This evening, Rep. Al Green of Texas was forcibly removed from the joint session of Congress by the sergeant-at-arms for standing up and yelling “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid.” during the president’s address.
“He is a person who has consistently used incivility against civility,” Green said.
“I’m willing to suffer whatever punishment is available to me,” he continued. “I didn’t say to anyone, ‘Don’t punish me.’ I’ve said I’ll accept the punishment, but it’s worth it to let people know that there are some of us who are going to stand up against this president’s desire to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.”
“This is about the people who are being punished by virtue of losing their health care,” he added. “This is the richest country in the world, and we have people who don’t have good health care.” (Per HuffPost)
Tonight House Republicans voted 217 to 215 for a budget that’ll take $1 TRILLION dollars from Medicaid, attack food benefits for kids, hurt seniors and vets.
but I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about these two Democratic members of Congress you’ve never ever heard of.
Congressman Mullin had knee surgery that didn’t go well, two surgeries, a life threatening blood clot and a week long stay in the hospital, and the moment he was discharged from the hospital he got on a five hour flight to DC to vote against the Republicans evil budget, using a walker to get to the floor of the House
Congresswoman Pettersen gave birth to her son Sam, in the picture, exactly one month ago on January 25th. They flew from Colorado to DC after Republicans refused to allow her to vote by proxy after having a baby. Congresswoman Pettersen took Sam onto the floor of the House to vote to protect the Health care of 400,000 Colorado kids.
why talk about this? because so much of the conversion is about telling people there’s no one good, no one worthy, no one fighting. I promise you there are people undergoing personal hardship to do the right thing.
This morning, i heard on the public health reddit that the HIV page at cdc.gov had been scrubbed. Sure enough, the landing page was there, but all links to information about programs, treatment, data were gone.
Then we started to hear that all CDC was going to be removing data. Whole data sets. I started looking, and the Social Vulnerability Index, which identifies geographic areas that are vulnerable to climate, economic, or health-related disasters, it was gone.
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a national survey that helps identify things like smoking prevalence, healthcare access, are people meeting nutrtion guidelines, was gone. I had just downloaded that dataset and the documentation on Tuesday to run some stats on colorectal cancer screening in my state. It was now gone.
My colleagues at the health department started messaging each other. Were they also having troubles finding data? People on reddit were frantically trying to download datasets, comparing what they already had. For fuck’s sake, the Census website and data was going down. The goddamn Census.
There are some heroes, like the good people at the r/DataHoarders subreddit who had heard rumblings earlier this week and had started scrapping the entire CDC website. The End of Term Archive had already been archiving federal websites and data for months, and are getting those datasets up on GitHub.
But this is unprecedented. This is fascism. This is an authoritarian regime removing public data from access to make sure theres nothing out there that can conflict with their message.
This is not normal.
If you live in the US and have the capability, call your reps and ask them what they’re doing about this data scrubbing, ESPECIALLY if they’re Democrats. Hold their feet to the fire.
“This thing we’re paying for is affecting the economy!!!!! * causes plague*”
No this is pure vindictiveness; Leonard Leo, the Catholic integralist at the head of the Federalist Society (and a Knight of Malta) has been after this for some time now.
‘You survived 8 years of Reagan, you can survive another 4 years of Trump’ was one of those lines I hated and which I can’t help but remember as cold comfort indeed.
PEPFAR aid recipients:
I need everyone to understand, we (meaning the planet Earth) were so close to eradicating HIV/AIDS globally.
Not manage it. Not suppressed. Not ended just in western first world democracies or whatever.
Eradicated. Everywhere. Every country.
We were on track to totally eradicate HIV/AIDS globally by the end of the decade. Thanks to 30 years of effort mostly spearheaded by activists in the US and later the US government (particularly during the Obama years)
And now all of that is gone because we let a bunch of theocratic christian nationalists take total power in this country.
If you’re an American federal employee and got an email saying “it’s ok to quit your job.” Do not, for the love of everything, quit your job. This is purely a scare tactic to get rid of as many people as possible without legal consequences.
Obviously, Trump has realized firing everyone in the government will be harder than he thought because of robust legal protections so he’s trying to scare or trick people into leaving instead because he knows they can block and slow his fascist agenda. Don’t let that happen. If you’re in the civil service, your country needs you; stay in your job and protect the constitution. And if you’re not in civil service, do what you can to support the civil service, including calling your representatives and asking them to protect civil servants.
Remember that this man is infamous for NOT PAYING HIS BILLS. He has countless contractors suing him for non-payment. So if he offers you money to quit? Don’t fall for it. You’ll never see a dime.
Gonna drop the recent entry from Ask A Manager to federal workers here:
Media needs to stop calling it a ‘buyout’. It isn’t. There is no authority to pay people to leave like this, it’s all BS. Administrative leave is capped at 80 hours in most cases. The current max cap for a voluntary separation incentive is $25,000 (before taxes) which it has been since the 90s. And it requires their agency to apply for it, as does voluntary early retirement.
To top it off, the government is under a continuing resolution that expires in March. Then there is no money at all until either a budget is approved or another CR is passed, so anyone that takes this 'deferred resignation’ may get hosed because they can change the appropriations bill to just say “Terminating any employee who replied 'resign’”. Will it hold up in court? Probably not but it’s going to take a while to get the day in court so you’ll be S.O.L. until then. Hold the line, they can’t fire feds as easily as they thought.
