, with the greatest coverage losses occurring among Black and Hispanic people in states that have not expanded Medicaid.[51] The PTC improvements are set to expire after 2025 without congressional action.

Beyond rejecting the PTC improvements, the RSC also calls for eliminating the PTCs entirely as part of its proposal to convert federal funding streams for existing health coverage programs into state block grants for Medicaid and high-risk pools (discussed below). While Project 2025 does not explicitly mention changes to the PTCs in its policy agenda, it criticizes federal marketplace financial assistance and references a separate Heritage Foundation paper that calls for establishing capped federal allotments for states in place of the current ACA subsidies.[52] Either proposal would lead to even greater coverage losses than eliminating the PTC improvements, increase people’s premium costs even further, and throw insurance markets into disarray.

Dismantling Core ACA Protections, Undermining ACA Marketplaces
The RSC budget and Project 2025 resurrect proposals similar to the highly unpopular 2017 ACA repeal bills[53] but downplay harmful effects on people with pre-existing conditions. These proposals would create an environment where people with health conditions would pay higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs for less substantial coverage than is currently available.[54] Given the increase in costs, more people would enroll in subpar plans that leave them exposed to high costs if they get sick. These changes would disproportionately harm Black people, who are more likely to have common chronic conditions due to racial inequities in social, economic, and political factors. For example, Black people are more likely to live in proximity to waste management facilities, power plants, and other sources of toxic exposure that lead to health problems due to discriminatory housing policies that have limited their access to neighborhoods with fewer environmental hazards.[55]

Specifically, these proposals would:

Eviscerate federal protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The RSC and Project 2025 plans would roll back federal insurance protections in favor of separating healthy people and those with pre-existing conditions into different insurance markets that operate under different rules.

The RSC proposal would allow insurers to charge higher premiums to people with pre-existing conditions and exclude certain benefits from the plans they can buy.[56] People with chronic and complex conditions would receive coverage through separate state-run high-risk pools. Such high-risk pools existed prior to the ACA and had high premiums, gaps in benefits, and limited enrollment because of their expense.[57] To save money, nearly all state high-risk pools excluded coverage of pre-existing conditions for people with high-cost medical issues, usually for the first six to 12 months of enrollment.[58]

Project 2025 proposes “separat[ing] the non-subsidized [individual] insurance market from the subsidized [individual] market” and “giving the non-subsidized market regulatory relief from the costly ACA regulatory mandates.” Though the plan provides no details about which regulatory mandates it would eliminate, the paper it cites supports an approach that would roll back ACA benefits standards, let insurers raise premiums for older people compared to younger people, and eliminate the “single risk pool” requirement that requires each insurer to price their individual-market plans based on all their enrollees.[59] Creating a separate, deregulated market would lead people with fewer health needs to migrate to deregulated off-marketplace plans that offer less expensive coverage; people with more health needs would remain in the marketplace’s comprehensive coverage and would experience higher premiums due to its sicker risk pool. If coupled with cutting and then eliminating premium tax credits, these changes would likely result in far higher costs for ACA marketplace coverage and thus fewer people with health conditions covered.

Allow states to further deregulate their individual insurance markets. The RSC proposes to bring back medical underwriting — the ability for insurers to charge higher premiums or exclude certain benefits from plans purchased by people with pre-existing conditions.[60]

States would be allowed to enact consumer protections similar to those in place today, but they were free to do so before the ACA — and few did. Robust protections for people with pre-existing conditions weren’t sustainable for most states before federal PTCs were available to keep premiums affordable.

Expand the availability of health plans that are currently exempt from consumer protections. Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget would expand subpar plans, such as association health plans and short-term, limited duration insurance, which are exempt from many of the ACA’s core consumer protections.[61] The RSC plan would let people enroll in short-term plans for 12 months instead of three, and both the RSC and Project 2025 proposals would allow small firms with healthier and younger employees and self-employed individuals to enroll in association health plans as a way of avoiding risk-pooling and other ACA reforms that apply to the small-group and individual insurance markets.

Expanding subpar plans in this way would weaken the ACA marketplace by drawing healthier individuals into alternative coverage arrangements. This is another strategy that would lead people with fewer expected health needs away from the ACA marketplace’s comprehensive health plans, resulting in a sicker risk pool and higher premiums in the ACA marketplace.[62]

Roll back federal protections that explicitly prohibit insurers and health care providers from discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy status. Section 1557 of the ACA prohibits Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) programs, as well as programs that receive HHS funding (including Medicaid and ACA marketplace insurers), from discriminating against members of certain protected groups. Project 2025 would end these protections for LGBTQ+ individuals, pregnant people, and people who have had an abortion.
Expanding Programs That Primarily Benefit Wealthy People
Both Project 2025 and the RSC budget aim to expand the use of health savings accounts (HSAs). In an HSA arrangement, individuals enroll in a high-deductible health plan and elect to transfer pre-tax dollars into an account that can be withdrawn tax free to pay for certain out-of-pocket health care expenses. In some cases, employers contribute to these accounts as well. While proponents of HSAs argue that these arrangements encourage wiser health care spending by giving people “skin in the game,” there is ample evidence that they lead to decreased use of care, particularly among low-income people.

HSAs can serve as lucrative tax shelters and investment vehicles for wealthy people, who can afford to contribute large sums into HSA accounts and who benefit more from the accounts’ tax advantaged status, as they are in higher marginal income tax brackets. In contrast, people with low or moderate incomes often cannot afford to put significant funds into savings, need to use any available income for upfront medical costs, or struggle with medical debt.[63]

Additionally, the RSC budget would change how HSAs and individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) can be used.[64] Currently, employers can choose to contribute to an individual coverage HRA, which an employee can then use to pay for premiums and/or medical expenses if they are enrolled in an individual market plan. The RSC proposal would allow HSAs and individual coverage HRAs to pay for non-insurance products such as health care sharing ministries and direct primary care arrangements.[65] These arrangements, which are often marketed as alternatives to comprehensive coverage, in fact cover far fewer benefits and may leave people exposed to catastrophic medical costs if they get sick.[66]


https://www.cbpp.org/research/healt...would-increase-number-of-uninsured-raise

In US swing states, officials brace for conspiracy theories and violence

DETROIT, Oct 30 (Reuters) - With the U.S. election days just away, officials in the most competitive battleground states are bracing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, threats and possible violence.

In Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, three of former President Donald Trump’s favorite targets for false claims of voter fraud, officials have fortified their operations against a repeat of the chaos of 2020. Philadelphia’s ballot-counting warehouse is now surrounded by fencing topped with barbed wire. In Detroit and Atlanta, some election offices are protected by bullet-proof glass.

In Wisconsin, election workers have been trained on de-escalation techniques and polling stations rearranged so workers have escape routes if they are menaced by protestors.

In Arizona, an epicenter in 2020 for false claims by Republicans about rigged voting, the secretary of state is working with local officials on how to respond to misinformation, including deep-fake images of purported fraud.

As opinion polls show Republican Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris neck and neck heading into Tuesday’s vote, officials say there’s one thing they can’t predict or control: What Trump and his allies might say on election night as the votes are still being counted.

“If it's razor thin, then they're going to throw everything they got, right?” said Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley, a Democrat, in an interview. “There’s nothing we can do to stop the former president from continuing his campaign of misinformation and disinformation. But what we can do is continue to push back on that with facts.”

Deeley and 30 other election officials from both parties told Reuters they are preparing for a replay of 2020, when Trump and his lawyers pushed false charges about late-night ballot dumps and rigged machines in an effort to overturn his loss. In the wake of those claims, clerks around the country have been subjected to threats and harassment from Trump supporters convinced the election was stolen.

The Trump campaign did not respond directly to questions about plans to challenge the results. In a statement, Danielle Alvarez, a senior advisor for the campaign and the Republican National Committee, said the party had recruited 230,000 poll watchers, poll workers and legal experts to “bring transparency and accountability” to the election.

"While Democrats will stop at nothing to weaken our elections, we are fighting for a fair and secure process where every legal vote is counted properly," she said.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has repeated the falsehood that he won in 2020 while signaling he would contest a possible loss to Harris.

On Friday, in a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, he wrote that there was "rampant Cheating and Skulduggery" in 2020 and threatened election officials and others “involved in unscrupulous behavior” this cycle with prosecution.

Election officials say one of their biggest fears is a razor-close result where the outcome will hinge on court fights over small numbers of disputed ballots. The Republican National Committee has targeted election officials with dozens of lawsuits challenging various aspects of the voting process, a move seen by Democrats as a prelude to contesting a potential loss. Republican poll watchers, who monitor the casting and counting of ballots, have been trained to be aggressive in scrutinizing the process, and their ranks are filled with activists who still deny the 2020 results, according to training calls reviewed by Reuters.

URBAN BATTLEGROUNDS

The tensions are especially acute in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit, major Democratic vote centers in crucial swing states. Trump accused them of allowing electoral fraud in 2020 and has done so again since the start of this campaign.

At an Iowa rally in December , he urged followers to go to the three cities and "guard the vote," a phrase that alarmed Democrats who warned it could prompt his supporters to intimidate voters or disrupt the counting.

Daniel Baxter, Detroit's chief operating officer for absentee voting and special projects, said the city is preparing for potential unrest in planning with local police and federal officials. Its election headquarters has been strengthened with armed guards and bullet-proof glass. The counting of mail-in ballots has been moved to a more secure location in the convention hall downtown. In 2020, Trump supporters sought to disrupt the process by pounding on windows and yelling "stop the count."

"We plan for a riot," Baxter said in an interview. “We just want to make sure that we have planned for the worst as we hope for the best.” He said he is unaffiliated with any party.

In a virtual meeting for prospective poll workers, an official with the Republican National Committee warned the volunteers that Detroit was not to be trusted. "Because that city, if I could get away with ... you know, burning it to the ground, I would try," said Morgan Ray, the RNC's director of election integrity for Michigan, according to a previously unreported recording of the Sept. 10 meeting obtained by Reuters. Ray and the RNC didn’t respond to requests for comment on her remarks.

Trump also singled out Detroit, America’s largest Black-majority city, saying on Oct. 10 that the rest of the country would become “like Detroit” if Harris wins. Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey, a Democrat, said she believes racism was at the root of Trump’s attacks on cities like hers. "He's the type of person that thinks that he can easily intimidate Detroiters because we're a predominantly Black city,” she said in an interview. “But we're not intimidated by him at all."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about Winfrey’s remarks.

Philadelphia has overhauled vote-counting since delays in 2020 created an opening for Trump and his allies to spread conspiracy theories and for his supporters to target election officials with threats. In 2020, election clerks in Philadelphia and elsewhere struggled with an avalanche of mail-in ballots, thanks to more liberal vote-by-mail rules adopted by many states in response to the pandemic.
On election night in 2020, Trump declared himself the winner after early returns showed him in the lead, even though thousands of ballots remained to be processed in Philadelphia. With the election in the balance, it took the city five days to count enough ballots to make clear that Biden had indeed won Pennsylvania, clinching his bid for the White House.

Since then, the city has moved its election operations to a warehouse, secured by fencing topped with barbed wire, 15 miles from the downtown convention center where ballots were counted four years ago as protesters gathered outside. In Pennsylvania, unlike other states, state law bars election officials from beginning work on the mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

Michigan, by contrast, in 2022 passed a law allowing for pre-processing of mail-in ballots. Election workers in Detroit now have eight days to verify and tabulate absentee ballots prior to Election Day. City clerk Winfrey said she hopes to report results in time for the 11 p.m. TV news on Nov. 5.

Philadelphia officials say they also expect to deliver numbers much more quickly this year, with nearly all ballots counted by Wednesday or Thursday. The city expects to receive more than 225,000 mail ballots, far fewer than the 375,000 that flooded in four years ago. The city has purchased new, faster machines to slice open envelopes and scan ballots, along with new technology that officials say speeds up the process of checking mail ballots.

Philadelphia’s commissioners said they hope announcing the results faster will tamp down the spread of disinformation in the time between the polls closing and news organizations declaring a winner.

“That is the window that allows for the greatest misinformation and disinformation to spread and for harassment and threats to come to election workers,” said Seth Bluestein, a Republican on the city’s three-person election commission. “So that's why it's so important for us to shrink that window and count the ballots as quickly as possible.”

In Atlanta’s majority-Black Fulton County, Georgia’s most populous area, officials are preparing for pro-Trump misinformation. In 2020, Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani falsely accused two Georgia election workers of counting illegal votes, triggering death threats against them and fueling Trump’s false claim that he won the state. The Georgia state election board, now dominated by three pro-Trump Republicans, has called for new investigations of Fulton County.

Opinion polls in the state show Harris and Trump roughly even. On Election Night, if Harris appears to be winning the state, Georgia State Election Board Member Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat, said she expects “to see disinformation” about election machines being hacked and tampering with the vote.

Fulton’s election board chair, Sherri Allen, a registered Democrat serving on the non-partisan body, said the county has taken steps to reassure skeptics. It opened last year a new vote-counting operation in a massive suburban warehouse, 21 miles from downtown Atlanta. The vote count will be televised on giant screens, promoting transparency. “You can see it on the screen as it’s happening,” Allen said. “We didn’t have that before.”

“DIFFERENT WORLD NOW”

Beyond these urban battlegrounds, election officials in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin and North Carolina are making preparations.

In North Carolina, some county election offices have installed panic buttons, bulletproof glass, security cameras and heavier doors, said State Board of Elections spokesperson Patrick Gannon. Election officials have been trained to defuse tensions with angry activists, he said. Police have been given pocket guides on election law in anticipation of increased challenges.

Nevada, where the 2020 election was not called until four days after the last ballots were cast, has changed laws and procedures to speed up counting and bolster confidence in the results. For the first time, mail-in ballots are being counted starting two weeks before Election Day. A new centralized statewide voter registration database allows citizens to track their ballots and make sure they accurately reflect their choices, which officials hope will quash concerns about mass fraud.

In Arizona, the secretary of state’s office said it has trained election officials to respond to AI-generated misinformation about the election, including deep-fake video and images.

And in Wisconsin, the state legislature passed an election protection bill this year that created a new crime of battery of an election official. Some municipalities pushed through ordinances aimed at people who might try to disrupt voting. Madison, for instance, now has an ordinance providing for $1,000 fines for people found threatening or otherwise hampering the work of poll workers.

Some changes are as subtle as moving chairs to bolster the safety of poll workers.

In the small northern Wisconsin town of Caswell, clerk Tamaney “Sam” Augustin has shifted poll workers across the room, so they faced, rather than sat next to, the door — with two exits directly behind them.
“We’ve never had anything happen,” she said, “but we live in a different world now.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us...conspiracy-theories-violence-2024-10-30/

Murica! Freedumb!

Perhaps this could also sum it up:

A Texas Woman Died After The Hospital Said It Would Be A “Crime” To Intervene In Her Miscarriage
Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana / ProPublica
Wed, October 30, 2024 at 11:01 AM EDT15 min read


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Josseli Barnica and her daughter in 2020 Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family (ProPublica)
Josseli Barnica and her daughter in 2020 Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family (ProPublica) ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.

Leaders in Texas, which has the nation’s oldest abortion ban, have witnessed the consequences of such restrictions longer than those in any other state.

In lawsuits, court petitions and news stories, dozens of women have said they faced dangers when they were denied abortions starting in 2021. One suffered sepsis like Barnica, but survived after three days in intensive care. She lost part of her fallopian tube. Lawmakers have made small concessions to clarify two exceptions for medical emergencies, but even in those cases, doctors risk up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000; they can argue in court that their actions were not a crime, much like defendants can claim self-defense after being charged with murder.

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

“They Had to Wait Until There Was No Heartbeat”

To Barnica, an immigrant from Honduras, the American dream seemed within reach in her corner of Houston, a neighborhood filled with restaurants selling El Salvadoran pupusas and bakeries specializing in Mexican conchas. She found work installing drywall, saved money to support her mother back home and met her husband in 2019 at a community soccer game.

A year later, they welcomed a big-eyed baby girl whose every milestone they celebrated. “God bless my family,” Barnica wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the trio in matching red-and-black plaid. “Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them.”

Barnica longed for a large family and was thrilled when she conceived again in 2021.

Trouble struck in the second trimester.

On Sept. 2, 2021, at 17 weeks and four days pregnant, she went to the hospital with cramps, according to her records. The next day, when the bleeding worsened, she returned. Within two hours of her arrival on Sept. 3, an ultrasound confirmed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix,” dilated at 8.9 cm, and that she had low amniotic fluid. The miscarriage was “in progress,” the radiologist wrote.

When Barnica’s husband arrived, she told him doctors couldn’t intervene until there was no heartbeat.

The next day, Dr. Shirley Lima, an OB on duty, diagnosed an “inevitable” miscarriage.

In Barnica’s chart, she noted that the fetal heartbeat was detected and wrote that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support.”

In a state that hadn’t banned abortion, Barnica could have immediately been offered the options that major medical organizations, including international ones, say is the standard of evidence-based care: speeding up labor with medication or a dilation and evacuation procedure to empty the uterus.

“We know that the sooner you intervene in these situations, the better outcomes are,” said Dr. Steven Porter, an OB-GYN in Cleveland.

But Texas’ new abortion ban had just gone into effect. It required physicians to confirm the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening unless there was a “medical emergency,” which the law did not define. It required doctors to make written notes on the patient’s condition and the reason abortion was necessary.

The law did not account for the possibility of a future emergency, one that could develop in hours or days without intervention, doctors told ProPublica.

Barnica was technically still stable. But lying in the hospital with her cervix open wider than a baseball left her uterus exposed to bacteria and placed her at high risk of developing sepsis, experts told ProPublica. Infections can move fast and be hard to control once they take hold.

The scenario felt all too familiar for Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who used to work in Tennessee and reviewed a summary of Barnica’s records at ProPublica’s request.

Abortion bans put doctors in an impossible position, she said, forcing them to decide whether to risk malpractice or a felony charge. After her state enacted one of the strictest bans in the country, she also waited to offer interventions in cases like Barnica’s until the fetal heartbeat stopped or patients showed signs of infection, praying every time that nothing would go wrong. It’s why she ultimately moved to Colorado.

The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.

Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.

Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.

The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.

As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.

Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.

The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.

Go back, she told her niece.

On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.

So he left and tried to get some sleep.

“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.

But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.

Nine days after her death, Barnica’s husband was processing his shock, learning how to be a single dad and struggling to raise funds to bury his wife and the son he had hoped to raise.

Meanwhile, Lima was pulling up Barnica’s medical chart to make an addition to her records.

The notes she added made one point abundantly clear: “When I was called for delivery,” she wrote, “the fetus no longer had detectable heart tones.”

“They Should Vote With Their Feet”

Texas has been on the forefront of fighting abortion access.

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

No doctor in Texas, or the 20 other states that criminalize abortion, has been prosecuted for violating a state ban. But the possibility looms over their every decision, dozens of doctors in those states told ProPublica, forcing them to consider their own legal risks as they navigate their patient’s health emergencies. The lack of clarity has resulted in many patients being denied care.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers made a small concession to the outcry over the uncertainty the ban was creating in hospitals. They created a new exception for ectopic pregnancies, a potentially fatal condition where the embryo attaches outside the uterine cavity, and for cases where a patient’s membranes rupture prematurely before viability, which introduces a high risk of infection. Doctors can still face prosecution, but are allowed to make the case to a judge or jury that their actions were protected, not unlike self-defense arguments after homicides. Barnica’s condition would not have clearly fit this exception.

This year, after being directed to do so by the state Supreme Court, the Texas Medical Board released new guidance telling doctors that an emergency didn’t need to be “imminent” in order to intervene and advising them to provide extra documentation regarding risks.

But in a recent interview, the board’s president, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, acknowledged that these efforts only go so far and the group has no power over criminal law: “There’s nothing we can do to stop a prosecutor from filing charges against the physicians.”

Asked what he would tell Texas patients who are miscarrying and unable to get treatment, he said they should get a second opinion: “They should vote with their feet and go and seek guidance from somebody else.”

An immigrant from El Salvador who works 12-hour shifts, Barnica’s husband doesn’t follow American politics or the news. He had no inkling of the contentious national debate over how abortion bans are affecting maternal health care when ProPublica contacted him.

Now he is raising a 4-year-old daughter with the help of Barnica’s younger brother; every weekend, they take her to see her grandmother, who knows how to braid her hair in pigtails.

All around their home, he keeps photos of Barnica so that the little girl grows up knowing how much her mother loved her. He sees flashes of his wife when his daughter dances. She radiates the same delight.

When asked about Barnica, he can’t get out many words; his leg is restless, his eyes fixed on the floor. Barnica’s family calls him a model father.

He says he’s just doing his best.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-woman-died-hospital-said-150100167.html

Smh, dirty MAGA.

By Joe Edwards
Live News Reporter
FOLLOW
9
Historian Allan Lichtman has suggested that the apparent gender gap in swing state early voting could be a "huge advantage" for Vice President Kamala Harris.

With less than a week until Election Day and early voting already well underway, both Harris and Trump have been looking to maximize their support from swing-state voters. Some early data has shown that the number of Republicans voting early this year is surging after Trump encouraged his supporters to vote before Election Day.

But in a livestream posted to his YouTube channel on Tuesday, Lichtman said gender could be more indicative of who is winning in early voting than party registration.

"We know there is an enormous gender gap in every state, with a double-digit gender gap on both sides.


"And so I think the most indicative statistic of how the early vote is going... is gender."

Newsweek has contacted the Harris and Trump campaigns via email for comment.

Lichtman broke down data from early voting in the all-important swing states from NBC News' early voting tracker.


It showed that in Michigan 56 percent of early voters were women and 44 percent were men. "That's huge," the American University professor said.

In Wisconsin the figure was 51 percent women and 43 percent men, while in Pennsylvania it was 56 to 43 percent.

"So we're talking about anywhere between an eight- and 13-point gap between men and women," Lichtman said.


"And, presuming the gender gap holds, that means a huge advantage in these states."


Arizona was closer but still had a higher turnout among women—48 percent compared with 44 percent men.

In North Carolina the figure was 55 percent women and 45 percent men, which Lichtman said was one of the largest advantages.

The one swing state that did appear gender-balanced was Nevada, with 45 percent each.

"A lot of the misguided pundits saying, 'Republicans are doing better, they're surging'—that's true if you look at the nation numbers, not at the swing state numbers, and it ignores the gender numbers, which I think are far more indicative than the registration numbers," Lichtman said.


"Gender is going to be the most important indicator of results," he added.

Speaking to Newsweek, Lichtman said: "The critical statistic to examine is not party registration because we do not know how registrants voted, and many independents are in the mix.

"The critical statistic is gender because there is a considerable gender gap in this election.

"Women are far outpacing men in early voting in swing states," he added.


Lichtman earned the moniker "Nostradamus", after the French reputed seer of the Renaissance, for his impressive track record predicting the outcomes of presidential elections since 1984, alhough his methods are not without their critics.

His system hinges on 13 keys, all true or false statements, which evaluate the standing of the incumbent party based on a range of issues including the economy, domestic politics and foreign policy.

Lichtman has officially forecast that Vice President Kamala Harris will win the 2024 presidential election, based on this prediction model.

The 13 keys, as set out by the historian in a 2012 article for the Social Education journal, are these:


Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
No primary contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
Incumbent seeking reelection: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
No third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
Strong short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
Strong long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
Major policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
No social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
No scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
No foreign or military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
Major foreign or military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
Charismatic incumbent: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
Uncharismatic challenger: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
If six or more are false, the incumbent party is predicted to lose the election. Should five or fewer be false, it is expected to win.


https://www.newsweek.com/allan-lichtman-kamala-harris-early-voting-advantage-1977486

Nice to read something somewhat meaningful ... but it is very close no matter what. If it's not close based on some of these observations ... wonder what the Trumpian clown show response will be?

There is a huge swath of people that consider themselves true Republicans that are not trumpians. There is at least one and possibly more on this very board. And as always people who are registered as Independent voters have no allegiance to any candidate or party.

And in many states in order to vote in the primaries, my state included, you must register under one of the two parties in order to vote in the primaries.

This election is far too close to call in either direction. What we do know is that the stage is once again being set for this election be contested and claims of cheating have already started. Another rerun of it's only fair if trump wins......

GOP’s aggressive court strategy sets the stage to cast doubt on the 2024 results

This election cycle — in which a former president who tried to overturn his 2020 loss is topping the Republican ticket — has featured an unprecedented amount of pre-election litigation, with the GOP touting that it’s been involved in 130 cases.

The GOP’s aggressive approach in court goes hand in hand with former President Donald Trump’s strategy of using the courts to preemptively cast doubt on the 2024 results. Republicans counter any criticism by saying that they’re focused on making sure the rules are clear and that election officials are on notice that they must follow the law.

Democrats have rushed to court as well — to defend the election policies under GOP attack and to fend off moves they say would kick eligible Americans off the voter rolls.
Yet legally, the onslaught of Republican-led lawsuits has done little to change the status quo around voting and election administration, according to Leah Tulin, an election law expert at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.

“If we measure success in terms of favorable results or winning lawsuits, the effort has been basically a total failure,” Tulin said. “There are still a lot of those cases pending, but they haven’t really moved, and we don’t expect most of them to move, or certainly to have favorable results in them before the election.”

A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee defended the GOP’s record in court, telling CNN that Republicans’ “unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote.”

“We have stopped Democrat schemes to dismantle election safeguards and will continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans,” spokesperson Claire Zunk said.

Here are the biggest issues and cases being litigated in the week before Election Day:

Mail ballot rules

The rules for voting by mail were among the most hotly litigated issues in the lead-up to the 2020 pandemic election, and in some battleground states, the court fights have continued into 2024.

As the Supreme Court has signaled that it is wary of court rulings that change voting policies near Election Day, some courts have balked at mail voting-related lawsuits in key states.

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court rejected an RNC lawsuit seeking to end the practice known as curing — in which voters are allowed to fix defects on their mail ballots — while also turning away a case brought by voting rights groups that challenged the requirement that mail ballots are properly dated.

Republicans have now taken to the US Supreme Court a dispute over provisional voting — a separate opportunity for someone to have their voted counted if their mail ballot is rejected for a technical defect, by casting a ballot in person that is counted once it’s properly vetted. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said counties must count the provisional ballots.

Michigan Republicans secured partial wins in cases that were resolved with requirements that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, tighten up her guidance for how mail ballots are verified.

In lawsuits brought in both state and federal court in Nevada, Republicans lost at the trial court level in cases challenging the acceptance of ballots that arrive after Election Day, including ballots lacking postmarks.

The GOP appeal of the federal case will not be heard before the election, while in the state court litigation — which is focused on the counting of non-postmarked ballots that arrive within three days after an election — a decision from the Nevada Supreme Court could come any time.

Republicans, however, secured a major win with a federal appeals court, stemming from a lawsuit brought against Mississippi, that said counting mail ballots that arrived after Election Day violated federal law.

The ruling does not have immediate impact on practices for this election, as the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals did not block Mississippi’s policy, leaving it to a trial judge to determine the next steps. But Republicans can point to the ruling as supporting their arguments if they seek to challenge late-arriving ballots in states where those ballots could make the difference in key races.

Election certification procedures

Legal fights around the certification of election results have been of critical importance for both parties in recent weeks, with Republicans pushing to give local officials greater discretion when it comes to finalizing the results.

The fight has played out most dramatically in Georgia, whose 16 electoral votes are crucial for both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. In cases brought by Democrats and others, courts have blocked last-minute rules passed by Trump allies on the State Election Board that changed the certification process — including one that required local officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results.

Those changes were immediately challenged in court, where a state judge said local officials cannot delay or decline to certify election results, dealing a blow to an effort by conservatives to gain the legal right to reject results based on a suspicion of fraud or abuse.

In another case involving the certification rules, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a Republican request to immediately reinstate the rules, guaranteeing that they won’t be in place for this cycle.

Democrats had warned the new rules around certification could allow local election officials to delay or altogether decline to certify the election results as they searched for purported fraud or irregularities. Key GOP state officials, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had also opposed the new rules.

Republicans did score a win in the swing state of Arizona last month when a federal judge blocked a new regulation that said in the event local officials have not finalized a county’s election results, the secretary of state was instructed to proceed with the state’s canvass without that county’s votes.

Purging voter rolls

As Republicans have made the supposed threat of noncitizen voting — which, according to studies, is an extremely rare occurrence — a focus of their political messaging, purging alleged noncitizens from the rolls has been a legal flashpoint.

The Republican National Committee and other conservative groups brought lawsuits in several states alleging that election officials are not doing an adequate job of keeping voter rolls clean of noncitizens and other ineligible voters, while defending state laws that stiffen ID requirements.

They secured a partial victory with a Supreme Court ruling that said Arizona could enforce a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement for people registering to vote using a state registration form — but the high court rejected an RNC request to extend that requirement to those using the federal form to register, meaning that those lacking documents proving their citizenship will still be allowed to vote in the presidential election, but not in state or local races.

But conservative lawsuits focused on voter purges have, for the most part, not gained much traction. In Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Michigan, judges rejected lawsuits challenging the registrations of specific voters or otherwise alleging the voter rolls had not been adequately maintained.

A major obstacle for conservatives is a federal law that prohibits systematic list maintenance programs within 90 days of an election.

That law has led to wins in cases by outside liberal and voting rights groups — sometimes joined by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department — against states for seeking to purge voters within the 90-day period. Voting rights advocates have also noted that naturalized citizens are often caught up in such purges because of flaws in the citizenship data that is used.

Federal judges in Alabama and Virginia have blocked those states’ respective purge programs for beginning the removal process within the 90-day window.

Republican state officials have launched an emergency appeal in Virginia, while Trump has attempted to play up the ruling for political gain.

Tulin, of the Brennan Center for Justice, said she thinks much of this year’s litigation was brought to serve as “predicates or placeholders” for conservative litigants to cite in post-election lawsuits should Trump lose.

“Something that they can then point back to and say, ‘Look, we told you there was this issue before,’ and to sort of add credence to post-election litigation,” she said.

Policing poll workers and watchers

Republicans have filed multiple lawsuits challenging how election officials plan to monitor or choose volunteer poll workers — who help perform certain tasks at polling places — and poll watchers, who observe how elections are being administered. The lawsuits pick up on largely unfounded allegations in 2020 by Trump and his allies that Republicans are not given adequate access to monitor the election.

So far, the cases aimed at the 2024 election have had only some success. A Republican lawsuit led to a settlement with Detroit election officials that affirmed that there would be at least one GOP poll watcher in each precinct. But in Wisconsin, a judge rejected a lawsuit there to force election officials to hire more GOP poll workers in Racine.

Some of the legal challenges have taken aim at policies enacted since the tense 2020 scenes to address the harassment and intimidation of poll workers, and in those cases, the record has been mixed. A Nevada GOP challenge to a 2023 law prohibiting poll worker harassment failed.

However, in Arizona, the conservative America First Policy Institute secured a court injunction blocking, on First Amendment grounds, regulatory guidance for how election officials should address intimidating behavior at polling places.

Overseas ballots

In recent weeks, Republicans have taken aim at overseas ballots, alleging that policies in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina allow for ineligible people to vote.

Though closely associated with military voters, expat civilians now make up a larger share of voters abroad than active service members, and the overseas vote has been a focus of the Democratic turnout operation.

Judges this month rejected RNC lawsuits that alleged Michigan and North Carolina were violating their constitutions by counting overseas ballots by citizens abroad who had never lived in those states but had a parent (or in Michigan, a spouse) who did.

A lawsuit brought by House members alleging Pennsylvania is not adequately verifying overseas ballots got a chilly reception in a court hearing this month, but a ruling has not yet been handed down.

Other election regulations challenged

This litigation cycle has shown that Republicans are looking at every aspect of how elections are run, while Democrats have also been quick to go to court over rules implemented by Trump allies on election boards.

In North Carolina, the GOP secured a court order blocking a rule that would have allowed University of North Carolina Chapel Hill students to use their digital school IDs as a form of photo identification to vote.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been successful in halting last-minute changes made by the Georgia Election Board concerning, among other things, poll worker access, ballot counting and drop-box surveillance.

Voting rights groups also successfully sued Nebraska over Republican officials’ refusal to carry out a state law restoring the franchise to those who have been convicted of a felony.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/28/politics/gop-election-lawsuits-trump-litigation/index.html

‘January 6th is going to be pretty fun’: How MAGA activists are preparing to undermine the election if Trump loses

Before Election Day has even arrived, the “Stop the Steal” movement has reemerged in force, with some of the same activists who tried to overturn former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss outlining a step-by-step guide to undermine the results if he falls short again.

For months, those activists – who have been priming Trump supporters to believe the only way the former president can lose in 2024 is through fraud – have laid out proposals to thwart a potential Kamala Harris victory. Their plans include challenging results in court, pressuring lawmakers to block election certification, and encouraging protests – culminating on January 6, 2025, the day Congress will once again certify the results.

“I have a plan and strategy,” Ivan Raiklin, a former Green Beret and political operative who has close ties to associates of Trump, told a group of Pennsylvania activists earlier this month. “And then January 6th is going to be pretty fun.”

Trump’s allies – and the former president himself – are increasingly pushing debunked claims of voter fraud, spreading their rhetoric through podcasts with massive audiences, megachurch sermons and political rallies in key states. Some Trump backers, including pastors associated with Christian nationalist ideas, have described the election as a fight between good and evil, describing Harris as the antichrist or suggesting that God has anointed Trump as the victor.

Four years ago, Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden didn’t truly materialize until after the election. They were largely improvised and ad hoc, with a flurry of hastily filed lawsuits that went nowhere and efforts to convince state legislators to block certification that fell short.

But this time around, MAGA activists have been planning to undermine a potential Harris victory well in advance of the election, with some even arguing that state legislators should simply ignore the election results and award electoral votes to Trump by default.

Congress passed a measure in 2022 that makes it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, and with Trump now out of office, he and his allies cannot wield levers of the executive branch to try to influence the election. But experts say that the people involved in these conspiracy theory-driven efforts appear to be better organized, more determined and, in some cases, more extreme than four years ago.

Federal law enforcement officials are also ringing alarm bells. A bulletin put out earlier this month by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence warned that extremist rhetoric about the election could motivate people to “engage in violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle.”

Marc Harris, a former investigator for the House select committee that investigated January 6, 2021, told CNN he’s concerned that the tactics to undermine the election have evolved since 2020, even with the safeguards put into place since then.

“Those looking to overturn the election are way ahead of where they were in 2020,” said Harris. “But on the flip side, the pro-democracy defenders are also more prepared. How that shakes out is not clear to me.”

Baseless fears of a ‘steal’

Unfounded claims about malign forces conspiring to cheat Trump out of an otherwise inevitable election win have been increasing in recent weeks from influential members of the MAGA movement.

“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.

And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.

“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted.

Some of the debunked ideas that surfaced after the 2020 election and sought to explain how Trump lost remain rampant, such as the notion that voting machines are flipping votes to favor Democrats or that election officials in swing states have been complicit in widespread voter fraud.

“The same systems are being used. Many of the same players are in place,” Joe Hoft, who has contributed to the conspiracy-theory-peddling website The Gateway Pundit, told CNN when asked about the 2024 election. “I don’t trust the process. The process is broken.”

In recent episodes of “War Room,” a prominent program airing election conspiracy theories started by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, guests have repeatedly suggested that Democratic governors in swing states or Democratic members of Congress could block certification of a legitimate Trump victory.

They’ve cited comments like Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin telling Axios earlier this month that he didn’t assume Trump would use “free, fair and honest” means to win – even though Raskin said he would “obviously accept” a Trump victory if it was honest.

“They call us election deniers all the time,” GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said on a “War Room” episode last week, in which she raised concerns about overseas military voting. “But it looks, it appears to be that there is a big fight being set up over the certification of the election and the outcome of the election.”

Greene has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.

Trump himself has echoed some of the conspiracy theories pushed by his supporters, suggesting that election fraud is rampant in 2024. But party officials have struck a different tone.

“You can trust American elections,” Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law and the Republican National Committee co-chair, said on a call with reporters Wednesday. Touting her party’s election-integrity efforts, she said that “we want to make people all across this country feel good about the process of voting in the United States of America.”

“President Trump, Team Trump, and the RNC have been incredibly consistent and clear: we are actively working to protect the vote and all Americans must get out and vote to make this election TOO BIG TO RIG,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, told CNN.

Plans to block a Harris win

While some groups have been gathering supposed examples of election fraud for lawsuits to challenge a potential Harris win, other pro-Trump activists have coalesced around a plan to ensure Trump returns to the White House: state legislators can simply allocate their state’s electors for Trump regardless of vote counts.

The strategy generated headlines last week after Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, said it “makes a lot of sense” to allocate electors that way in North Carolina, where he suggested damage from Hurricane Helene may disenfranchise some voters.

Harris, who later walked back his comments, initially voiced support for the proposal after hearing a presentation from Raiklin, who’s known for having posted a memo that argued then-Vice President Mike Pence could have blocked certification of the 2020 election results.

Raiklin has been espousing the plan for legislators to seize control of awarding electoral votes in various states in recent weeks and receiving support from other far-right figures. Mark Finchem, a Republican candidate for state senate in Arizona, wrote on X that the “extraordinary circumstances” in North Carolina – a reference to the hurricane damage – “provide a justifiable pathway for the legislature to take action.”

Noel Fritsch, publisher of the far-right online publication National File, has argued that the US Constitution gives all state legislatures the power to choose electoral college members, which he told CNN he believes could create more national stability.

“Any movement toward direct democracy is, of course, as history shows, a move toward chaos, and that’s what we’re seeing,” Fritsch said. He cited arguments from some Republican Florida legislators who claimed they had the power to a select a slate of electors during the razor-thin 2000 presidential race.

But the recent proposal from people like Fritsch and Raiklin is rife with flaws, according to legal experts and officials. Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of North Carolina’s election board, called the proposal a “violation of law,” and officials in the state have said that voting is proceeding without major issues despite the impact of the hurricane.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told CNN that state legislatures would have to first repeal their laws that dictate how elections operate before appointing electors directly.

“It’s too late for the legislatures to act,” Muller said. “You’d have to go through and remove all those laws on the books, and if you’re doing that in the middle of this moment when there’s already elections happening, then you’re going to risk due process violation of changing the rules arbitrarily.”

Concerns about violence

Incidents of political violence and threats have already occurred this year, including two apparent attempts to assassinate Trump, shootings involving a DNC office and suspicious packages mailed to election offices.

In the weeks ahead of the election, some pro-Trump activists have been openly alluding to more violent chaos that they say is on the horizon.

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn said on a program last week that he thought Trump would win all 50 states if there’s a fair election but offered a grim prediction if the winner remains unknown for days.

“I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting and there could actually be violence because people are going to be, people are so upset after 2020,” said Flynn, who four years ago drew comparisons to Civil War battlefields in a speech the day before the Capitol riot.

Some extremists are already preparing “violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war, raising the risk of violence against government targets and ideological opponents,” according to a DHS memo from September obtained by the watchdog group Property of the People and shared with CNN.

Posts in recent months on the obscure message board 8kun, formerly 8chan, have called for violence against undocumented immigrants and urged “election steal defense prep,” while messages on a forum called “The Donald” encouraged violent shows of “force” to stop the “steal,” according to an October bulletin from Colorado’s Department of Public Safety also obtained by Property of the People.

On Telegram, violent rhetoric related to election denialism has more than quadrupled over the course of October, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that tracks such content.

But unlike 2020, more extremist groups may have moved their discussions off public online forums and into private chats, hiding online conversations that may involve planning for the days after the election, said Devin Burghart, the executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit that studies far-right movements.

Still others have cast the stakes of the election in foreboding, apocalyptic terms.

Speaking this month at a political rally known as the ReAwaken America Tour, Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina called on supporters to keep Harris out of power by any means necessary.

“Is there anybody standing with me who would do whatever it takes to make sure she’s not the next president of the United States? Because we are at war,” Burns said. “This is about good versus evil, of a real enemy come from the gates of hell.”

Asked about his comments, Burns told CNN he was referring to spiritual war and that he condemns “talks of physical violence in any form if in the unlikely event that President Donald Trump loses the election.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/31/poli...rmine-election-if-trump-loses/index.html

This is who they are. This is what they have become.

Prepare for crickets.

I'm always prepared for that. No matter what trumpians do, they don't care.

Once again in the name of god, region stirring up another war.

I hope in the end, they all swing for their treason. I’d offer to buy the rope, but I don’t have Elon money like that.

Stacey Williams is 27th woman to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct

Stacey Williams, who alleged in interviews this past week that former President Trump groped her while Jeffrey Epstein watched in 1993, is one of roughly 27 women who have accused the Republican presidential candidate of sexual misconduct.

The big picture: As with all previous accusations, the Trump campaign strongly denies the former model's claims. The ex-president has never been criminally charged for any sexual misconduct — though a jury in a civil case last year found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll.

Trump's boast in a now-infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape about groping women that leaked a month before the 2016 presidential election drew national attention to misconduct allegations against him.
Williams told the Washington Post she's speaking out now — with just over a week to go until Election Day — because her account is mentioned in a documentary film released this month that was recorded in 2022.

What they're saying: "It was only when he emerged on the political scene as an America First Republican when women began baselessly accusing him with lies in desperate pursuit of hurting his campaign or money and fame," Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in part of an emailed statement.

"Every woman who actually knows President Trump knows he is generous and kind, and has put many women in positions of power in both business and politics."
She accused Williams of announcing her "fake story on a Harris campaign zoom call two weeks before the election" and claimed Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign was trying to use it as a distraction from unconfirmed reports about her family.

The allegations

Stacey Williams alleged Trump and Epstein exchanged smiles after Trump groped her at Trump Tower in 1993. "The hands were moving all over me," she told WaPo. The Guardian first reported on her allegations after she took part in a Zoom call organized by the grassroots group "Survivors for Kamala."

E. Jean Carroll, a writer, alleged in New York magazine in 2019 that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. In 2022, she filed a suit against him. The jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but did not determine that he raped her.

A separate jury this year found Trump had damaged Carroll's reputation, and ordered him to pay her $83.3 million in damages. Trump has maintained his innocence in the case and sought to appeal the judgement.

Jessica Leeds accused Trump in October 2016 of groping her on a plane in the 1970s and recounted her allegations in testimony for Carroll's civil case.

Miss USA contestants

Five former Miss Teen USA contestants told BuzzFeed News in 2016 that Trump allegedly walked into the dressing room when they were changing in 1997.

Victoria Hughes, one of the accusers, said it was "inappropriate," while Mariah Billado claimed Trump said: "Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before."

Cassandra Searles alleged in a 2018 Facebook post that Trump "continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room" during Miss USA 2013. Yahoo reported on the post, which is no longer public, from the former Miss Washington winner in June 2018.

Tasha Dixon told CBS affiliate KCAL-TV in October 2016 that Trump unexpectedly entered a dressing room at the 2001 Miss USA pageant, which he owned, while "some girls were topless" and others "were naked."

Bridget Sullivan alleged to BuzzFeed in May 2016 that Trump "walked through the dressing rooms" in 2000 while the Miss New Hampshire winner and other Miss Universe contestants "were all naked" and that "he'd hug you just a little low on your back" and give "a squeeze that your creepy uncle would."

Temple Taggart McDowell alleged to the New York Times in May 2016 that Trump kissed her "directly on the lips" in 1997 when the then 21-year-old Miss Utah winner was competing in Miss USA.

Ninni Laaksonen claimed to Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanoma in October 2016 that Trump "squeezed my butt" backstage before an appearance on "The David Letterman Show" in 2006, when the Miss Finland winner was competing in the Miss Universe competition that Trump then owned.

Alleged incidents at Mar-a-Lago

Natasha Stoynoff wrote in an October 2016 article for People magazine that Trump allegedly pushed her against a wall and was "forcing his tongue down my throat" in 2005, when she was visiting Mar-a-Lago to interview him and Melania Trump for an article about their marriage.

Cathy Heller accused Trump in October 2016 of forcibly kissing her during a Mother's Day brunch she attended with her family at Mar-a-Lago in or around 1997.

Melinda "Mindy" McGillivray alleged to the Palm Beach Post in October 2016 that Trump grabbed her buttocks when she attended a 2003 Mar-a-Lago party.

Karen Johnson alleged that Trump groped and kissed her at a Mar-a-Lago New Year's Eve party in the early 2000s, per a book excerpt Esquire published in October 2019.
Former "Apprentice" contestants

Jennifer Murphy, a former "Apprentice" contestant, told Grazia magazine in October 2016 that Trump allegedly "kissed me on the lips" after she had a job interview with him.

Summer Zervos filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in 2017, saying he lied when he denied ever groping or kissing her without her consent in 2007. The former "Apprentice" contestant later settled the case without compensation.
Allegations from the 1990s

Jill Harth, a former business associate of Trump, alleged in 1997 that he groped her under the table during a dinner with him and her then-partner in 1992.

She accused the then-businessman in a lawsuit of sexual harassment and attempted rape, but AP reported she dropped the case after settling a separate breach-of-contract suit with him.

Kristin Anderson, also a former model, told the Washington Post in October 2016 that Trump touched her through her underwear at a Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.

Lisa Boyne told HuffPost in October 2016 that at a dinner in the mid-1990s, Trump insisted women walk on top of his table while he allegedly "stuck his head right underneath their skirts."

Amy Dorris, a former model, alleged to the Guardian in September 2020 that Trump groped her at the 1997 U.S. Open in New York and forced his tongue into her mouth.

Karena Virginia accused Trump in October 2016 of touching her breast while the yoga instructor was waiting for a car outside the U.S. Open tennis tournament in 1998.

Other allegations

Rachel Crooks in October 2016 accused Trump of forcibly kissing her on the mouth in 2006 in Trump Tower, where she was working as a receptionist.

Jessica Drake, a former adult film star, said in October 2016 she was with two other women in Trump's hotel suite during a 2006 charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe when Trump allegedly "kissed each one of us without asking permission."

Ivana Trump accused Trump during a 1989 deposition in their divorce proceedings of sexually assaulting her. She later denied that the alleged attack took place and said in 2015 that the "story is totally without merit," per ABC News.

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/28/trump-sexual-misconduct-allegations-women

And now we'll hear how all of these women are lying and we can only believe a proven habitual liar to be the beacon of truth.

It's as if Deshaun Watson were running for president.

Trump sues CBS over ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Harris. Legal experts call it ‘frivolous and dangerous’

Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Thursday against CBS, demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit was immediately ridiculed by First Amendment attorneys, who called it “frivolous and dangerous.”

In the complaint filed in US District Court in the Northern District of Texas, Trump’s legal counsel claimed CBS’ “60 Minutes” interview with Harris and the associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the presidential election in her favor.

The lawsuit also says Trump is seeking for the network to “publicly release the full, unedited transcript of the [interview].”

The US District Court in Northern Texas currently assigns cases in a way that any case filed in its Amarillo Division is automatically assigned to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee.

It was unclear why the suit was filed in the Texas court but could be a case of “judge shopping,” the practice of strategically filing cases in courthouses where the lawsuits are almost guaranteed to be heard by judges perceived to be sympathetic to the litigants.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the show’s interview with Harris was grossly mis-edited by CBS at the direction of the campaign, and he has called for the network to “lose its license.”

“To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” the filing stated.

Trump’s legal counsel argued that “CBS’s misconduct was unconscionable because it amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.”

A spokesperson for CBS said that Trump’s claims against “60 Minutes” are false.

“The Interview was not doctored; and 60 MINUTES did not hide any part of the Vice President’s answer to the question at issue. 60 MINUTES fairly presented the Interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it. The lawsuit Trump has brought today against CBS is completely without merit and we will vigorously defend against it,” the spokesperson continued.

The lawsuit was slammed by prominent First Amendment attorneys, who called it meritless and absurd.

“This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media. The Supreme Court has made it crystal clear: the First Amendment leaves it to journalists – and not the courts, the government or candidates for office – to decide how to report the news,” said First Amendment attorney Charles Tobin of the law firm Ballard Spahr. Tobin is representing CNN in several ongoing matters.

Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer of Pentagon Papers fame, agreed, telling CNN: “The First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation. Mr. Trump may disagree with this or that coverage of him, but the First Amendment permits the press to decide how to cover elections, not the candidates seeking public office.”

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, put it more simply: “It’s ridiculous junk and should be mocked.”

Trump mentioned the lawsuit during his rally in Henderson, Nevada, Thursday, saying, “In honor of you, I just sued CBS today.”

CNN previously reported Trump backed out of a planned interview with “60 Minutes” in early October.

In a statement, the Trump campaign denied it had agreed to the interview.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/01/media/trump-cbs-lawsuit-harris-60-minutes-interview/index.html

Yet more of this.....

TRUMP IS THE DW OF POLITICS.

BUt WHaAt wAZS ThE CoNtExTt?

clearly more evidence of garbage

I'm sure someone will be along shortly to call this a red herring.