Lumberman Dean Angstadt tells one of the more dramatic stories about the impact of the Affordable Care Act. A loyal Republican and Fox Viewer who once said, “I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” Angstadt found himself self-employed, uninsured and in urgent need of heart-valve replacement surgery. He’d drunk the Fox News Kool-Aid, however, and at first adamantly refused to sign up through the ACA exchange.
Of U.S. registered voters say they are less enthusiastic about voting than in previous elections, while 35% are more enthusiastic, according to Gallup. “This 18-percentage-point enthusiasm deficit is larger than what Gallup has measured in prior midterm election years, particularly in 2010 when there was record midterm enthusiasm.”
You know what’s at stake. Only six wins this fall for Republicans leaves them to rule the Senate. If that happens, House-passed bills outlawing contraception and abortion, promoting guns, and cutting food stamps even for children will be the law of the land. And those 50 votes to defund and rescind Obamacare? Done deal.
That’s why states where Democratic senators seem at risk are drowning in dollars from those who profit if Republicans are in charge. Can you blame the Koch brothers for spending millions through their front group, Americans for Prosperity, on ads to tip these races? They’ll earn back billions if their legislation — like a bill to charge people for using solar panels instead of burning the fossil fuels that are heating our planet but lining the Kochs’ pockets — passes.
Pundits, at first stunned by a Democrat not playing by the GOP rules, are realizing the brilliance of Hagan’s move.
North Carolina, where Sen. Kay Hagan (D) is up for re-election, could be drawing the most outside money.
Voters in North Carolina have already been bombarded with 15,000 television political advertisements thanks to the U.S. Senate race…
The cost of those ads is a whopping $6.3 million, and nearly all of them have been paid for by outside groups, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project.
Many of the ads criticize Hagan’s vote for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a strategy chosen by Republican consultant Karl Rove and the Kochs after the healthcare.gov website’s rocky launch last October. But the overall success of Obamacare’s first enrollment period leaves fewer one-issue voters who will go to the polls just to get rid of the ACA’s supporters.
Amount the Koch brothers’ main political arm intends to spend on an aggressive ground, air and data operation benefiting conservatives in the midterm elections. “The projected budget for Americans for Prosperity would be unprecedented for a private political group in a midterm, and would likely rival even the spending of the Republican and Democratic parties’ congressional campaign arms,” according to Politico.
We’ve got to rein in what has become an almost article of faith that anybody can have a gun anywhere, anytime. And I don’t believe that is in the best interest of the vast majority of people.
— Hillary Clinton, delivering harsh criticism of gun culture in America and denouncing the idea that “anybody can have a gun, anywhere, at any time,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they are supporters of the Tea Party, while 11% are opponents and 48% are neither, a new Gallup poll finds. That is a significant drop from the Tea Party’s high-water mark in November 2010, when 61% of Republicans were supporters.
Despite what you read, N.C. Assembly Speaker Thom Tillis, who won the primary race in the U.S. Senate election yesterday, is not a Republican “establishment” candidate. Tillis is, in fact, a tea bagger of the first order, per PM Carpenter:
Tillis takes a second, reactionary pew to no man: he opposes a federally mandated minimum wage; he denies the science of climate change; he supported a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and further restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion; and of course as a NC prophet of national Republican totalitarianism, he just can’t get enough of voter suppression.
As Tillis kicks off his campaign to unseat Sen. Kay Hagan, a conservative Democrat, he already finds himself mired in controversy after being caught on tape suggesting that, in order to advance its war on the poor, the GOP must turn sick and invalided people who receive disability payments against poor people who rely on government assistance:
Remember during the last presidential campaign when Mitt Romney was reaching out for the Hispanic vote and the Republican National Committee jumped in to help out with a Latino-oriented website that featured a stock photo of Asians instead of Latinos?
Well, it’s happened again. To Fox News.
Figuring one sad Asian is as good as another, Fox ran video of a grief-stricken woman mourning the Sherpas who died on Mount Everest in a story about the Sewol Korean ferry disaster. Koreans living in the United States could tell the difference, even if the bright lights at Fox couldn’t, and spoke up.
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
“If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should be trying to stop it and throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”
“We are done, Americans are done with endless conflict in the Middle East, spending trillions of dollars, American lives… this is insane and we have to call it for what it is.”
“The U.S. State Department announced on Monday that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas during President Donald Trump’s administration so far,” Fox News reports.
President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office, Alternet reports. This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget.
A new Emerson College survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%. President Trump holds a 39% job approval rating, consistent with the past two months, whereas his disapproval increased another point, to 57%.
A new American Research Group poll finds just 30% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 67% say they disapprove.
Wall Street Journal: “Around 40% of voters in the 2024 election said the economy was their top issue, far outstripping any other matter. And those voters favored Donald Trump by 60% to 38%. Many say they were moved by his pledges to tame inflation, rebuild U.S. infrastructure, cut red tape and trim government waste. … About a year and a half later, more voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy than approve, 61% to 35%, an average of polls by the Cook Political Report found this month.”
