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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Don't kill us. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-03-08

CNN:

House Republicans could face a major obstacle if they cut Medicaid: Their own districts’ health needs The House GOP is advancing a budget that could impose major cuts in the Medicaid program that now provides health services to more than 72 million Americans. But dozens of House Republicans represent districts where the share of residents receiving health coverage through Medicaid is greater than in the average district nationwide. And far more House Republicans than House Democrats now hold seats in districts where the share of residents confronting serious health challenges — including diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, breast cancer deaths, cardiovascular problems and a lack of health insurance of any kind — exceeds the average. Those are among the major findings of an exclusive CNN analysis of data collected by the Congressional District Health Dashboard, a partnership between the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

x New: People across the political spectrum really don't want Medicaid to be cut. And, it's personal: 53% of people say they or a family member has been covered by Medicaid at some point. pic.twitter.com/zsxqVr31tP — Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) March 7, 2025

Mujtaba Rahmen/Twitter via Threadreader (in 13 parts):

Some thoughts on the European response to the chaos now emanating from the White House - on Ukraine and more broadly, based on chats with senior European policymakers directly or indirectly involved in formulating the bloc's response 1/ It's clear to me that EU leaders & their most senior officials are clearly seized of this moment. They aren't under any illusions about the risks to Ukraine or European security. US alignment with Russia can do two things: result in panic or focus. Right now we're seeing focus 2/ Making €bn available for Ukraine & the EU's own security & defence is not a sufficient response. But it is a necessary one. So the EU has unleashed national budgets, the EU budget, the EU's borrowing capacity & private capital via the EIB, to enable much more defence spending 3/ Germany has proposed the same thing (no more borrowing constraints for defence, and a €500bn facility for infrastructure). This is in response to risks that *might* transpire in Ukraine & wrt NATO. If those risks actually manifest, an even more forceful response is likely 4/

x 💥 BREAKING: A spokesperson from Perkins Coie, the law firm that President Trump targeted yesterday in an Executive Order, messaged me today: “We have reviewed the Executive Order. It is patently unlawful, and we intend to challenge it.” www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... — Nancy Levine Stearns 🌎 (@nancylevinestearns.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T17:12:01.124Z

Anne Applebaum/The Atlantic:

There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing How regime change happens in America These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing. This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.

Jonathan Lemire/The Atlantic:

Is DOGE Losing Steam? The Department of Government Efficiency lives. But Donald Trump is reining in Elon Musk. Jesse Watters, a co-host of the Fox News hit show The Five, is usually a slick deliverer of MAGA talking points. But on February 19, Watters told a surprisingly emotional story about a friend working at the Pentagon who was poised to lose his job as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “I finally found one person I knew who got DOGE’d, and it hit me in the heart,” said Watters, who urged his Fox colleagues to “be a little bit less callous.” Although Watters soon resumed championing DOGE, the moment went viral. Trump watched the clip and asked advisers if it was resonating with his base of supporters, according to one of three White House officials I spoke with for this story (they requested anonymity so they could discuss private conversations). Over the ensuing weeks, the president grew unhappy with the television coverage of cuts affecting his voters, according to two of those officials, while the White House fielded calls from Cabinet members and Republican lawmakers frustrated by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul empowered to slash the federal government. Some of Trump’s top advisers became worried about the political fallout from DOGE’s sweeping cuts, especially after seeing scenes of angry constituents yelling at GOP members of Congress in town halls.

It’s all about the television coverage.

x A reckoning is coming- there will be many more such cases https://t.co/8uysizGlPC — Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) March 7, 2025

Perry Bacon Jr/Washington Post:

FiveThirtyEight is gone. Its legacy will endure. Nate Silver’s website suffered because of Trump and changes in political news coverage. FiveThirtyEight became famous for its “forecasts” from founder Nate Silver. But the website (where I worked from 2017 to 2021) was trying to do much more than predict presidential election results. FiveThirtyEight was an attempt to improve and reimagine journalism. I think it succeeded — even though the website is now defunct. ABC News, which owned FiveThirtyEight, this week laid off the site’s 15 remaining staffers. The network had already made drastic cutbacks two years ago, with Silver himself departing back then.

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