07/18/25
Good morning! It’s Friday, July 18th.
National Caviar Day.
I love caviar. Not a joke. I’ve got a caviar palette (on a Taco Bell budget). Life finds a way.
And now, the news.
ICE Gets Access to Medicaid
-via AP News, Journal of American Medical Association, and Georgetown
Big news day! Top to bottom rough stuff - Let’s get into it!
Starting with a significant (in a bad way) agreement made between the Department of Homeland Security and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which will allow ICE officials to access the personal information of the more than 79 million people here in America who are on Medicaid, including the names, addresses, birthdays, and ethnic and racial information, to find people who may not be living here legally.
Oh don’t worry, they can’t download the information. Officials just have access to it from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, until September 9th.
Hey, I wonder if they’ll use it to look up anyone else while they’re there. Like an ex that doesn’t want them to know where they live. Or someone they went on one date with and that person never called them again because they felt unsafe (or, frankly, learned they were ICE and decided it wasn’t a match), and now they have their home address.
What will prevent them from doing that?
Immigrants without legal status are not allowed to sign up for Medicaid. Like many programs supported by tax dollars, they pay into the program, but are not able to benefit from it. However, by law, all states must offer emergency Medicaid for lifesaving services in emergency rooms.
So what’s happening here, is that someone has gone to the ER in a life-or-death emergency, and now – that moment is being used against them.
Because that is the point of all of this – to hurt people.
It also prompted me to wonder… how often is this service used by immigrants without legal status?
Between 2017 and 2023, $27 billion in federal and state funding was spent on Emergency Medicaid for non-citizen immigrants. Which might sound like a lot of money – except that represents .4% of all Medicaid spending in that same period, which totaled $860 billion.
It should also be noted that those same immigrants without legal status paid well over that $27 billion each year, in fact. Hard numbers are difficult to obtain for several reasons, but one study reported a 2017 contribution of $18.9 billion.
Taking the average noncitizen population growth rate over that same period (which is .75%) and applying it to $18.9 billion, we’re looking at a total contribution of $135.32 billion.
$135.32 billion in that same period where they were only using $27 billion.
I point all of this out because, while Homeland Security says this is going to be used on their mission to deport 3000 people a day, adding up to one-third of our entire county, but Health and Human Services says this is a cost-cutting measure – which is an easily provable lie.
Breonna Taylor’s Killer
-via NY Times
Mad? Good, hold onto that feeling. On Thursday the chief of the Department of Justice’s civil rights unit asked a federal judge to have Breonna Taylor’s killer sentenced to one day in prison.
This is the chief of the civil rights division.
Brett Hankison is the officer who was found guilty on one count of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights when he fired ten (ten!) shots through the window during a drug that (that wasn’t even meant for her apartment).
His shots were not the shots that killed her. The two other officers who fired the shots that killed her were never charged.
Obviously all three officers are white. Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old Black woman.
Part of the reason we’re supposed to feel so bad for this guy and believe this SINGLE DAY IN PRISON is enough of a punishment is because he lost his job first years ago, he’s already a felon, and “The jury’s verdict will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again,” the filing added.
Yeah, literally the least that can happen here is that he can never own a gun or be a cop again. That’s like – duh. I mean, it happens every single day but he should never be able to be a cop or own a gun again.
One day in prison.
I don’t even… I can only hope that he knows what he did, he spends every single day for the rest of his life trying to somehow contribute to this world in a positive manner to atone even a little bit for what happened on that day and then, at the end of each night, before he closes his eyes, his last thought is the absolute gut-wrenching same of that day.
Votes
Coupla votes to cover real quick –
In the Senate: Republicans voted to pass $9 billion in spending cuts that will, among other things, cancel some foreign AID as well as funding for NPR and PBS.
Resistance queen Mitch McConnell voted against it in the procedural stage but, when he saw that his vote mattered… he voted to get it across the finish line.
North Carolina’s Thom Tillis voted for it, saying - “I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret. Some second- and third-order effects. And I suspect that when we do, we’ll have to come back and fix it.”
You ding dongs. You know you could have just… thought about what those effects would be, right? Thought about them and waited to pass this?
There were multiple Republicans with reservations… who still voted to defund Big Bird.
Such bravery. It now heads to the House for a vote. It will need to pass the House and be signed by the President by midnight tonight in order to go into effect.
And over in the House, they have passed a piece of legislation that will regulate crypto for the first time. I’m mostly just telling you this because it’s called the GENIUS Act… that’s so embarrassing for them. Silly geese.
Trump Diagnosis
-via BBC, Johns Hopkins, ABC News,
On Thursday the White House press secretary announced that the president is suffering from something called chronic venous insufficiency, or CVI.
We just did math, let’s do science (I’d love to take credit for this but I grew up with a nurse who never once talked to me like I wasn’t also a nurse and I’d just have to be like yes, I also know that thirteen syllable wordand then eventually did – and she had, among other things, an anatomically correct plastic heart in in her office that was cool to look at).
Anyway, all this is, is that the heart’s pumping that blood all through the body, but with CVI, the leg veins don’t allow blood to go back up to the heart, so instead it starts to pool in the legs.
Over the last few days, people have noticed that his legs have been swollen, so now there’s this new diagnosis.
One of the causes of this can be from being overweight and, although he has said he’s the healthiest president in history (real quote) he is objectively overweight. Other causes include high blood pressure due to sitting or standing for long periods, and a lack of exercise – both of which align with him.
Now, with all things concerning Trump’s medical – it is important to remember his team is never honest. We’ve never gotten a full medical report. CVI can be very minor, but it can be more serious with comorbidities, which we don’t know if he has. Frankly, we don’t even know for sure what happened with his ear. I pierced my ear in high school and there’s still a scar. That dude has no scar.
Here is why I’m noting that – a diuretic is one treatment for CVI, but only when heart failure or kidney disease are also linked. That would likely be administered via IV. Going back as far as February, Trump has been seen with bruising, or very obvious makeup to cover bruising, in the same spot on his right hand. He says it’s from shaking hands, which is just a lie. It just is.
The bruising on his hand was again said to be from shaking hands and taking aspirin, which can lead to an increase in bruising.
I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t want to make you one. (Well, you can be a medical professional if you want, just don’t be a conspiracy theorist). But we do deserve answers to those questions.
Meanwhile – from the ankles to the brain man… at a speech this week Trump talked about the time his Uncle taught the Unibomber at MIT and the stories his uncle told him about the Unibomber.
Coupla things… Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, when to Harvard and University of Michigan – but not MIT. So it would have made it very tough for him to have been a student of Trump’s uncle.
It also would have been tricky for his Uncle to tell stories about the Unibomber, because Ksczynsk was anon until 1996, when his brother was like oh no!!!... Trump’s uncle died in 1985.
He also just recently said Biden never should have nominated Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve… but oh no man – that was Trump in 2017!
So, you know… I’m sure he’s shaking a lot of hands and taking asprin but I think it’s also fair to believe that, as has always been the case, we’re not getting the full story on his mental and physical health.
Epstein
-via NBC News, Politico, Axios, NY Times, Twitter
Wanna talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a while?
Just a couple updates – Trump, unsurprisingly, said on Thursday that the White House will not appoint a special counsel to review the Epstein case. I mean… feels very obvious. That one we saw coming from a mile away. It’s so funny to me that some people who still support Trump thought this was a good idea. How do you not get it, you know?
After two votes in the House to try and get the DOJ to release the files (which the Republicans all voted down – because they really want these files out there! But not the in the way that will prove what they are starting to realize is the truth… uh oh!), the Dems tried it in the Senate with Arizona’s Ruben Gallego requesting unanimous consent to pass a resolution to demand the files be released. Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin called the move “pure theater.”
And while all of that was going on, Oregon Ron Wyden, who has been looking into Epstein’s finances for the last three years, came out on Thursday to say – hey, just a quick heads up, big red flag – four banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transfers, including 4,725 wire transfers from rich friends and payments to women. He also noted that the DOJ has all of this information but says they don’t have enough evidence to investigate.
And finally, breaking literally as I was about to hit record – Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the Department of Justice reviewed a 2003 birthday letter from Trump to Epstein which features lines of typewritten text framed by a drawing of a naked woman, with Trump’s signature below the woman’s waist.
What did the letter say?
“May every day be another wonderful secret.”
I should note the president has denied the letter is his and said he’s¿ I ¿
CVF b suing the Wall Street Journal saying, “I never wrote a picture in my life.” Yeah man, your brain the best brain. Again, this is breaking as I went to hit record.
All of this could be solved in an instant – just release the files.
And that’s it, that’s the news.
I’m proud of… caviar. I don’t care – it tastes so good!
Also Taco Bell! I also doesn’t care – it also tastes so good!
But more than that… because you are also fancy, but a person of the people… I’m proud of you.