Huh. This article about Biden donors complaining includes an interesting passage… nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/…
I find this bit kind of bemusing seeing how I personally raised $6 million for various Dem candidates last cycle (including around $70,000 for Biden, I believe) and never asked for a thank you, much less a phone call or ambassadorship…
Oh! Turns out I actually raise $103,000 for him! I guess I should’ve been interviewed for the article?
1. They have NINE KIDS. That's ELEVEN mouths to feed. I applaud the couple for being willing to foster/adopt so many, but I wonder how the story narrative would've differed if they'd been a Black couple w/9 kids?
2. The wife claims that "In June $1 was worth $1, now it's 70 cents"...making it sound like the inflation rate has been *43% since June*, which I find...questionable.
3. She claims a gallon of milk was $1.99 in March, and today it's $2.79.
In reality, the average price for a gallon of milk nationally appears to have been $3.55 in March vs. $3.65 in October. ams.usda.gov/sites/default/…
In Sept. 2013, prior to the first Open Enrollment Period starting on October 1st, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent an internal projection of how many people they expected to enroll each month of the first 6-month OEP to the HHS Secretary: acasignups.net/sites/default/…
When the reports for each month came out, there were various news stories claiming that enrollment had dropped by 20% from January to February (1,161,862 to 942,833). DISASTER!!
HOWEVER, if you look at the actual reports, that's not what happened at all. 2/
--small-ball version of Medicare Part D drug negotiation!
--penalty if drugmakers increase prices more than inflation!
--$2,000 Part D out-of-pocket cost cap!
--$35/mo cap on insulin costs!
...but there's more!
A lot of these changes are just clerical/typo corrections or slight legalese tweaks to pass legal muster (think the #KingvBurwell debacle!).
Other changes are literally just bumping funding up a bit for one program or down a bit for another.
As an aside, this was precisely my point last spring when Bernie folks demanded that VP Harris fire the parliamentarian after she put the kibosh on including $15MW in the ARP bill.
If Manchinema oppose killing or even altering the filibuster they sure as hell aren’t gonna be onboard with firing the person who decides what can pass without the filibuster.
Setting aside the dire status of democracy at the moment, it's kind of interesting in a wonky sort of way to compare the *smaller* text changes which *don't* make much of a difference: rules.house.gov/sites/democrat…