Kevin

Retired, hooray.

[Old Salty Marine @BamaSaltyMarine]

From a post on FB…nothing truer!

You can bury your head in the sand where politics is concerned but it won't do any good. We're in trouble here in the U.S. We were in trouble long before Donald Trump became POTUS so don't try to put this off on him. Democrats were in office 8 years before he was elected & then we had a nursing home patient for 4 years afterward.

America fought in the Cold War for years before we defeated Communism but now we're electing Democratic Socialists (Communists) to public office. People from other countries flee to our country to escape Communism but we want to adopt it here. We all know how well that's going to turn out.

No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation & our lives are never going to be the same.
I have been aggravated by the hostility of family/friends. I look at people I have known all my life--so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind.
• If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.
• Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.
• Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.
• It was cool for Joe Biden to 'blackmail' the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.
• Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote and go to war. And evidently, four or five is now old enough to change your gender or your name.
• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.
• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.
• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.
• Irish doctors & German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-bangers who jump the southern fence are welcome.
• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for 'free' health care is not.
• If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
• We see other countries going Socialist & they've all collapsed but it seems like a great plan to us.
• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born & other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
• Criminals are caught-&-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it's a violation of THEIR rights.
• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us 'racists'?!
Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no respect, no civility & people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China. We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong & wrong is right, where moral is immoral & immoral is moral, where good is evil & evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water & is sinking fast. The choice is yours to make. What will it be? Time is short, make your choice wisely.
This is the truth.

[Steve @SteveL3385]

So you don’t like the price of gas? Answer me this. Who shut down the Keystone pipeline? Who shut down the off shore drilling? Who shut down the drilling in Alaska? Who shut down the Line 5 in Michigan? Who shut down drilling on Federal Land? Sorry windmills and solar panels do not put gas in your cars. Oh, how many refineries have closed in the last 5 years?

[Jan Jekielek @JanJekielek]

Here’s why beef is so expensive in America, says Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms.

He said:

“The biggest enemy right now keeping beef prices high … is the subsidies to the corn and soybean farmers.”

“Half the soybeans America produces are exported. We don’t even use them. Almost half the corn goes into ethanol.”

“A huge percentage of American agriculture is not in the food business.”

“The average soybean farmer lost $100 an acre last year…Instead of having to face the reality that the world doesn’t need soybeans.”

His alternative: take 1,000 acres of Nebraska soybeans, convert them to grass, and begin grazing cows.

“My hypothetical 1,000 acres,” Joel says, “costs $300,000 to convert from soybeans to grass… That’s exactly what it costs annually to grow soybeans.”

Joel says that either “It’s going to cost me $300,000 of annual expense to put that crop in and harvest it,” or “I can do a once in a century $300,000 investment and return it to perennial prairie polyculture.”

“Today’s farmer only gets 5.8 cents of the retail dollar.”

“Today, we have four companies controlling 85% of the meat market.”

“It’s not free enterprise…It’s capital cronyism.”

@JoelSalatin

[Kevin @fireozark]

@20th_Centurygal Sunday morning coming down

[St. Louis Cardinals @Cardinals]

As we remember the lives lost on September 11, 2001, we look back on Jack Buck's poem "For America," which he read at Busch Stadium as a tribute to the victims and first responders one week after the attacks.

[Kevin @fireozark]

@real_kuntry Wrong

[Farm Girl Carrie™️👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

Isn’t this the truth?!

[Kevin @fireozark]

@20th_Centurygal Edgar Winter

[Michele Tafoya @Michele_Tafoya]

I have two kids.

When I saw the direction this country was headed, I had a choice: stay comfortable in a career I love, or speak up.

Matt Calkins made that same choice. He resigned from the Seattle Times rather than be muzzled.

Speaking up costs you. But is it worth it?

You bet it is.

Minnesota, you're worth fighting for. I won't stay silent now. I won't stay silent in Washington.

[Kevin @fireozark]

@BillGossage Insider trading, I would like to have access to all their info. Every fan should know that the odds are fair.

[Leah Rain ✝️🇺🇸🎸🏝️ @LeahRain77]

Imagine you, and your wife are returning a package to Kohl’s department store, you look up and you’re surrounded by four police cars telling you to get out with your hands up.
Turns out the driver’s license plate came up stolen and was picked up by flock cameras. Problem is the car was not stolen. Some human input the license plate wrong, and the plate came up stolen in California..
He was detained by the cops for an hour as he was explaining that he runs a social media platform that test drives cars for different dealerships, and car manufacturers, and he had proper paperwork with him to prove this. He finally got it sorted.
The company laughingly says that this occurrence is rare, but actually it isn’t.
If this can happen this way to him, it can happen to anyone.

[ThePersistence @ScottPresler]

If we were to put Flock cameras outside of every polling location & drop box in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, & Pittsburgh,

democrats would unite against them.

[Charlie Bilello @charliebilello]

Over the last 10 years, US Federal Government Tax Revenue has increased 65% to $5.3 Trillion while Government Spending has increased 96% to $7.3 Trillion.

The result: a more than doubling of the US National Debt from $19 trillion to $39 trillion.

Video: https://t.co/AsceBj2Abf

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

Almost there ... $40 trillion

42% of all income taxes collected goes to paying interest on the US National Debt

US govt debt growing at $2.1 trillion per year. Most and more of the US govt budget is being swallowed by interest payments.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

We shouldn’t be spending $432B – that we don’t have – in a single month.

It’s time for Washington to get serious about its spending problem, reduce the size and scope of government, end welfare benefits for illegal aliens, and crack down on rampant fraud.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

Given this massive deficit, Congress should not entertain increasing federal spending!

U.S. budget deficit surged in July to highest level since March 2021 https://t.co/2FZoUgFZ8j

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

Secretary Kennedy just admitted his agency loses $100 BILLION a year to theft.

Not a typo. One hundred billion. Every single year. Your tax dollars.

Here is how the scam works, in his own words:

They shut down 800 hospices. In Los Angeles, investigators found "patients" enrolled in end-of-life hospice care who were very much alive. Still walking around two and three years later. Medicaid was billed $6,000 a month the entire time.

The recruiters worked poor neighborhoods. The pitch was simple: give us your patient number, take this $375 flat screen TV, and we will enroll you in hospice. You never have to show up. We just bill the government $6,000 a month, forever. The person never dies, because the person was never sick.

Then Miami. A fifth of the durable medical equipment companies in the entire country were clustered in South Florida. Wheelchairs, knee braces, that sort of thing. Investigators found hotels where every single room was registered as a separate medical equipment company. None of them sold any equipment. The government paid anyway.

$100 billion in outright theft.

But here is the part that should make you angrier.

That number does NOT include the legal robbery. The contract prices Medicare agreed to pay:

Abiraterone: $63 cash here. $2,700 on Medicare.
Imatinib: $17 cash here. $1,800 on Medicare.
That is not fraud. Nobody is going to prison for it. Those are the prices Medicare negotiated and signed off on. They are so bad at managing your health care that they let prices spiral that far out of control, then act surprised when the bill comes due.

We are not waiting on Congress to fix this.

We fired the middleman who sets those prices. No PBM. No insurance games. No hidden markups. Just the real cost of the drug plus a flat fee, posted in the open.

[Rick Scott @SenRickScott]

No SAVE America Act = No recess

That should be the Senate’s plan.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 BOOM: SEN. MIKE LEE JUST WENT WAR MODE ON THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN

She may try to OBSTRUCT the SAVE America Act in reconciliation (only needs 50 votes) and Lee is getting ahead of people like Thune saying to "protect" her

"Nobody elected the Senate parliamentarian. The Senate parliamentarian occupies no constitutional post in our system of government!"

"You're going to hear we need to PROTECT the Parliamentarians' rulings, saying they can't be overturned..."

"Nobody's calling for the parliamentarians' rulings to be overturned. Why? Because the parliamentarian DOESN'T RULE! She lacks that power. Only the presiding officer rules. The parliamentarian merely offers ADVICE."

"The presiding officer, whether that's the vice president of the United States, the president pro tem, or the acting president pro tem...is the presiding officer who makes the ruling. It's then up to the Senate to either sustain or overturn that ruling."

"In most contexts, it takes a simple majority vote to overturn the ruling of the chair. In budget reconciliation, it takes 60 votes, so the math changes. But regardless, there is nothing sacred about the rule of the Senate parliamentarian!"

"So don't believe those who say that you've got to protect the parliamentarian at all costs."

"It's not her vote that matters. She doesn't have a vote. It's the ruling of the presiding officer that matters."

NO RECESS UNTIL IT'S DONE!

[Forest Park Pharmacy @ForestParkPharm]

This is the story of the most expensive generic drug in the world, and how it is quietly bankrupting Medicare while it enriches the manufacturers and the middlemen at the same time.

It is lenalidomide, the generic of Revlimid, a blood cancer drug. And it costs nearly $14,000 a prescription. For a generic. In 2023 it was the single biggest generic drug in all of Medicare, at $1.68 billion. The number two generic on that list costs about $15 a claim. This one costs $13,806.

So how does a generic pull that off? It went off patent in 2019, but Bristol Myers Squibb had just bought it, and on the way in they negotiated three more years of market exclusivity. I have no idea how that is legal, but it happens constantly.

It became broadly generic in 2022. But here is the trick. It is still under restricted distribution, which means the manufacturer only lets about 21 pharmacies in the entire country sell it. A pharmacy like mine cannot even touch it. So we cannot compete and drive the price down. They did not win the market. They deleted it.

And when you look at who owns those 21 pharmacies, surprise, it is mostly the PBMs and insurers themselves. CVS, Cigna, Centene, Optum, Prime.

With no real market, why would any manufacturer compete on price? They do not. Several companies make this drug and they all somehow land on the same high number. And it is making them a fortune. For Dr. Reddy's, this one drug is over 80 percent of its revenue growth. These are companies with hundreds of products, leaning on a single generic.

The manufacturers are not the only ones cashing in. Your insurer is too, because lenalidomide is classified as a specialty drug. Specialty drugs are less than 2 percent of prescriptions but half of all drug spending. What makes a drug specialty? Nobody can tell you, other than it is expensive. And once that label is on, the insurer cranks the knobs. They raise the price and they limit where you can fill it.

Look at a different drug, abiraterone. It costs about $188. CVS charges $6,372 for it, then steers half of all patients to the pharmacy CVS itself owns, so they capture every last cent.

Add it all up and lenalidomide is on track to cost Americans around $3.5 billion, roughly 8 percent of all Medicare drug spending. A generic taken by about 20,000 people is propping up the entire ecosystem. That is insane.

Firing the middleman will not fix every problem with a drug like this. The restricted distribution is a separate fight. But it takes care of a whole lot of the damage, so that is exactly what we did. No PBM in the middle means fair, transparent prices you can actually see.

Sources: CMS Medicare Part D, 46brooklyn Research, and the Lenalidomide REMS program.