Beware of dogma.
Midwest
Joined November 2019
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Lester Windrip retweeted
Americans have paid $74.4 Billion more on gasoline & $47.5 Billion more on diesel since March 1 compared to a year ago.
$122 Billion of disposable income gone up in smoke because elected Republicans refuse to say "no" to Trump.
Lester Windrip retweeted
Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and still managed to keep the country together. Franklin Roosevelt ran the entire Second World War from a wheelchair. Eisenhower defeated Hitler and then, just to stay busy, built 48,000 miles of motorway. Kennedy looked at the moon, said “we’ll have that,” and inside a decade they did. Reagan stared down the Soviet Union until it simply gave up and went home.
Two hundred and fifty years. Forty-six men. Men who stormed beaches, split atoms, faced down nuclear annihilation over breakfast and then filed sensible paperwork about it afterward.
And then, after all of that, the entire accumulated weight of American history, the most consequential democratic experiment the world has ever seen, produced this.
A television review.
No Mars landing. No cure for cancer. No Soviet empire dissolved before lunch. Just a man in the White House, in the year 2026, informing the internet that a CBS chat show host had no talent.
That is what 250 years of American greatness built. America should be deeply, permanently ashamed of itself.
If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on Substack:
open.substack.com/pub/gandal…
Lester Windrip retweeted
Trump's performance in China has been a unique, extraordinary and embarrassing combination of weakness, obsequiousness, lack of preparation, amateurism, and incompetence. It just seems normal because we've become desensitized by the constant circus.
Lester Windrip retweeted
Someone making $50,000 and paying $8,000 in taxes is far far far far far far more impacted and has a much more reduced quality of life than someone making $50,000,000 and paying $8,000,000 in taxes.
Lester Windrip retweeted
We will invade, kill your family, and steal your possessions, but remember—we are a nation of peace, liberty, and Christian values.
Lester Windrip retweeted
To be American is great. To be an American territory…well
Poverty rates:
🇺🇸American Samoa: ~57%
🇺🇸 Puerto Rico: ~43%
🇺🇸 US Virgin Islands: 22–25%
🇺🇸 Guam: ~23%
🇬🇱Greenland: ~10–12% poverty risk
Median income (PPP-adjusted, USD)
🇺🇸American Samoa: ~$18k
🇺🇸Puerto Rico: ~$24k
🇺🇸Guam: ~$35k
🇺🇸US Virgin Islands: ~$37k
🇬🇱Greenland: ~$45–50k (PPP-adjusted household income)
Just worth taking into account when talking about “offers” to Greenland
Lester Windrip retweeted
There’s a full-blast propaganda blitz on X today trying to smear the ACA, and posts with actual history are getting choked out by the algorithm. That’s not an accident. The people who spent years trying to kill the law don’t want you seeing the receipts.
So shove their censorship attempt right back in their faces. Share this everywhere. Let the truth outrun their manufactured bullshit.
Lester Windrip retweeted
Celebrating Direct Care Physicians
"The doctors going cash-only aren’t the greedy ones. And it’s time we stopped pretending they are.
For decades, we’ve celebrated the “noble” physician: takes insurance, works at academic hospitals, never talks about money, sacrifices for the calling.
Meanwhile, the system built an extraction machine around them.
Hospitals mark up procedures 50-100x compared to private practice. Insurance companies skim billions while denying claims. Administrative bloat has replaced patient care as the primary revenue driver.
Everyone’s getting rich. Except the doctors. And definitely not the patients.
So when a physician goes cash-based, we call them sellouts.
Wrong target.
The doctor who goes cash isn’t abandoning the calling — they’re refusing to participate in a profit-extraction scheme disguised as healthcare. At least with cash-based care, patients know exactly what they’re paying for. No hidden markups. No surprise bills. No six-month insurance fights.
Academic medical centers position themselves as altruism’s last stand. But check the pricing: same MRI, same credentials, wildly different bills. Where does that markup go? Not to patient care. Not to physicians. To administrators and “nonprofit” profit centers.
The mental gymnastics required to call cash-based clinics “greedy” while defending 100x hospital markups is remarkable.
We still need hospitals for complex care. But if we’re honest about where healthcare money actually goes, the reckoning will be uncomfortable.
The doctors who opted out aren’t the problem.
They might be the only ones being honest about the transaction."
—Dr. Taif Mukhdomi @tmukhdomimd
Lester Windrip retweeted
My jaw dropped when I saw that somebody fell for this nonsense.
The federal budget does not spend “more than 50 percent” on health care. That is simply wrong. When you look at actual government data, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the VA combined make up roughly one quarter of federal spending, not half. Social Security and defense are larger categories. If your number comes from a meme, it is not a fact.
And our lower life expectancy has nothing to do with government programs being too big. It comes from the opposite. The United States has the most privatized, fragmented, profit first health system in the developed world. We let hospitals, drug companies, and insurance companies charge whatever they want, so we spend more without getting better outcomes. That is why countries with national health systems spend less and live longer.
Your claim about Democrats and Republicans is backwards too. Democrats focus on lowering costs by negotiating drug prices, capping insulin, expanding preventive care, and stabilizing insurance markets. Republicans talk about “reform” but their actual proposals are to cut Medicaid, cut ACA subsidies, raise the Medicare age, and shift more costs onto consumers. That does not fix anything, it just makes people pay more out of pocket and reduces life expectancy even further.
So if your argument is based on “fifty percent of spending” and “Democrats just want more,” you have been misled. The numbers do not match the claim, and the policy descriptions you are using do not match reality.
Lester Windrip retweeted
Republicans claim we can't afford Social Security and Medicare.
They're giving a $40,000,000,000 bailout to Argentina.
Lester Windrip retweeted
🚨NEW: Maine Democrat Graham Platner is head of Susan Collins by 14 points in a new poll of the U.S. Senate race.
RETWEET if you support @GrahamforMaine as he runs to beat Collins!
Lester Windrip retweeted
The numbers are so bad that Trump just fired the person responsible for releasing the monthly job totals. Not because the person did anything wrong, but because the truthful numbers show how badly Trump is failing. The authoritarianism everyone had been warned about once again reared its ugly head.
The entire economic mess is because of Trump’s trade war tariffs. He found the fastest way to bring an economy that was powering the world to a standstill.
The debt is increasing while the government does less for us. Critical weather monitoring services are cut, the bureau that protects consumers from predatory and illegal corporations is cut, and healthcare for millions of Americans, cut. So where is that extra debt coming from? All the money flowing to corporations and the wealthy when they already had a massively oversized share of the pie.
Lester Windrip retweeted
Fox News and other rightwing media said that global high inflation was due to Biden instead of the pandemic. When inflation dropped to normal levels faster than our peer nations, the lie was that it was still high. As GDP growth was robust, Fox said the economy was slowing. And while the debt-to-GDP ratio was shrinking, they said it was rising out of control.
The Biden administration didn’t just tackle inflation and the debt; America experienced the longest stretch of low unemployment in over 50 years, high-tech manufacturing jobs came back to the US, and Biden is the only president in history to have added jobs every month of his presidency. No administration is without its flaws, but the economy was not one of Biden’s.
In June 2024, the World Bank wrote:
“There are, of course, notable bright spots in the global economy. The U.S. economy, in particular, has shown impressive resilience. Growth has remained buoyant in the teeth of the fiercest monetary policy tightening in four decades. U.S. dynamism, in fact, is one reason the global economy enjoys some upside potential over the next two years.”
Ayhan Kose, the World Bank’s deputy chief economist, said at the time that “US growth is exceptional.”
Lester Windrip retweeted
The US economy, once the envy of the world, quickly ground to a halt in a matter of months after Trump took office. It was a predictable outcome, as economists and experts had warned that enacting broad tariffs would lead to job losses and increased inflation.
What is shocking is that, according to 2024 exit polls, the top issue for Trump voters was the economy.
There is nothing about Trump's history that suggests he understands economics. His wealth, aside from the crypto bribes and money he earned from selling subpar, often tacky, products to his supporters, was inherited. Trump's list of failed businesses fills an entire page, and he was convicted of falsifying business records 34 times. His last presidency was marked by the decline of manufacturing in the US, a loss of total jobs, growing income inequality, and rapidly rising debt.
So why did so many people vote for Trump if they wanted a better economy? They've been repeatedly lied to.
🧵
Lester Windrip retweeted
Actor Bryan Cranston on Trump: "I've stopped worrying about the president's sanity. He's not sane. What I now worry about is the sanity of anyone who can still support this deeply troubled man to lead our country."
RETWEET if you stand with Cranston against Trump!
Lester Windrip retweeted
HISTORY: When Hitler became Chancellor, he announced that he would not draw a salary, but instead donate it all to charity. What he did not reveal to the public was that he was receiving backhanders and expenses from the German taxpayer to the tune of millions of Reichsmarks 1/
Lester Windrip retweeted
We had a grim BBQ at my aunt's house. We are a family of #Latinos We are all legal citizens, some of us are veterans, some are civil servants, and some of us are community volunteers. We sat and pondered what we would do should things get worse. 🧵