Health care provisions in the IRA legislation

Health care in the US is a mess because of its dependence on an employer-based insurance model and the adamant opposition of the health care providers (insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, and other providers) against a national single payer system that would streamline the system and cut costs. Since all those interests lobby heavily against any changes and are willing to pour money into politicians’ campaigns, what results is a tinkering of the system in order to smooth out some of the roughest features. Obamacare was one such effort and the latest legislation that is due to be passed later this week known as the Inflation Reduction Act also makes some progress.
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Trump’s home raided

Donald Trump says that the FBI has raided his home in the Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago.

The FBI executed a search warrant around 6pm ET at Trump’s residence, which appears to have been related to an investigation into Trump unlawfully taking White House documents with him to Mar-a-Lago after his presidency, according to a source familiar with the matter.

“My beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in a bitter statement lashing out at the raid, adding: “They even broke into my safe!”
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In a furious statement, Trump compared the FBI raid to “Watergate” and blamed it on “Radical Left Democrats” who he said “desperately don’t want me to run for president in 2024 … who will do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming midterms elections”.

Even at a time like this, Trump has to describe himself and his stuff grandiosely, referring to his ‘beautiful’ home.

I must confess that I did not expect this. I am puzzled as to what documents he would have thought he needed to remove.

Another bizarre report has photos that show Trump’s toilet with papers stuck in them, supporting allegations that his toilets used to get blocked because he would try and destroy official documents by tearing them up and flushing them down the toilet.

Remember our toilet scoop in Axios AM earlier this year? Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher.

Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal.

That raises the question: Who goes around taking photos of Trump’s toilets? Is this part of their official duties? If so, how much do they get paid?

Can the Trump presidency get any weirder?

UPDATE: There is a livestream of the street in front of the gates of Mar-a-Lago where pro and anti-Trump people are hanging out.

The religious tax exemption boondoggle

The Family Research Council is a think tank that promotes right-wing causes that are consistent with a christian nationalist viewpoint. the investigative journalism outfit ProPublicareveals that it, along with other right-wing groups, has claimed to be a church to escape from paying its full share of taxes.

Forty members of Congress on Monday asked the IRS and the Treasury to investigate what the lawmakers termed an “alarming pattern” of right-wing advocacy groups registering with the tax agency as churches, a move that allows the organizations to shield themselves from some financial reporting requirements and makes it easier to avoid audits.

“FRC is one example of an alarming pattern in the last decade — right-wing advocacy groups self-identifying as ‘churches’ and applying for and receiving church status,” the representatives wrote, noting the organization’s policy work supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its advocacy for legislation seeking to ban gender-affirming surgery.
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Huge job gains last month

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its monthly report and says that a whopping 538,000 jobs were added last month, about twice the expected number. They also revised upwards the jobs gains for the previous two months. This means that all the jobs that were lost during the pandemic have now been regained. The unemployment rate also edged down to 3.5%, another low number.

Since the GDP had declined for two straight quarters, there had been concerns that the economy was entering a period of recession. But this robust job growth contradicts that idea since in a traditional recession, people are thrown out of the labor market on a large scale. It also contradicts the idea that employers are finding it hard to get workers.
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Kyrsten Synema works for the venture capitalists

Thanks to the 50-50 balance in the US Senate, Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have much greater leverage over legislation than they deserve and are thus able to force their priorities into legislation that needs to be passed. In the negotiations over the major legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act, what they demanded in return for their support is revealing about whose interests they really care about and it is clearly not the ordinary people of their respective states.

For Manchin it is the fossil fuel industry that he obeys, so he demanded, and got, Biden administration approval for a huge natural gas pipeline in his home state that has been blocked by courts.

For Sinema, it is the venture capitalists that she kowtows to.

In the statement, Sinema indicated that she won several changes to the tax provisions in the package, including removing the provision that would have tightened the carried interest loophole, which aimed to raise the taxes paid by hedge fund and private equity managers. That proposal would have raised $14 billion. She also suggested that she won changes to Democrats’ plans to pare back how companies can deduct depreciated assets from their taxes — a key demand by manufacturers that had lobbied Sinema over their concerns this week.

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Alex Jones assessed 45.2 million in punitive damages

The other shoe dropped in the Alex Jones case as the jury ordered him to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child who was murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre, bringing the total up to $49.3 million.

It is still less than the value of his reported assets but is more than a slap on the wrist.

Legal wrangling that is standard after these types of cases – including a promised appeal – means the amount Jones ultimately pays may be far below $49.3m. But the ruling nonetheless represents a victory for loved ones of Sandy Hook victims and a major rebuke for one of the country’s most notorious conspiracy theorists.
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The jury’s award Thursday was to compensate Heslin and Lewis for Jones’s actions. The one Friday – doled out after about four hours of deliberations – was meant to punish Jones for conduct the jurors, through their unanimous decision, found to be egregious.

Jones’ appeal would aim to drastically reduce the jury’s award against him – if not eliminate it altogether. [His lawyer] Reynal on Friday had argued that $270,000 in punitive damages was fair, relying on a state law capping such damages a significant amount below what the jury awarded.
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The baseless Sandy Hook conspiracy is far from the only theory of that kind which Jones has propagated on Infowars, which is often derided in some quarters for selling pills marketed as helping men achieve firmer erections.

He also lied about a Washington DC pizzeria being the home to a child sex-abuse ring, inspiring a man to go there and fire a high-powered rifle inside. Another centered on a myth that a yogurt factory supported child rapists who spread tuberculosis.

Jones was forced to apologize for both of those. He did not appear to be in the courtroom for the reading of Friday’s verdict.

There are as yet two more cases against him, one in Texas and another in Connecticut.

Alex Jones trial award

The jury has ordered Alex Jones to pay $4.1 million to the parents of Jesse Hill as compensatory damages for the pain that he (and his mindless supporters) inflicted on them by his reckless claims that the Sandy Hook massacre in which Jesse died was a hoax and that the grieving parents were crisis actors.

The lawyers had asked for $150 million so this is a lot less but it could have been a much worse. The jury in Texas had to award something since Jones had already had a default judgment against him but they could have levied a nominal fine of just $1 if they had sided with him.

The trial is not over though. This award was just for compensation for the suffering of the parents and is meant to represent the costs of the real injury they suffered. The jury now has to decide on whether to award punitive damages against Jones. Punitive damages are meant as punishment for reckless and egregious behavior, in order to send a message and deter future such actions and hence it is hard to put a figure to it. Since it is meant to inflict pain, it depends on how much they think the person has in assets, since there is little point in a financial penalty that the defendant can easily afford.
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A dangerous strategy

Amy Davidson Sorkin warns that the Democratic party is pursuing a dangerous strategy in trying to help the most extreme Republican candidates in the primary races in the belief that they will be easier to defeat in the general elections.

The plan, such as it is, is that voters will recoil from these candidates and turn to the Democratic Party as a bastion of sanity. That’s a harder argument to make when playing games like this. Many Democrats recognize that, too. “It’s dishonorable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s just damn wrong,” Representative Dean Phillips, of Minnesota, told Politico. In the same piece, Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, called the ploy “very dangerous” and “substantively risky.” The implied risk is that the extreme candidate could actually win.
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Alex Jones’s lies exposed in court as one trial ends

We know that Alex Jones lies and lies brazenly. In a surprising development, his lies have now been exposed in court during the trial to determine how much damages Alex Jones should pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Heslin who was murdered at Sandy Hook, the parents’s lawyer Mark Bankston dramatically revealed a lie that Jones has made. It was exposed because Jones’s lawyers had inadvertently sent copies of all the text messages on Jones’s phone to Bankston.

In a remarkable moment, Bankston disclosed to Jones and the court that he had recently acquired evidence proving Jones had lied when he claimed during the discovery process that he had never texted about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Bankston said that Jones’ attorney had, in an apparent mishap, sent him two years of cell phone records that included every text message Jones had sent.

The cell phone records, Bankston said, showed that Jones had in fact texted about the Sandy Hook shooting.

“That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston said.

Bankston showed Jones a text message exchange he had about Sandy Hook. But Jones testified that he had “never seen these text messages.”

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