Q&A with Devdutta, NC secretary of health and human services | Raleigh News & Observer

«To encourage states that had not expanded Medicaid to get on board, the federal government allotted a $1.6 billion or so “signing bonus” to new states. After North Carolina passed Medicaid expansion with bi-partisan support, the General Assembly used part of that signing bonus to fund about $835 million for behavioral health. DHHS used some of those funds to increase the rates paid to Medicaid providers for behavioral health services, among other things.»

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article299325609.html

Is 50% for behavioral health good, bad, or average?

Daniel Penny Gets Hired by Andreessen Horowitz

https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-daniel-penny-hired-at-andreessen-horowitz

«“He will learn the business of investing and he will work to support our portfolio companies,” wrote Ulevitch in a note sent to all employees this afternoon.»

“He will LEARN?” What is his skill set now? (It’s clearly not subduing a person in a non-lethal manner.) Did they just hire an unqualified person because of their political agenda?

And, Free Press: his current skill set is reporting you could have included in your story.

Wikipedia says: «He was honorably discharged and returned to New York, reportedly considering higher education and other career paths before the 2023 incident.»

So: no skills. Apart from he learned doing whatever he did in the Marines. Maybe “working the system”?

Experts warn Dems falling for Trump and Musk’s ‘trap’: ‘Don’t swing at every pitch’ – Raw Story

https://www.rawstory.com/musk-trump-2671092992/

«“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told Politico. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”



MAGA world, meanwhile, is thrilled to see Democratic lawmakers outraged over the foreign aid issue, Politico wrote in their report, which noted that many in Trump’s orbit believe them to be “wasting political capital defending an agency that they believe the public doesn’t give a rip about. Musk himself spent the following 24 hours posting videos of Democrats protesting the move.”»

In addition to the 51% of the American people who couldn’t care less about brown people suffering in parts of the world they never heard of, I believe there’s a chunk of folks on the left who are focused exclusively on domestic issues.

And I wonder if we’ll ever know how many people who were super-concerned about Gaza just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Harris.


[Edit: of course, three days from now, at the pace we’re going, USAID will be a distant blip in the rear-view mirror and nobody (other than those directly affected) will remember the rage other than the lawyers involved.]

Rethinking the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, at least a little bit

Ya know… I always sort of viewed the WWII museum in New Orleans as some sort of Boomer-conservative thing, glorifying war and nationalism (and Murica). But it occurs to me that I might want to reconsider my views at this point, given how much current events track with the past events of WWII (at least as far as politics in Germany) and the fact that America really did fight against Nazism then.

I saw Laffy’s statement that all of Trump’s cabinet nominees are probably going to be approved, and I thought about legislators who supported the Nazis in Nazi Germany and how they fared after the war. Did they live in shame? I did some research. Apparently not (with some exceptions like von Papen, who was never able to restart his political career even though he tried). I think everybody knew, but it always stayed sort of in the background.

And I landed on this article by an academic (a scholar!) written for the WWII Museum. Which seems pretty good, actually, although I can’t tell at this point if there’s some sort of crypto-something going on, but I’ll assume not for now.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/justice-in-post-nazi-western-germany#:~:text=Immediately%20after%20the%20establishment%20of,brought%20up%20if%20they%20behaved