I can see that. When California announced earlier this year that it would begin to make its own insulin and sell it for $30, companies suddenly began dropping their prices to $35 to match.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1164572757/california-contract-cheap-insulin-calrx

Well, according to the article:

Of course, economists are only expecting price increases to slow, not to reverse, which is what it would take for prices for groceries, haircuts and other things to return to where they were before inflation took off during 2021.

“They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable,” Harris said in her afternoon speech at the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention in Orlando. “Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”

Makes sense to me.

"Liberal media has distorted my record since the beginning of my judicial career, and I refuse to let false accusations go unchecked," Bradley told the Journal Sentinel in an email. "On my wikipedia page, I added excerpts from actual opinions and removed dishonest information about my background."

What, then, was getting under her skin?

It's clear Bradley really, really disliked the section in her Wikipedia page dealing with a Republican challenge to the stay-at-home order issued by the administration of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in response the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to her Wikipedia page, in May 2020, Bradley "compared the state's stay-at-home orders to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II," a case known as Korematsu v. the United States.

This is why they're mad

President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022 by a narrow party-line vote, empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time in the program’s six-decade history.

The provision aims to make drugs more affordable for older Americans but will likely reduce pharmaceutical industry profits.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists," Jones said. "The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence— is shameful.”

And there’s also this:

Yesterday — after Trump posted on his social media website that authorities were going "after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!" — Advance Democracy noted that Trump supporters were "using the term ‘rigger’ in lieu of a racial slur" in posts online.

According to ABC 13 Eyewitness News in Houston, things started when school trustee Melissa Dungan declared that she had spoken to parents who were upset about "displays of personal ideologies in classrooms." When pressed for an example, according to the news report, "Dungan referred to a first grade student whose parent claimed they were so upset by a poster showing hands of people of different races, that they transferred classrooms." … Some other members of the school board did, in fact, argue that there was nothing objectionable about such a poster. But Dungan was backed up by another trustee, Misty Odenweller, who insisted that the depiction of uh, race-mixing was in some way a "violation of the law." The two women are part of "Mama Bears Rising," a secretive far-right group fueling the book-banning mania in Conroe and the surrounding area. At least 59 books have been banned due to their efforts.

WTF

Here’s some good news about that with California making its own insulins:

The state-label insulins will cost no more than $30 per 10 milliliter vial, and no more than $55 for a box of five pre-filled pen cartridges — for both insured and uninsured patients. The medicines will be available nationwide, the governor's office said.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1164572757/california-contract-cheap-insulin-calrx

The air-defence system fired its rounds to shoot the drones down, thus revealing its location, Rybar reported. Ukraine waited until it had fired all its ammo, then targeted it with cruise missiles.

The Texas Democratic Party issued a scathing statement Friday, accusing Johnson of being dishonest with Dallas voters.

“[T]he voters of Dallas deserved to know where he stood before he ran for reelection as Mayor,” the chair and vice-chair of the party said. “He wasn’t honest with his constituents, and knew he would lose to a Democrat if he flipped before the election.”

Our billionaires are not okay. The most obvious example, of course, is Musk, who is having a midlife crisis so unhinged that it would be upsetting if he weren't such a terrible person. He purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year, out of nothing more than a fit of pique over the company's efforts to keep the social media app from being too overrun by Nazis. As the company swirls down the toilet under his watch, his public behavior gets ever more erratic. The threat from Threads, a Meta-owned competitor that launched earlier this month, caused Musk, age 52, to react with a level of immaturity that would be cause for alarm in a junior high school kid. He challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a "cage match." And then again to a "literal dick measuring contest." He keeps throwing schoolboy insults at Zuckerberg.

Kinda hilarious and sad at the same time.

Ads for brands including Adobe, Gilead Sciences, the University of Maryland’s football team, New York University Langone Hospital and NCTA-The Internet and Television Association were run alongside tweets from the account that had garnered hundreds of thousands of views, CNN observed.

Spokespeople for NCTA and pharmaceutical company Gilead said that they immediately paused their ad spending on X after CNN flagged their ads on the pro-Nazi account.

And they’ve already filed lawsuits:

The suits make similar and overlapping claims that Medicare negotiations are unconstitutional.

The companies argue that the talks would force drugmakers to sell their medicines at huge discounts, below market rates. They assert this violates the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay reasonable compensation for private property taken for public use.

The suits also argue that the process violates drugmakers’ free speech rights under the First Amendment, essentially forcing companies to agree that Medicare is negotiating a fair price.

They also contend that the talks violate the Eighth Amendment by levying an excessive fine if drugmakers refuse to engage in the process.

Just ridiculous.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/29/10-drugs-to-face-medicare-price-negotiations-see-the-list.html

“I offered a real date. Dana White (UFC boss) offered to make this a legit competition for charity.

“Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead.

“If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

Palestine strikes Israel: 22 dead (huge outcry) Israel strikes Palestine: 200 dead (nobody bats an eye)

Source for only 22 dead? Associated Press is reporting at least 250 people were killed and 1,500 wounded in Israel

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-gaza-hamas-rockets-airstrikes-tel-aviv-11fb98655c256d54ecb5329284fc37d2

“What a joke,” Newsom spokesperson Nathan Click said in a statement, according to Politico. “Desantis’ counterproposal is littered with crutches to hide his insecurity and ineptitude — swapping opening statements with a hype video, cutting down the time he needs to be on stage, adding cheat notes and a cheering section.”

If true, that is so weak.

For years abortion has been thought of as a bitterly partisan issue, but the Ohio vote is the latest example of how the issue seems to defy the partisan 50/50, red/blue lens that defines most everything in American politics in 2023. In state after state, initiative after initiative, voters seem to be coming down on the side of abortion rights — and the data suggest one big driver of those outcomes might be suburban Republicans.

While the “In God We Trust” motto does not reference any one religion, critics of the law fear it will further blur the lines separating church and state, which follows a pattern seen in Southern legislatures in recent years.

This major questions doctrine, at least as it is understood by the Court’s current majority, emerged almost from thin air in the past several years. And it has been wielded almost exclusively by Republican-appointed justices to invalidate policies created by a Democratic administration. This doctrine is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Nor is it mentioned in any federal statute. It appears to have been completely made up by justices who want to wield outsize control over federal policy.

In a memorable line from her ruling, Chutkan wrote, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”

Other judges typically have handed down sentences that are more lenient than those requested by prosecutors. Chutkan, however, has matched or exceeded prosecutors' recommendations in 19 of her 38 sentences. In four of those cases, prosecutors weren't seeking any jail time at all.

To get the construction of its Arizona chip factory back on track, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) says it needs more workers with the expertise and skillsets that Americans don't have. Since June, the company has been in discussions with the US government about receiving accelerated non-immigrant E-2 visas for as many as 500 Taiwanese workers.

…

The Arizona Pipe Trades 469 Union, a labor union that says it represents over 4,000 pipefitters, plumbers, welders, and HVAC technicians, has started a petition to urge US lawmakers to deny these visas. The petition claims that TSMC has deliberately misrepresented the skillset of Arizona's workforce. By approving TSMC's visa requests, a union website says lawmakers would be laying the groundwork for "cheap labor" to replace American workers.

Kbin adds another 63k.

FYI, Lemmy doesn’t count lurkers as active users. Here’s how Lemmy counts active users:

An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

You’re not kidding. Somebody did a survey in 2018 of insulin prices around the world, and here are the top ten most expensive:

• United States — $98.70
• Chile — $21.48
• Mexico — $16.48
• Japan — $14.40
• Switzerland — $12.46
• Canada — $12.00
• Germany — $11.00
• Korea — $10.30
• Luxembourg — $10.15
• Italy — $10.03

The study revealed that the manufacturer price for any given type of insulin averaged five to ten times higher in the U.S. ($98.70 USD) than in all other OECD countries ($8.81 on average).

Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country

“District leaders believe that the AP African American Studies course will be a valuable addition to the district’s curriculum and will help our young people understand and appreciate the rich diversity of our society,” said Jeremy Owoh, the superintendent of the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District. The district’s only high school, Jacksonville High, will offer the class as an elective, he said.

And there's this historical significance:

Central High School in the Little Rock School District also will offer the course as planned, the district said. The school was among the first in the nation to integrate in 1957.

The article literally gave the reasons why:

“It sends a real message in a time when we are seeing attacks legislatively and through violence against the LGBTQ+ community that the majority of people reject that kind of animus,” Rob Hill, state director of the Human Rights Campaign’s Mississippi chapter, said in an interview after Nelson’s victory. “I think a lot of youth around the state who have felt like their leaders are rejecting them or targeting them won’t feel as lonely today.”

...

Nelson’s victory comes on the heels of a historic wave of restrictions passed by Republican-controlled legislatures targeting the rights of transgender people. LGBTQ advocates say they’ve seen a record number of measures aimed at their community in 2023. In February, Mississippi enacted a ban on gender-affirming hormones or surgery for anyone in the state younger than 18.

My guess is that they probably didn’t want to fire him explicitly for the baptism because of the recent Supreme Court decision that allowed a high school football coach to pray on the field: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/football-coach-fired-praying-field-backed-supreme-court-resigns-rcna103789

Marvin Dunn, a professor emeritus at Florida International University and author of “A History of Florida: Through Black Eyes,” said DeSantis would gain no political advantage from his argument because “it is so outrageous that people are going to reject it.”

“These children know in their hearts and in their minds that slavery was evil,” he said.

“One of the main things about slavery, beyond the physical damage that it did to people of so many generations, was that it prevented people from becoming what they could have become,” he said.

“So what if you became a carpenter or a blacksmith or a good maid? Your chances of that were not determined by you, it was determined by somebody else. That’s not a rationalization for enslavement.”

Well said

Cannon, a 42-year-old former federal prosecutor appointed by Trump to the bench in 2020 late in his presidency, also neglected to swear in the prospective jury pool - an obligatory procedure in which people who may serve on the panel pledge to tell the truth during the selection process. This error forced Cannon to re-start jury selection before the trial ended abruptly with defendant William Spearman pleading guilty as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

Cannon’s decision to close the courtroom represents “a fundamental constitutional error,” said Stephen Smith, a professor at the Santa Clara School of Law in California. “She ignored the public trial right entirely. It’s as though she didn’t know it existed.”

June 1, I think. Hitting 100k users in just over a month is kind of intense.

I understand your hyperbole, but what do you mean he hasn’t been paying attention? Here’s a quote from the article:

“We know this. As I made clear in my inaugural address, white supremacy is a poison. It’s a poison,” Biden said at the event. “It’s been allowed to grow faster and fester in our communities to the point where the intelligence community’s determined … that domestic terrorism, rooted in white supremacy, is the greatest terrorist threat we face in the homeland.”

We’re not talking about semiconductor workers though. This is from the earlier article that this article references:

TSMC and its suppliers are in talks with the U.S. government to assist with the application process for non-immigrant visas in a bid to dispatch more than 500 experienced workers as early as July to expedite the construction of cleanroom facilities and the installation of pipelines and other equipment, three chip supply chain executives said.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/TSMC-to-send-hundreds-more-workers-to-speed-U.S.-plant-construction

Sources tell ABC News that Trump's legal advisers have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.

On Wednesday, DeSantis agreed, telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity: “Absolutely I’m game. Just tell me when and where.”

An aide to Newsom told POLITICO that the governor was also in. Newsom’s office had sent a formal request offer to Fox News last week with proposed debate dates of Nov. 8 or Nov. 10. That request called for Hannity to serve as the sole moderator for a 90-minute forum on Fox News that would not include an in-studio audience and would air live.

Glad to see these thoughts spelled out:

We inhabit an era where the question “what do we do about Fox News propaganda?” sees a real shortage of solutions that are both practical and don’t run afoul of the First Amendment. Everything in the conversation tends to steer toward what’s not possible. Or they involve unworkable gibberish like trying to bring back the Fairness Doctrine (which wouldn’t apply to cable TV anyway).

So I think it’s good that activists are trying something creative and new. I think it’s good to have a broader conversation about what can actually be done about authoritarian and right wing propaganda. I think it’s good to form new, bipartisan coalitions that finally recognize the harm in partisan propaganda masquerading as news. Because our efforts up to this point have consisted of either stoic tut-tutting about what’s not possible under the First Amendment, or half-baked incoherence.

No, this trend started over a decade ago. Here are some possible explanations from the article:

Some of the reductions are easy to explain. Congress changed Medicare policy. The biggest such shift came with the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which reduced Medicare’s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011.

...

Older Americans appear to be having fewer heart attacks and strokes, the likely result of effective cholesterol and blood pressure medicines that became cheap and widely used in recent years, according to research from Professor Cutler and colleagues. And drug makers and surgeons haven’t developed as many new blockbuster treatments recently — there has been no new Prozac or angioplasty to drive up spending. (Medicare is currently barred by statute from covering the new class of expensive anti-obesity drugs.)

Parts of the health system appear to have become more efficient, as medical providers have been more cautious about adopting new therapies without much evidence, and more care has shifted outside hospitals into cheaper settings.

State House News Service, an independently owned news wire, reported that $1 billion of the state's record $56.2 billion fiscal budget for 2024 came from the state's new 4% tax on millionaires. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed the budget on Wednesday, making Massachusetts the eighth state to adopt a free school lunch plan since federal free school lunches which started during the COVID-19 pandemic ended.

Rogan, who signed a $200 million contract with Spotify in 2020, has repeatedly embraced the unsubstantiated claim that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies used “agent provocateurs” such as Epps to manipulate the crowd to attack the Capitol. In past episodes, Rogan said the intelligence community had a “vested interest in this going sideways,” adding that “if somebody wanted to disparage a political party or to maybe have some sort of a justification for getting some influential person like Donald Trump offline, that would be the way they would do it.”

What a slimeball

In a thinly-veiled swipe at the United States, Mr Wang said "some country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the emerging markets and developing countries".

"Whoever is developing fast becomes its target of containment. Whoever is catching up, becomes its target of obstructions."

The remarks are another development in the growing friction between the US and China - with Mr Xi having earlier blamed the West for the difficulties faced by his country's economy.

Who will be eligible for the pilot program

Some taxpayers in Arizona, California, Massachusetts and New York will be eligible for the pilot program during the 2024 tax season that will launch in January. The states have opted to integrate their state taxes with the federal Direct File system.

The Direct File pilot will cover only individual federal tax returns. But once a federal return is filed, taxpayers will be guided to a state-supported tool that they can use to file their state tax return.

Taxpayers in nine other states that do not levy a state income tax – Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming – may also be eligible to participate in the pilot.