DL Open Thread: Friday, October 3, 2025
The Knee-Jerks Didn’t Like This:
Now, those same activists are questioning the administration’s commitment to their cause, marking the first significant pushback Trump has received from his otherwise loyal base of social conservatives.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said in a social media post about the decision that he has “lost confidence in the leadership at FDA.” Former vice President Mike Pence said the decision was “a complete betrayal of the pro-life movement that elected President Trump” and called on Kennedy to be fired.
A White House spokesman did not respond to questions about Trump’s position on the drug approval but provided a statement from HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon, who said the FDA “has very limited discretion in deciding whether to approve a generic drug.”
Nixon said the HHS secretary, by law, must approve an application if it demonstrates that the generic drug is identical to the brand-name drug, and generic applications aren’t required to provide evidence proving safety or effectiveness. He noted that HHS is “conducting a study of the reported adverse effects of mifepristone to ensure the FDA’s risk mitigation program for the drug is sufficient to protect women from unstated risks.”
Raise your hands if you think that this decision will stand. Nope, didn’t raise mine either. Look for mass firings at FDA soon.
Don’t Make Me Laugh. These sell-out comedians certainly don’t:
Billed as “the biggest comedy festival in the world”, the inaugural Riyadh Comedy festival, which is running 26 September to 9 October, features some of the biggest names in US comedy. The lineup features Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, Bill Burr, Kevin Hart, Whitney Cummings, Pete Davidson, Aziz Ansari and Jo Koy, among many others who are all taking their fees directly from the Saudi government.
Some comics were transparent about their willingness to ignore their moral convictions in order to play at the festival. “So what, they have slaves?” asked Tim Dillon in a podcast segment that led to his firing from the festival. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way.” Pete Davidson offered a similar take, acknowledging in a chat with Von that people have asked him why, given his father’s death on 9/11, he would take a paycheck from the Saudi government. He did not address the criticism directly, but he did suggest he was happy to forget 9/11 for the right price: “I just know I get the routing, and then I see the number, and I go, ‘I’ll go.’”
How high is that number? According to Dillon, pretty high: in the same podcast that got him fired, he said the organizers offered him $375,000 and claimed that some comedians were offered millions. Gillis did not reveal how much the organizers offered him, but he did say that when he initially refused, they “doubled the bag”. Tough news for Dillon, who elsewhere claimed he asked for $500,000 but had to settle for less.
Man, I really liked Aziz Ansari…
Will Air Traffic Controllers End The Government Shutdown? Robert Reich thinks so:
Like other federal workers, the controllers aren’t being paid now (they’ll get back-pay when the shutdown ends). But unlike most other federal workers, their workloads and stress loads have been soaring.
Recall the last big shutdown that started in late 2018 and went on for 35 days — a record. What ended it? Air traffic controllers.
In January 2019, several controllers at a facility near Washington, D.C., that handles air traffic for most of the region, called in sick.
As a result, flight delays along the East Coast began to stack up. The delays quickly cascaded to Atlanta and beyond.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association issued a statement saying essentially, “We told you so.”
“In the past few weeks, we have warned about what could happen as a result of the prolonged shutdown. Many controllers have reached the breaking point of exhaustion, stress, and worry caused by this shutdown. Each hour that goes by that the shutdown continues makes the situation worse.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “The #TrumpShutdown has already pushed hundreds of thousands of Americans to the breaking point. Now it’s pushing our airspace to the breaking point too.”
Angry travelers began phoning their members of Congress. Private jets carrying CEOs and Wall Street mavens couldn’t take off or land. The CEOs and mavens also began phoning.
Hours later, Trump announced that the government would reopen and employees would be given back pay. Trump didn’t even get funding for his border wall — the issue that had sparked the shutdown.
This time it won’t take 35 days.
Hadn’t thought of that. History repeating itself?
The Food That Never Arrived To Food Banks–And The Culprit:
In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute.
The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history.
ProPublica then enumerates exactly how much food, down to the last egg, that Trump took from food banks. I’ve said it before–award-worthy reporting that I hope you read. Here’s one example from the heart of Trump country:
Most food banks rely on a combination of federal or state dollars, private giving and partnerships with businesses that donate leftover food. While the cancellations were disruptive to all food banks, according to their representatives, those that receive state funding or have strong community support said that they have weathered the cuts better than others.
The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, where Cornwell and Green’s groceries come from, gets more than half of its food from the federal government and receives very little state support. It serves rural areas of Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to U.S. census data.
The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.
Christiana Care: ‘Fuck The Poor’.
Earlier this year, the state spent half a million dollars to pay off medical debts for nearly 18,000 residents. State leaders argued that costs were too high in the state, and patients had been unfairly burdened by often crippling medical debt.
But as taxpayers footed the bill, which would ultimately erase $50 million in unpaid medical debt, the state’s largest hospital system has often spent a minuscule fraction of its multi-billion-dollar budget to ease those medical bills for Delawareans in the first place.
ChristianaCare, Delaware’s largest nonprofit hospital, has doubled its revenue in the last decade. But during that same timeframe, its investments in free and discounted care have remained largely flat.
The revelation, pulled from the nonprofit health care giant’s annual tax filings, comes as health care costs continue to rise in the state and ChristianaCare attempts to grow its footprint in the region and dismantle regulatory measures meant to lower costs for patients.
Nonprofit hospitals are required by the IRS to provide a “community benefit” to earn their tax-exempt status. Historically, that benefit came in the form of providing free or discounted services, sometimes called “charity care.”
But changes in recent decades to federal and state guidelines have allowed nonprofit hospitals to set charity care policies at their own discretion, removing any requirement of providing it to patients in order to receive a tax break.
For ChristianaCare, this has translated to a steep decline in the amount of free and discounted services provided to patients in the last decade. Charity care has made up less than 1% of the health care giant’s annual expenses since 2021.
This is the second award-worthy article I’ve read this morning. Memo to Legislators: Do something. And ignore that ChristianaCare bean-counter Ray Seigfried. He represents the corporation where he built his fortune, not the people in his Senate District.
What do you want to talk about?
In case you were wondering whatever became of Lauren Witzke, she’s playing narc at Costco:
https://www.aol.com/woman-caught-filling-huge-container-105204661.html
Wow, that Witzke mug shot! From drug mule to soda jerk.
That Spotlight article and this (shockingly) Delaware Online one will go greaaaat with Meyer’s plan to cease any attempt at regulating health systems:
“As Delaware recorded some of the steepest increases in health care costs and premiums in 2023, top executives at the state’s largest nonprofit hospitals reported seven-figure salaries, according to IRS filings.”
https://www.delawareonline.com/story/money/industries/healthcare/2025/09/23/irs-form-990-filings-show-delaware-ceo-compensation/86296474007/
I hope the next story is how the state subsidizes these entities and how much property tax and what not they would be paying if not making hundreds of millions in ‘reserve’ as nonprofits.