DL Open Thread: Friday, October 10, 2025

Did Nepotism Influence Gov. Meyer’s Agreement (and/or surrender) With Christiana Care?   The question becomes more germane as Mediawatch uncovered this potential conflict-of-interest for us.

Dr. Cooksey is Matt Meyer’s wife.  It’s not the only action that Meyer has taken that raises questions, though.  Remember this?  That’s right.  Meyer’s two appointments to the Hospital Cost Review Board came with longstanding ties to ChristianaCare.

Dr. Thomas Sweeney:

…(f)rom 2001 to 2018, he was associate chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at ChristianaCare Health System, where he oversaw performance improvement and system-wide credentialing.

Gary Ferguson:

…(f)or 30 years, Gary served in various leadership roles at ChristianaCare Health System, one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers. His tenure culminated in his role as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, where he spent 14 years overseeing system-wide operations, driving strategic initiatives, and ensuring high-quality patient care.

I think that, at least, this is a worthy topic of investigation for either WHYY or Spotlight Delaware.   I don’t have answers here, only questions.  Betcha the General Assembly has some questions of their own.  Oh, and before anybody claims I’m besmirching the reputations of these people, let me point out that it’s not their accomplishments that I question, it’s their longstanding involvement with ChristianaCare, whose costs led to the creation of this Board.

Here is something that Meyer and his Christiana Care lackeys don’t want you to read.  So, please, honor their wishes and don’t read it.  A couple of excerpts from an interview with Spotlight Delaware reporter Nick Stonesifer.  Don’t read them:

This is where I always struggle.

“Hey mom, I did an investigation into charity care in Delaware. As hospitals continue to grow and expand, as their budgets grow larger, as their capital projects grow larger and larger, the amount of investment they’re putting into reducing costs and bills for patients has stayed relatively flat.”

This was pitched to me by our Editor-in-Chief to look into this.

I hadn’t heard of it until he told me. We looked at how hospitals in the state were running very large surpluses, but their financial assistance and those numbers were staying pretty low. And we saw that they were often a fraction of a percent within their budget, and we wanted to examine that further.

These fights over the Affordable Care Act, I think that you’re actually going to see more people probably going to have to lean on this as those credits go away. Premiums for insurance are going to go through the roof, and people may not be able to afford insurance. They might go uninsured and they might have to begin leaning on hospital financial assistance.

I’m sure that ChristianaCare Bean-counter Emeritus Ray Seigfried can explain to us why this is all perfectly reasonable.  Now that’s something well worth reading–in the Governor’s office.

Fascism Proceeds Unabated.  Yet another Trump-mandated political indictment:

A grand jury has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on a fraud charge in the latest Justice Department case against a perceived enemy of President Donald Trump, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Thursday.

James was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on one count after a mortgage fraud investigation, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

The indictment, two weeks after a separate criminal case charging former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress, is the latest indication of the Trump administration’s norm-busting determination to use the law enforcement powers of the Justice Department to pursue the president’s political foes and public figures who once investigated him.

The James case remained under seal Thursday, making it impossible to assess what evidence prosecutors have. But as was the case with the Comey charges, the prosecution followed a strikingly unconventional case. The Trump administration two weeks ago pushed out Erik Siebert, the veteran prosecutor who had overseen the investigation for months but had resisted pressure to file a case, and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who was once Trump’s personal lawyer but who has never worked as a federal prosecutor.

Halligan presented the case to the grand jury herself, as she did in the case against Comey, according to the person familiar with the matter.

Trump has been advocating charging James for months, posting on social media without citing any evidence that she’s “guilty as hell” and telling reporters at the White House, “It looks to me like she’s really guilty of something, but I really don’t know.”

I think that at least one of the judges will throw out the charges before the case(s) proceed much further.  Thankfully, some citizens are fighting back:

A grand jury Tuesday night declined to indict two protesters in the Chicago area accused of assaulting law enforcement, the latest in a shocking string of failures by the Trump Department of Justice. 

Securing grand jury indictments is usually nearly automatic; only the prosecutors get to present evidence, and the bar is much lower for indicting someone than proving their guilt. But the Trump administration, in its eagerness to crack down on protesters resistant to its brutality, has now been rebuffed by grand juries in Illinois, Washington D.C. and California. 

The official ICE account had crowed about the Chicago-area protesters’ arrests online, promising that they’d be “held accountable” and that “we will not be deterred.”

In perhaps the most famous of these jury rebellions, D.C. jurors refused to indict Sean Dunn — the former Justice Department employee who threw a hoagie at an officer — in August, forcing prosecutors to charge him with a misdemeanor instead.

It’s a stunning rebuke, a reflection of the thin gruel that prosecutors are presenting as they attempt to throw the book at protesters for minor infractions — and perhaps an expression of protest against the state violence being visited on these cities in general.

JB Pritzker Speaks Truth To The Cowardly:

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker sharply criticized fellow Democrats on Sunday for not doing enough to oppose President Donald Trump, drawing a clear divide between himself and other high-profile Democrats seen as future presidential contenders.

Pritzker delivered the keynote address at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner, the latest and most high-profile in a series of speeches this year.

While Pritzker continued to attack Trump, he also focused on what he says are shortcomings in his own party, assailing Democrats for listening to “a bunch of know-nothing political types” instead of everyday Americans. Without naming names, he called out Democrats “flocking to podcasts and cable news shows to admonish fellow Democrats for not caring enough about the struggles of working families.”

“Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants, instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,” Pritzker said.

He’s become my early choice for the Democratic Presidential nomination, mostly by default.  You know, due to cowards and ‘know-nothing political types’.

BREAKING: Trump Doesn’t Win Nobel Peace Prize:

The Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado has won the Nobel peace prize for her dogged struggle to rescue the South American country from its fate as “a brutal, authoritarian state”.

Machado, 58, a conservative often described as Venezuela’s Iron Lady, has spent the last year living in hiding after her political movement was widely believed to have beaten the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in the July 2024 presidential election.

Maduro refused to accept he had lost to Machado’s ally the former diplomat Edmundo González and launched a ferocious political crackdown that forced González into exile and Machado to go underground.

Just curious–is someone who declares war on American cities even eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize?

A Delaware Prison Closes For The Best Possible Reason–Not Enough Prisoners:

The Plummer Community Corrections Center in Wilmington, parts of which date back 125 years, is set to shut its doors by next March.

Delaware Department of Correction Deputy Commissioner Shane Troxler says that demand for lower-level facilities like Plummer has declined in recent years for a variety of reasons.

“We’ve got over 1000 beds that are empty, which is a good thing,” he said. “It means our efforts to reduce recidivism, to ensure we’re making re-entry efforts, are working.”

Troxler notes the people currently housed at Plummer will be relocated to other DOC facilities, likely sites in Georgetown and Smyrna. Similarly, employees will be reassigned to other facilities as well.

“No one’s losing their job. We have vacancies statewide. We have needs statewide,” Troxler said. “We’re working with our unions and our employees to identify new assignments for those officers that are assigned to the Plummer Center.”

Repeat after me:  Nobody tell ICE about available prison space.

What do you want to talk about?