I told you a while back about how Bob “Crooksy” Brooks had posted some racist stuff, particularly his support for a racist flag “because Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like this flag.” Look, Kaepernick has his faults, but it’s racist as hell to post a flag actual racists use it and a Black guy hates it, but I’ll chalk that up to Crooksy being ignorant. I mean, I know exactly what he was signaling to his buddies on the internet, but whatever. I also knew there was more. It’s no shock that the guy Bernard Sanders endorsed, the guy who stiffed his mother-in-law out of $55,000 (that she still hasn’t collected a dime of), the guy who is a religious fanatic, said racist shit. You just knew there would be more fun stuff to talk about.
Well, there is plenty, and we’ll start with another example of his attitudes about prominent Black people- this time, President Barack Obama. It turns out, “Crooksy” said “unfortunately he sucks” about the 44th President of the United States. On September 5th, 2012, right as President Obama was in the thick of his competitive re-election against Mitt Romney, “Crooksy” weighed in with that opinion. Today, “Crooksy” and his team would have you know that he would defend President Obama’s signature achievements (like Obamacare), which I don’t believe, but he swears so. If Obama’s actual policy achievements are worth running for Congress to defend, what exactly made President Obama “suck?” Was it that “Crooksy” actually didn’t like President Obama’s policies and won’t defend things like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created under Dodd-Frank, that he didn’t support Obamacare, President Obama’s rejuvenation of the COPS Bill to hire new cops on the street, or maybe Obama’s immigration policies? Maybe “Crooksy” was actually a MAGA Trumper until he pulled a coup to become a union leader? Or let’s be honest, could it have just been as simple as to say that “Crooksy” thought President Barack Obama “sucks” because he was a famous black guy like Colin Kaepernick? Look, I have no idea, but “Crooksy” would have you believe now he’s going to Washington as some sort of defender of President Obama’s achievements, but back then he wanted his buddies he tended bar with or whatever that he knew that President Obama “sucks.”
When a candidate runs for office, they tell you what you want to hear, because they want to win. When they were posting things 14 years before that totally contradict what they say now, but do tend to jive with the other really racist, crazy shit they were saying all the way up until they became a public figure, that is exactly who they are. A lot of Democrats won’t call out that this guy is either not a Democrat, or is a straight up return to Dixiecrat roots, because they’re afraid of angering people they want to support them. Look, whatever, I don’t really expect most of these people to have some sort of “profile in courage” moment. I get it, they need the Governor to give them that grant, they need that union to endorse them, they want the party to come campaign for them. That’s fine, like I said, most of these guys are terrified of their own shadow. Let’s call it like it is though- some of us worked for President Obama, some of us worked for the Democratic Party at that time to elect him and people who agreed with him. For some of us, that belief in the President’s values would literally come back to save our life. You can bury your head in the sand as much as you want- nominating someone who shares so few of your values that he embraces MAGA-style soft racism is total capitulation. If you’re fine with that, fine, go ahead. I’m not. I’m not going to be. I was enthusiastic about 2012 Barack Obama. Were you?
My new newsletter on Substack will be a less frequent, more big picture items type of outlet. You can subscribe at “The Dark Side of the Dawn.” This is the first piece.
Do you remember 2020? It’s ok if you don’t, it really was a long time ago, and it was not a pleasant time for anyone. But if you can get just a little further back, to 2019, you might remember the Democratic Primary race for President of the United States. There was literally more than 20 candidates running, and they held debates where literally all of these people participated in one form or another. Moderators asked them to raise their hands if they agreed with statements like “defund the police,” or if they pledged to implement “the Green New Deal,” or if they would enact reparations for descendants of former slaves, and all kinds of different stuff. For the most part, everyone on stage raised their hands. Candidates who had spent years carefully building their public persona were suddenly racing each other to show they were further left, more “woke” I guess is how some people would put it. The one who basically refused to raise his hand for most of this stuff was Joe Biden, the former Vice-President of the United States and guy who progressives like Larry Krasner called dumb, while others said he was out of touch, and others yet questioned his mental fitness. Hell, he was called racist for working with Dixiecrats in the 1970’s, with the obvious moment everyone remembers being his confrontation with Kamala Harris during an early debate. One by one though, all of those candidates dropped out, rejected by a primary electorate of Democrats who gave Joe Biden the cleanest and clearest primary victory for President since 2004. Progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supposed young up and comers like Julian Castro and Cory Booker, and moderate stalwarts like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg all had varying levels of success, but Biden had either knocked them out of the race or sealed off their pathway to the nomination by the end of Super Tuesday. The Democratic Primary voters picked the older than hell moderate guy. Then the older than hell moderate guy picked the “cop” prosecutor lady from California as his running mate and guess what? They’re the only Democratic ticket out of three that managed to beat Donald Trump in a Presidential race.
There’s an uncomfortable truth for progressives and “establishment” Democrats alike about this period after Barack Obama’s Presidency, a period dominated by in all aspects of American life by Donald Trump. Donald Trump did better with many core Democratic leaning demographic groups than Mitt Romney or John McCain literally from the beginning in 2016. Trump has improved his standing in each subsequent election (albeit, not always by a lot) as a percentage of the vote with African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Trump has received more votes in each of his successive elections than the previous election, and he has received a higher percentage of the vote in each election than he did in the last. You don’t have to like it, but the truth is that MAGA has appeal to a lot more people than Democrats want to believe, and many of the truths Democrats held as gospel about demographics and the future of the country after 2008 and 2012 were simply not true, or at least are not true anymore. The country did not reject the personal failings, the crass language, the confrontational, bullyish style of Trump. They didn’t care that he trampled norms, or that he’s nasty, or that he even broke the law. There was something appealing about what he put forward, and that appeal actually cuts across demographic lines. In fact, Democrats in 2024 did not really have a particular “white voters” problem- Kamala Harris even won college educated white men, a first for a Democrat since the days of Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.
He did lose once though, and that once was to Biden/Harris. To hear the DC group think though, by 2024 Trump would have defeated them in a rematch, and he did end up defeating Harris. There is an arm of the Democratic Party that Biden defeated in 2020 who wants to fill in the blanks about why. They want to blame Gaza, they wanted to blame student loan forgiveness being struck down at one point, and they basically want to point the future of the party in the direction of the populist left. They point at rather small data points like Dearborn, MI (where Gaza probably did make the difference) to back up their point. They point to victories by progressives in deep blue municipal elections, without point out that their candidates didn’t really do that great, relative to what a Democrat should do. They point to unrest amongst younger voters with Biden and Harris, without pointing out what a tiny share of the electorate that really was, compared to the whole. They’ve created a case for a party that embraces big government liberalism, abandons traditional central points of American foreign policy dating back to the end of the Second World War, and more closely resembles something like Corbyn’s British Labour Party or a European Social Democratic Party in policy and rhetoric. Some of them make the case quite compellingly. The problem is their case is fiction.
Saying that Harris lost because of Biden being old, or that she was too moderate, or any of the go-to’s of terminally online leftists and radicalized coffee shop folks is comforting. It’s false. The truth is that while voters knew about Trump’s first term, his part in January 6th, his alleged crimes, his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, and really everything about Trump, they viewed Harris as more extreme (while this links to a Fox article, the polling was from the New York Times). Post-election surveys showed an electorate that thought Harris and the Democrats had their priorities wrong and took far left positions, even in cases where she didn’t. In fact, Harris was literally caught up in a bad brand. She was too generic Democrat, in part because of her own failed 2020 campaign, and she simply couldn’t overcome that.
To the extent Joe Biden did hurt her, I think it’s been overblown that it was because he stayed in the race too long. The truth is that most voters picked Biden in 2020 because he wasn’t like the generic Democrats that they imagined, something that was born out in Biden winning and House Democrats actually losing seats from their 2018 majority. I think this portion of “The Liberal Patriot’s” critique of Biden and Harris actually hits pretty close to home with my experience on the campaign:
Finally, Harris’s refusal to distance herself from President Biden likely complicated her efforts to fashion herself as a moderate. Though Biden ran to the center of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he made a conscious decision at the beginning of his presidency to swing left. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction. Meanwhile, he shunned moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of the Obama White House.
This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has since been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. Biden additionally took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
Perhaps all this is why in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, polls showed that more voters saw him as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other reasons voters chose not to support her was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.
I’m a huge Joe Biden fan and proud alum of his 2020 campaign- hell I was a delegate for him in 2020. He campaigned as the most moderate Democratic candidate in the primary field, but that guy never governed. Right around the time he had basically secured the nomination and Covid hit and shut down our headquarters, the campaign underwent a leadership shift that brought with it an influx of staff from Beto, Warren, Sanders, and others. Many Hillary alums who hadn’t been on the team were brought in as well. During the long “work from home”/”virtual campaign” period, many of these folks took fairly important roles. That continued right on into the administration. Biden, like Hillary before him, sought to bring progressive Democrats into his fold for the general election by promising to be the new LBJ and promising bold action. Was it unifying to Democrats and sounded good in 2020? Sure, I guess. Over time though, the Biden that governed seemed a lot more similar to an AOC than a Blue Dog Democrat, and people weren’t really excited about that outside of the party faithful. That was even more true as inflation hit in 2021 and 2022, and the administration had made a conscious effort to prioritize employment an wage numbers over holding down inflation. Basically, they started to tune him out then.
Look, I’m of the opinion that it was the kiss of death to try and appease Bernie Sanders in 2016, but that’s long over with. The truth is that 2026 will be about the Trump Administration, and Democrats should be able to win that election if they can talk coherently and plainly about health care premiums, continuing rising inflation, housing, and kitchen tables issues. Literally don’t mix this stuff up with activist speak, talk prices and affordability, and we’re good. In the longer run, like say 2028 though, I’m not as sure right now. Sure, the public hates ICE and the Trump Administration’s actions on immigration. Will they vote against it if we go back to Biden’s more liberal policies on asylum and immigration though? I doubt it. If we’re able to get out of our own way and admit that Barack Obama’s orderly, humane, and due process driven deportation policies that deported a shit ton of people here illegally actually did work pretty well, we might be able to win the issue. I’m not sure though. We have mini-Mamdani candidates and people trying to run as clones of John Fetterman in 2022 popping up all over the place. This isn’t sustainable. Even if it doesn’t kill us in 2026, and realistically it shouldn’t, it’s poison for 2028.
It’s fairly easy after your rejected to recoil and take the position that you weren’t true to your values. That doesn’t mean it’s true. Democrats get a minimum of 48% in literally every Presidential election, dating back as far as 1996, and while there’s meaningful divides in that electorate, the reality is that a large majority of those votes are not terminally online activists. That’s even more true for the voters who are not consistent Democratic voters. Those extra voters that pushed Biden and Obama up over 50% are not closet liberals waiting for a Bolshevik Revolution, they really don’t want to hear about the virtues of Hamas, giving taxpayer funded gender re-assignment surgeries to prisoners, confiscating guns, taxing churches, making all cars electric, or open borders. I’m not saying liberals are right or wrong on those subjects (I have some nuanced views of what is actually right there), I’m saying the voters who voted Obama/Trump/Biden/Trump (or didn’t show up in Trump’s wins) don’t love the Democratic Party, and would prefer we not cater to our activists. We can ignore them, that’s certainly an option, but that option probably doesn’t go well.
I got a text this morning with some news about the PA-7 Congressional primary- Republican Ryan Crosswell is losing his campaign manager to Governor Shapiro. You may remember the manager from this, so maybe you don’t think it’s a big deal, but we are now only a couple months from the primary. I don’t know this person, so there is no way to confirm it, but it would obviously change the campaign a lot if it’s true.
It may or may not be a big deal for Crosswell. He was burning some 40% of his campaign money up to this point, and probably needs to spend it since no one knows who he is. With that said, it’s more telling to me where this text says the manager is going- the Governor’s campaign. You wonder who initiated this, and if it’s just the latest attempt to try and rig this primary for Crooksy, because they fear he can’t do it himself unless he is running against a bunch of incompetent candidates? The amount of effort to create a candidate with this many flaws is remarkable to me. Why not just back one of the actual Democrats from the Lehigh Valley who wanted to run to begin with?
To say I think it’s unfair and stupid is an understatement. Julian Guridy got screwed. Despite the fact he clearly grew up in the town he was going to run to represent, he’s ineligible to run for the State House because of his residency- he grew up there and has lived there again for three years. Apparently because he lived in Florida for a few years as a young adult, the 90% of his life he lived here isn’t enough.
This rule is absolute bullshit, a state constitutional relic that only exists today to protect incumbent legislators from real challenges. It’s apparently easier to be eligible to run for Congress than the State House. The legislature should be working to fix this so it doesn’t happen again. This is just terrible.
So now Ana Tiburcio, a member of the Allentown School Board, will be the candidate in February’s Special Election. She almost certainly will beat Bob Smith, who has run for virtually every legislative office in the city of Allentown and only ever won the school board. That will make Tiburcio an incumbent in May’s primary, but she will not get a free pass. Erlinda Augilar sought the party nomination for the special election, though I have not seen if she plans to run in May or not. Allentown Councilwoman CeCe Gerlach definitely plans to run. This will be a highly competitive race. Much of Gerlach’s message about the party “bosses” (such a ridiculous term) trying to pick the candidate instead of the people still works, if not better now that she’s been passed over twice. Gerlach also probably has a sizable name recognition advantage over Tiburcio. While party insiders like to complain about Gerlach, I don’t see much evidence that the voting public hates her. Sure, she lost for Mayor when the story about her dropping a minor at the “tent city” homeless encampment came out close to the primary election, but even then she was within a couple of points of winning. Since then she was re-elected handily to the council. I’m not sure that a bunch of endorsements from people not in her district are going to be what sinks her, but maybe a huge investment by House Democratic leadership would get it done. That also kind of seems silly in a safe Democratic seat. If this is a real fight and isn’t just bought by Harrisburg, Gerlach just might win anyway.
All of this really doesn’t look great for the Democrats. It looks like people didn’t do their homework ahead of time and just figured they could rubber stamp their way through. Is that the truth? Of course not. Guridy had worked hard to become the choice of most of the party. Reality matters a lot less than optics. Now there is a chance that a very, very independent leftist voice will win and represent the 22nd District, an outsider to the Allentown establishment. If you can get yourself far enough away from the mess to be objective, it kind of looks like some folks walked themselves right into it.
State Senator Lisa Boscola is a moderate Democrat. That makes some folks mad, but she’s ultimately with the Democratic caucus on nearly every vote. We notice when she’s not because it’s rare, and because the Senate Dems are a super highly regional caucus at this point, nearly all of their members are in or near Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties, the most liberal spots in the state. The reality is that a State Senator from the Lehigh Valley really can’t always vote like a Philadelphia Democrat, they’ll lose re-election. Your options are someone like Senator Boscola, or a Republican. Choose wisely.
Look, I think the current version of ICE is simply unworkable. I was for Lamont McClure’s executive order to keep them out of Northampton County’s courthouse without a warrant, and I’m for Tara Zrinski strengthening that. I also don’t think we need Easton or Bethlehem deciding they are going to put a big neon light on themselves and declare themselves a “sanctuary” city for people who are here illegally, and I don’t think a society is simply wrong for enforcing their borders and immigration laws. Are we wrong to employ an armed gestapo to terrorize people over immigration? Yes. There is a happy in-between of course, we had it for eight years under Barack Obama. He deported far more people than Trump or Biden without being cruel and inhumane doing it. We were safer because of it.
I don’t think this criticism of Boscola is random of course. Taiba ran against Bob Freeman for the state house unsuccessfully in 2024, losing by more than 50% of the vote. She’s going to try and run against Boscola. This is an even harder, worse district for her to try and win in than the House one, and it’s not going to go well for her. If she decides to run her race saying Senator Boscola is opposed to illegal immigration, she just might end up losing worse in this race than she did in 2024.
Todays’ the day that Lehigh County Democrats will pick their candidate to replace incoming Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel in his Allentown and Salisbury based 22nd District seat. The candidates are lining up:
Four Democratic candidates — precinct committee person Erlinda Aguilar; Allentown City Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach; Julian Guridy, an aide to state Sen. Nick Miller; and Lewis Shupe, who attempted to launch a congressional campaign in 2024 — submitted their names for consideration ahead of Thursday’s 5 p.m. deadline, Lehigh County Democratic Committee Chair Lori McFarland said.
A fifth, Douglas Kunkle, withdrew his nomination.
Kunkle apparently withdrew out of frustration with the process. Gerlach has also complained about who is and who isn’t an eligible voter, from what I’ve been told. Many expected that. The Allentown City Democrats did fold several years ago, leading to some questions about who is and who isn’t still on the committee, though it actually appears that this isn’t as real of a question as some believed. Jessica Ortiz, who had a Facebook page to run for this seat, did not apply for the Democratic nomination either.
If you put a gun to my head and asked me who is going to win today, well you wouldn’t need the gun, because I would tell you that it will be Julian Guridy. Guridy is publicly supported by Mayor Tuerk, Siegel, and Allentown’s other two Representatives, Mike Schlossberg and Pete Schweyer, and a functioning adult would guess State Senator Nick Miller, Guridy’s current boss. Does anyone think the committee is going to go out of it’s way to embarrass literally every significant elected official at the state level from Allentown? Of course not.
Gerlach is formidable (I don’t know the other two candidates very well, so I can’t comment there) and this is not the end. She has support from most of the more leftist groups in Allentown, and this committee selection is only binding for the February 24th Special Election. She is still more than able to run in the May Primary, and has a base of support for that race.
With all of that said, Guridy is going to win today.
We just passed the 34th anniversary of one of the greatest days in the post-World War II world- the death of the Soviet Union. A bunch of hyper-ambitious morons decided to create a government on a theory and a myth, and ended up creating a failed shit hole of a state, an authoritarian, corrupt, awful nightmare of a state. As with most Socialist nations in our world, it turned into a cult of personality towards it’s leaders, complete with rampant corruption and “black markets,” poverty, and all kinds of human rights violations. The world is better off for not having the Soviet Union around today, whatever you think of the governments in the republics that replaced it.
Sure, there are Russians and others from the old empire that miss the power they had at that time. Even so, they’re not desperate to return to the system of government they had. Meanwhile, socialism has failed pretty much everywhere else- North Korea is a hellhole, China basically abandoned the system, Cuba is on the verge of collapse, Venezuela has literal pirates off their coast, Yugoslavia collapsed into a state of war and ethnic cleansing, the rest of Eastern Europe threw out their dictators, East Germany had to build a wall to keep people from leaving, and Bolivia’s economy is now in ruins. Socialism just doesn’t work anywhere. Even countries that didn’t end up in violent chaos ended up turning away from the failed system.
So why do progressives in the Western World, who are actually just old European Social Democrats (a very generous government “safety net.”) want to brand themselves as far leftist nuts? To be clear, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Graham Platner, Bob Brooks, and others are not calling for the government to “seize the means of production.” They don’t want a “First National Energy Company,” and even their “Medicare for All” is just covering everyone under Medicare- which is generally administered by private companies. Why are they associating the policies of a full social safety net with a failed economic and political system that allowed Joseph Stalin to kill millions and millions of his own people? How is this good politics?
Americans are generally smart enough to know that these people are idiots, which is why they don’t win elections outside of comfortably Democratic jurisdictions where primaries decide the winners. It’s one thing to want a generous Social Security program or a higher minimum wage, it’s another altogether to brand yourself a part of a murderous, failed political system. Somehow, a lot of Democrats want to turn to these people to turn their 2024 fate around. It’s a foolish strategy.
I don’t like remembering December of 2016, but I think we all remember the SNL skit where Hillary Clinton showed up at the homes of electors and tried to convince them to vote against Donald Trump in the electoral college. One could certainly laugh at the skit, and one could even empathize with the shock many people felt after Trump won- I mean, he got less votes and won the election. If you go back and watch the speech, even Trump looked shocked when he came out to declare victory. The whole thing was surreal at the time. It was still absolutely batshit that people though the electoral college would be faithless enough to defeat the candidate they pledged their support to. It was a super long shot in 2000 when Al Gore needed less than five, and that wasn’t happening in 2016.
The problem with this is that it never ended though. People thought the Russian interference in our elections and every other scandal “would be the end of him.” When he was defeated in 2020, they wanted him punished for the very real wrongs he had done. Even now, they hope there is some early way out. The truth is that there never was. The even more real truth is that for most Americans, it was never really a priority.
I came across a tweet that angered me quite a bit. It’s tone deaf. There are truly a class of people in Washington who think that the top concern of most people is imprisoning Trump. You can read it here:
The more I think about it, the more I think Joe Biden was a uniquely bad president at the particular moment in time he was president. Not because of what he did, but because of all the things he didn't do. Holding Trump accountable for his crimes was job Number One.
Basically the thought here is that Joe Biden, after receiving 81 million votes, should have made it his priority to prosecute and jail the guy he just defeated. Not stop Covid, revitalize the economy, expand health care, invest in green energy, or really any of the stuff he told people he would do. Never mind that the crimes committed in New York and Georgia were state crimes, never mind the need to investigate whatever involvement Trump actually had in January 6th, never mind that the Florida case hadn’t even happened yet, never mind that while Mueller found that Russia did interfere in the 2016 Election, there was no two party conspiracy, and never mind that neither impeachment ended in a conviction- lock him up. Look, do I think he did a lot of this stuff? Yes, and he was convicted in a state of doing it. The idea that someone was going to lock him in Leavenworth and we’d never hear from him again was nuts though. That locking the guy in Leavenworth, or Minersville, or whatever other crazy place you wanted him locked up in, should have been the top priority, well that’s just insane.
Yes, I’d love it if Donald Trump was gone from American politics. The reality though is that he’ll be gone when he’s done being President- which the Constitution clearly says will be January 20th, 2029, but don’t get too comfortable with this Supreme Court. In all seriousness, Trump and Trumpism will probably only be gone when the American people are ready to move on to something else. They will. They moved on from Obama, from Clinton, from Bush, from Reagan, from Nixon, from Eisenhower, from Truman, and even eventually from FDR’s politics (he of course was dead).
I stopped watching cable news a few years back, almost entirely, and it’s the best thing I ever did. I built a nice following on Twitter and other social media a few years back for my political opinions, but the truth is that I think that world is too segregated from normal society now. People only talk to people like them, then think the world is like them. Most people are much more mad that groceries and gas cost a lot than they are that Trump says mean and insensitive things. No, he’s not being hauled off to The Hague, or impeached and removed, or prosecuted, or any of that. Most people don’t care either. If you tell them this is your priority, they think you’re nuts. This is truly a level of strange that I think has infected most politically active people.
If Bob Brooks is the nominee of the Democratic Party in PA-7, Republicans will swamp him with negative ads defining him as a deadbeat who took money from his mother-in-law and expresses racist beliefs on social media. In any normal time, I’d say that’s disqualifying, but there are a lot of people who would vote for O.J. Simpson if he ran on their party’s ticket right now. Even so, Crooksy is really the only candidate with a strong general election negative to run against, and Republicans are open that they feel most confident they can beat him. They’ll use his personal baggage, his endorsement from Bernie Sanders and other radical left wingers, and even negatives from his career that they have waiting to use. Democrats can’t afford that. Ryan Crosswell is completely unacceptable, but probably can win a general election, if you’re willing to vote for a Republican. There are three Democrats actually from the Lehigh Valley who are Democrats running in this race. We never needed the DCCC to mess this race up with this guy, but sure enough, it happened.
There’s absolutely no evidence that Crooksy brings anything to the table as a candidate, but that’s not what this is about. He raised $300k last quarter? So did like everyone across the river in NJ-7. Any candidate that gets nominated will raise plenty in the general election, and have PACs you’ve never heard of spending on their behalf. All that any of these folks endorsing him cares about is, he is the President of the IAFF’s Pennsylvania organization and the IAFF is really damn good at politics. When the IAFF backs a candidate for President, that candidate usually wins the Democratic nomination, at a minimum. The Governor wants the IAFF to support him in future campaigns, such as for Governor in 2026 and for President in 2028, and let’s be honest, one is more critical right now than the other. It’s very clear this is why this endorsement is happening, and anyone saying otherwise is a liar. Let’s be honest here, otherwise there’s no other reason to step into a competitive primary. Months ago, everyone claimed they would stay out. Plenty of people have appealed to the Governor directly and his insiders, pleading with them to not endorse this guy. None of that mattered, because this isn’t about this race. It’s about 2028.
I know this is an inconvenient truth to publish, but it’s a truth nonetheless. If I was worried about backlash for saying it, I wouldn’t have started in on Crooksy. I knew this from the start and made the decision on my own to write it. I’ve brought the receipts since day one. Frankly, I haven’t wrote the worst stuff, and probably won’t. Unions and elected officials are being pressured from the good ole’ boys club in Harrisburg to fall in line, to crush a primary here. I’m not invested enough in anyone’s success to play that game.
Last week the Senate failed to extend subsidies for people buying health care on the Affordable Care Act Exchanges. This week?
Friday’s proposal from House Republicans includes measures that would allow small businesses to join together to buy insurance plans for their employees and put in place new requirements for pharmacy benefit managers in an effort to lower drug costs.
Starting in 2027, federal payments, known as cost-sharing reduction payments, would aim to lower premiums for some low-income Americans. Health plans that provide abortion coverage would be excluded.
A vote on the package is expected next week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
“House Republicans are tackling the real drivers of health care costs to provide affordable care, increase access and choice, and restore integrity to our nation’s health care system for all Americans,” Johnson said in a statement.
Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries blasted the proposal Saturday.
“Mike Johnson just released a toxic Republican Healthcare plan that hurts everyday Americans,” Jeffries wrote on X. “It fails to extend the ACA tax credits that expire this month. And is a deeply unserious proposal.”
This is a joke. Sure, let employers buy together, but what does that do for people who are buying their own health insurance? The answer is nothing. For people like me, who buy their coverage at full price, this will mean not only do I get hit with higher 2026 premiums, but when millions drop their coverage in 2026, my premiums will skyrocket again in 2027. Health care costs the least when the most number of people are able to pay for their care, or are insured. House Republicans actively are plotting to harm that. Why? Some sort of stubborn insistence on free markets? I doubt it. They simply don’t want the government to provide anything, so they can cut taxes more for wealthy people. At this point, it’s clear their goal is no income taxes at all.
This did not have to happen. The decision by Chuck Schumer to send Tim Kaine, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan, Angus King, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Jackie Rosen over to vote to end the government shutdown without even this small concession from Republicans will essentially do massive damage to the American health care system. If Republicans were going to re-open the government without these subsidies, Democrats should have forced them to end the filibuster to do it. Let them have the blood on their hands. Instead Democrats gave them a way out of their own mess, and we all know it was approved by their leader, because they gave just enough votes to get it done. Senate Democrats basically own this mess as much as Trump’s GOP, which is utterly embarrassing for a party whose crowning achievement of the last 20 years was a health care system that insured over 20 million people who were previously uninsured.
We really need to get rid of John Fetterman in 2028, by the way.
Apocalypse Vibes 