EVERY SENATE REPUBLICAN VOTED FOR ROBOTS TO DENY YOUR HEALTHCARE

Every Senate Republican present voted to continue the Trump administration's WiSER program, which is introducing AI pre-authorization into traditional Medicare:

"Yesterday we were reminded who the Republicans are: A group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away from those who need it most.

The White House leaned on the Republican Senators, and they folded like the cheap suits they are. Cowards to a person. The worst of all being Josh Hawley, who pretends he would oppose Medicare delays and denials by algorithm or AI, but when the vote is called dutifully dances to the tune his master calls. Their goal is to destroy Medicare, to destroy guaranteed healthcare, to ensure that every facet of the 'healthcare system' serves only one purpose, profit.

The so-called WiSER program that the Republicans voted to continue to allow to delay and deny care in traditional Medicare is just Wall Street sticking their insatiable greed into one of the last bastions from it in healthcare, traditional Medicare. If the Republicans get their way it will expand and expand, delaying and denying care for those who need it most until every senior in this country lives or dies at the whim of a robot."

Find the full statement on our website (linked in comments)

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The order came down from the top of the biggest private bank on Earth. Delete everything. Wipe the files. Empty the desks. Every trace of what the bank had done, gone. Almost every single employee obeyed.

One woman did not.

Her name is Stephanie Gibaud.

She worked for UBS, the giant Swiss bank, in its Paris office. Her job looked glamorous. She organized grand events. Fancy parties. Golf days. Tennis at Roland-Garros. The kind of places where the very rich come to play.

But the parties had a hidden purpose. They were where Swiss bankers quietly cornered wealthy French clients and made them an offer. Hide your money in Switzerland. Where the French taxman can never see it. Where you never pay what you owe.

It was a secret machine built to help the rich cheat their own country out of billions. Money that should have paid for schools, hospitals, and roads, funneled quietly into offshore accounts instead. For a long time, Stephanie helped run the events without seeing the whole picture.

Then, in 2008, the authorities started closing in. And the bank panicked.

That was when her own boss told her to delete her files. The files full of names. Wealthy clients. Swiss bankers. The entire web, laid out.

Everyone around her wiped their computers and cleaned out their desks. Stephanie refused. She believed it was wrong. She believed it might be a crime. So she kept every file.

By her account, she was the only one who did.

That single decision cracked the whole thing open. Her files became a treasure map. They helped investigators uncover 38,000 secret offshore accounts and around 12 billion euros hidden from France. She had the proof. She handed it over. She did exactly what a citizen is supposed to do.

And for that, the bank set out to destroy her.

From the moment she refused, they turned on her. She was harassed. Isolated. Frozen out. She walked into the cafeteria and colleagues stood up and left. The stress crushed her into anxiety and depression, all while she was raising her children.

They tried to fire her. When the government blocked it, the bank did something stunning. It sued its own employee. The biggest private bank on the planet dragged a junior marketing manager into court and tried to bury her in lawsuits for years, knowing she had to pay every legal bill herself.

She won. And they kept coming. Finally, in 2012, they got rid of her.

Then, in 2019, the reckoning arrived. A French court convicted UBS of running a massive scheme to help the rich dodge their taxes and hit it with a record penalty in the billions of euros, one of the largest France had ever handed down. Stephanie had been right the entire time.

Now here is the part that should make you furious.

For helping recover billions for her country, Stephanie Gibaud got almost nothing. France has no reward for whistleblowers. None. After years of court battles she was awarded a few thousand euros. It did not even cover her lawyers.

The bank paid billions and moved on. The woman who exposed it was financially ruined, blacklisted from her entire industry, unable to find work, and left to raise her child on basic welfare payments.

And here is the detail that turns the knife.

The very same bank, UBS, was also exposed on the American side, by a banker named Bradley Birkenfeld. For blowing the whistle on the exact same kind of scheme, the US government handed Birkenfeld a check for 104 million dollars.

Same bank. Same crime. One country rewarded its whistleblower with a fortune. The other left its whistleblower on welfare.

Think about the choice she faced. She had a good job and a comfortable life. All she had to do was press delete, like everyone else, and keep it all.

She refused. Because it was wrong. That one word, no, cost her her career, her health, and her security. She gave up everything, so the truth would not be erased.

And she still has not stopped. Stephanie is fighting today, battling for the rights of every whistleblower who comes after her, so the next person who refuses to hit delete is not left with nothing.

She took on the biggest private bank in the world. She won. And she is still standing.

Share her name, because the truth-tellers who walk away with empty pockets are exactly the ones the powerful are counting on you to forget.

 

#weirdbuttrue #weirdfacts #mindblowing #bizarre

History is littered with men who climbed to the peak of power only to realize they have no idea how to govern a democracy. Mike Johnson did not stumble into this chaos; he engineered it by prioritizing the demands of an extremist fringe over the stability of our institutions. By gutting the legislative process to satisfy the most radical elements of his party, he has rendered the House of Representatives almost entirely dysfunctional. Now, he expects us to sympathize with his exhaustion.

This is the inevitable outcome of a movement that views governance as a performance rather than a duty. When you spend your tenure courting instability and weaponizing the gavel to protect those who threaten our democratic norms, the house you occupy will naturally begin to tremble. Johnson is not a victim of circumstance; he is the architect of a paralyzed chamber. He traded the long-term health of our republic for the temporary favor of the MAGA movement, and now he is learning the hard way that an authoritarian-aligned agenda is impossible to manage. We cannot afford leaders who are too weak to stand against the very fires they helped light.

BREAKING: RIGHTEOUS FURY! Republican Senator Thom Tillis RAGES against Trump's efforts to "confuse this election" and vows to grind government to a halt to stop him.

This is an astonishing blow to MAGA...

“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math,” Tillis roared, referring to Trump's "SAVE America Act," an Orwellian voter suppression bill.

Trump, fully aware that he cannot win the midterm elections legitimately due to his utterly failed presidency, has made the SAVE Act his top priority, going so far as to refuse to sign a popular bipartisan housing bill in protest of Congress's failure to pass SAVE.

The House is currently debating a legislative package that includes some pieces of the SAVE Act despite the Senate refusing to pass the bill on numerous occasions prior.

Tillis stated that it would nearly impossible to implement the SAVE provisions in the current package even if Congress did choose to pass it because the November elections are right around the corner. There simply is not enough time to do it properly. Trump is out of runway to enact the sweeping changes that he desires.

To drive the point home for the hardheaded MAGA senators in the room, Tillis used a whiteboard to outline all the agencies across the country that would have to be involved with the proposed election measures, including voter ID. It was a daunting display.

“I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election,” Tillis raged.

He explained that rushing to impose these new measures in a hurried, slapdash method would only serve to undermine faith in the elections. Of course, that's exactly the point. Trump wants to inject as much uncertainty as possible into the midterms so that when his party inevitably gets crushed at the ballot box, he can cry foul and dispute the results.

“Let’s stop the charade. Let’s stop the distraction,” said Tillis. “Let’s get the government funded, let’s use reconciliation if we need to but let’s not clog it up with another piece of policy airdropped by a member of this Senate or the White House that will undermine this bill, undermine what we need to get done before the election.”

Thank you Senator Tillis! Donald Trump is an enemy of our democracy as is anyone who supports his election destruction bill.

 

 

The Amendment They Pretend Is Not There

By Tony Pentimalli

 

The Ninth Amendment was written to stop the government from claiming every freedom the Constitution did not name. In an authoritarian age, progressives should use it to defend every part of human life the powerful are trying to seize.

The men who wrote the Bill of Rights understood that naming some freedoms could become a trap. They feared that a future government would point to the written list and claim the people had surrendered everything left off it. The Ninth Amendment was their answer. The people kept rights beyond those the Constitution specifically named. More than two centuries later, the abuse they feared has become a governing strategy. Women are crossing state lines because politicians have taken control of their medical decisions. Marriage equality is under attack again. Government can track our phones, scan our faces, collect our genetic information, and buy intimate details about our lives from private companies. These are not separate fights. They are one enormous fight over whether Americans own any part of their lives that the government and the Supreme Court have not chosen to recognize. Authoritarian politics reverses the burden of freedom. The government no longer explains why it may enter your body, bedroom, family, movements, or private life. You are forced to explain why it should stay out.

The Bill of Rights answers that power grab in the amendment politicians, judges, and conservative legal activists almost never mention. The Ninth Amendment says that listing certain rights must not be used to “deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The decisive word is retained. The people did not receive those other freedoms from the government. They already had them, and they kept them. James Madison understood what was at stake. Critics warned that future rulers would use the written list to claim ownership of everything the Constitution did not mention, so the Ninth Amendment was added to stop them. It is not decoration. It is a direct command that constitutional silence cannot be turned into government property.

The powerful suddenly become flexible constitutional scholars whenever flexibility gives them more power. Corporations receive broad speech rights that let them pour enormous sums into politics. Presidents receive implied privileges the Constitution never names. Police officers receive qualified immunity from many civil lawsuits unless a court had already declared the exact misconduct illegal in a nearly identical case. Yet when an ordinary person claims control over her body, marriage, family, movement, or private information, these same people demand an exact sentence written more than two hundred years ago. Corporations find rights between the lines. Presidents find privileges between the lines. Police find immunities between the lines. Ordinary people are told their freedom does not exist unless someone powerful remembered to write it down in 1791. That is why the politicians, judges, corporations, and legal activists feeding on this double standard need the Ninth Amendment buried and forgotten.

The Ninth Amendment does not settle every constitutional case by itself, and pretending otherwise would hand its enemies an easy argument. Its legal purpose is to establish that the written list of rights is incomplete. Other parts of the Constitution give courts the tools to protect liberty, equality, conscience, association, and privacy from state and federal power. Even the basic freedom to travel from one state to another has survived without one neat constitutional address. The Ninth Amendment does not replace those protections or guarantee an automatic victory. It tells courts they cannot pretend Americans surrendered every freedom the Constitution’s authors failed to name.

That broader understanding of freedom mattered in Griswold v. Connecticut, when the Supreme Court struck down a law banning married couples from using contraception. The majority cited the Ninth Amendment while finding marital privacy within several constitutional protections. Justice Arthur Goldberg stated the issue plainly. Refusing to protect a fundamental freedom merely because the Constitution did not list it would gut the Ninth Amendment, although the amendment did not give judges unlimited power to invent anything they wanted. The Constitution did not need to contain the word “contraception” before the government could be thrown out of a married couple’s bedroom. A family does not become government property because the founders failed to list every private decision its members might someday face.

The Supreme Court turned that principle upside down in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The majority demanded proof that abortion was deeply rooted in American history and tradition, forcing women to hunt for their freedom in centuries when women had little political power and almost no control over the laws governing their bodies. Justice Clarence Thomas then called for reconsidering the decisions protecting contraception, private consensual same sex relationships, and marriage equality. The danger is far bigger than the destruction of Roe or the possibility that Griswold and Obergefell could fall next. The authoritarian Right is attacking the entire modern idea that liberty protects intimate human decisions even when the founders did not list them one by one. It asks whether the people who excluded you also protected you, then uses their failure as proof that you never had the freedom at all. They are turning the oppression of the past into legal authority over the living. They want a Constitution where no unlisted freedom belongs to the people until the government or the Court decides to hand it over.

That project becomes even more dangerous as technology gives the state powers the founders could never have imagined. They knew nothing about cell phone location histories, facial recognition, genetic databases, artificial intelligence profiling, license plate readers, reproductive data, or government agencies buying personal information from data brokers. Their inability to name those technologies cannot mean modern machinery transfers our private lives to the government. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that government acquisition of extensive historical cell phone location records was a Fourth Amendment search because it exposed the whole pattern of a person’s movements. The Ninth Amendment reinforces the principle beneath that ruling. A new machine does not erase an old human freedom merely because eighteenth century language could not name the device threatening it. A Constitution that protects only the freedoms eighteenth century men could imagine will leave twenty first century Americans defenseless against powers those men could not imagine.

The strongest objection is that unelected judges cannot turn every policy they like into an unwritten constitutional right. That objection is legitimate. The answer is not to give judges unlimited power, but it is not to give the government unlimited territory either. Constitutional protection should be strongest when the state invades choices central to a person’s control over their own body, conscience, family, intimate relationships, movement, association, or deeply private information. That is nothing like giving corporations, landlords, or employers a constitutional license to control other people. A corporation has no fundamental human right to poison workers, crush unions, discriminate against families, buy political control, or gut communities for profit. Freedom protects people from domination. It does not protect the powerful while they dominate everyone else.

Progressives should use the Ninth Amendment every time the government claims ownership of a freedom simply because the Constitution did not name it. Every one of those fights should force the same question: Why does constitutional silence give the government ownership of that freedom? Courts should reject that theft. States should write endangered liberties directly into their constitutions. Citizens should understand the size of what is happening. This is not a fight over a few controversial rights. It is an attempt to rebuild the Constitution so the oppression of the past controls the freedom of the present, new forms of power face no limits unless the founders predicted them, and every unnamed part of human life belongs to the government until the government decides to give it back.

The Ninth Amendment is not a magic wand. It is one of the Constitution’s clearest warnings against that total claim of ownership. The government does not own everything the Constitution did not specifically name. The people retained it.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social

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