New Big Ben Show: Covid Madness Lives On Forever!

I literally saw a guy putting on a cloth mask outside on Monday

May 15, 2025

New podcast dropped! This episode has everything: Covid gaslighting, Andrew Cuomo’s mountain, the corrupt NBA, doddering Joe Biden revisionism, data-based proof that white college educated women make the absolute worst friends, Elizabeth Holmes running it back, Grand Theft Auto 6, Lively v. Swift, and a producer trip to Hershey Park that ended with her husband failing a sobriety test. The whole thing is based on the novel Push by Sapphire. Listen now!

All The House GOP Factions in One Room

Happening right now, video proof:

Punchbowl News:

At 10 a.m. today, Speaker Mike Johnson will bring together the warring factions inside the House Republican Conference. At stake is President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda – and the GOP majority.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus will be there. They’re furious that the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” doesn’t go far enough in cutting government spending – especially on Medicaid – and say the package needs to be reworked.
Five key members of the GOP SALT Caucus, increasingly skeptical of Johnson’s ability to craft a deal to lift the state-and-local tax deduction cap, are also invited.
Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee, openly sick of the SALT fight after having just approved a $3.8 trillion tax-cut package, will be there too.
Johnson is running out of time to find a consensus on the reconciliation bill. The House Budget Committee is scheduled to assemble the component parts of this wide-ranging legislation – 11 committees are involved in the process – into one mega-package on Friday.
Johnson wants the legislation in front of the House Rules Committee on Monday in advance of a vote next week. His self-imposed deadline for getting the package through the House is May 22.
Yet Johnson is going to have to make changes to this legislation in the Rules Committee or on the floor. That’s certain.
As of right now, Johnson and the House GOP leadership don’t have the votes to pass this big chunk of Trump domestic agenda, although they’re keeping an upbeat appearance in public.
Trump should – and almost certainly will – get involved to close this out.
Conservatives. Put yourself in the conservatives’ shoes for a moment. They’ve been talking about making drastic structural changes to Medicaid for years. While hardliners believe it’s time to push the envelope and reverse years of dramatic growth in the program, the House Republican leadership is balking at the most sweeping moves.
The problem is that what the House Freedom Caucus is asking for can’t pass the House and certainly wouldn’t pass the Senate.
After a grueling 26-hour markup, the Energy and Commerce Committee adopted a package that includes huge Medicaid changes that cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars. CBO estimates 8.6 million additional people would go uninsured, while Democrats say it’s 13.7 million if you factor in the expiration of Obamacare subsidies.
The proposal also includes massive revisions to the Inflation Reduction Act that even some Republican lawmakers don’t like.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) argues that Republicans shouldn’t delay the implementation of work requirements for Medicaid for four years or put off the phase-out of IRA clean energy tax credits.
“How is that a cut? How is that meeting the intent of the cuts? Why are they waiting? You got to do it now,” Norman said, calling the bill filled with “smoke and mirrors.”
“If it comes like it is, I’ve got a real problem with it,” Norman declared.
Conservatives have more leverage than any other group has. Norman and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) both sit on the Rules Committee. They can throw a wrench in Johnson bringing this bill to the floor.
GOP leaders’ hope is that Trump can turn hardline conservatives by expressing the urgency of passing this bill. In response, Norman said he’d seek a meeting with Trump to explain that this bill doesn’t do what he said it would during the campaign.
The White House deployed OMB Director Russ Vought, as well as Hill liaison James Braid, to meet with the HFC board on Tuesday night, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The question for the HFC is will they fight for policies that probably can’t pass and would most likely cost moderate Republicans their seats?
SALTers. Let’s put it plainly: Moderates always fold. The GOP leadership knows that. And they’re expecting it once again this time around.
We’ve written this ad nauseam over the last few weeks, but SALTers say that raising the deduction cap for state and local taxes is a matter of political survival.
The problem for Johnson is that there are enough of them – five – to bring down this bill. But much of the rest of the conference, HFC included, is unpersuaded by their arguments that blue-state taxpayers need a break.
Will they fold? It’s tough to say. The SALT cap disappears in 2026, allowing unlimited deductibility for state and local taxes — but other 2017 tax cuts disappear too. If SALTers agree to a cap, Democrats will hammer them. If they don’t, they risk putting Trump’s entire agenda at risk.
The sweet spot for them is a 10-year cap around $40,000 for individuals and $80,000 for married couples. The GOP leadership wants to phase out the higher SALT cap, and potentially snap it back to $10,000. Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) said that would be a “red line” for him. And Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.) called it a “nonstarter.”
A high SALT cap such as that is pricey – no doubt. But these are the folks that give Republicans their majority. And SALT isn’t their only gripe. They also have big issues with the scale of Ways and Means’ IRA tax credit repeals. That costs money too and is the opposite of what conservatives are demanding, which neatly describes the pickle Johnson is in.
For Johnson, the big risk is that the SALTers go see the president – a fellow New Yorker – to plead their case and Trump agrees. But the challenge for Johnson is finding a sweet spot that doesn’t cost a fortune and selling it to a skeptical conference.

The Post-Progressive Era

Eric Kaufmann in the WSJ:

The decline of woke isn’t merely a “vibe shift.” It marks the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture. We are entering a post-progressive era.
Woke refers to an ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection for minorities. It produced phenomena such as cancel culture, men in women’s spaces and the toppling of statues. It energized a suite of policies known as diversity, equity and inclusion, whose roots lie in older racial-sensitivity training and affirmative-action programs. It is now in retreat.
The Trump administration has rescinded executive orders on affirmative action and disparate impact that were more than 50 years old. Universities are no longer allowed to enforce broad, identity-based speech codes, many of which arose nearly four decades ago. Colleges have adopted institutional-neutrality policies and ended mandatory diversity statements. Corporations have cut back on DEI. Today’s anti-DEI mood is likely to outlast the current administration, reflecting a deeper shift in the culture.
Culture can change from the top as elites lead public opinion. American elite culture turned against immigration in the late 1880s, then gradually liberalized between the 1920s and ’60s. Are we witnessing a similar elite-led shift, this time away from the ideology of equal outcomes and emotional-harm protection that has guided it since the mid-1960s?
The liberal left spearheaded liberation from social mores around divorce, sex and the traditional family. Attitudes toward interracial marriage, women’s equality and homosexuality liberalized, making society better. Conservatives lost virtually every battle in the culture, culminating most recently in the growing acceptance of gay marriage.
The success of the cultural left created a sense of progressive inevitability, captured by Ronald Inglehart’s important book, “Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society” (1990), which suggested that rising affluence and security propel young and educated people toward liberal-egalitarian cultural views. They in turn change society through generational turnover: one birth, one funeral and one college degree at a time. Left-liberalism was to usher in the end of history as society became more enlightened and empathetic. This confident historicist outlook could be discerned through phrases such as “the right side of history” or references to certain attitudes being out of date.
The cultural left envisioned a grand narrative of progress whose next phase would move from individual rights to group rights, citizen rights to rights across borders, and gay rights to trans rights. But what Daniel Bell termed the left’s “chiliastic hopes” appear to have ended in stalemate and polarization. The attempt to push for next-level DEI policies such as segregated graduation ceremonies, mandatory diversity statements, critical race and gender ideology in schools, or males in female sports has produced an enduring antiwoke reaction. Immigration attitudes have turned restrictionist after decades of liberalization.
Young people are more culturally progressive than their elders, but large-scale college freshman data and exit polls show a substantial rightward shift among young people from 2021-24. In Britain, YouGov’s tracker finds the under-25s moving sharply right on transgender issues and immigration since 2022. Both elite and public opinion on transgenderism has shifted against the left in the past two years, its first cultural loss in six decades.
The new vibe shift isn’t, as with the 1990s reaction to political correctness, confined to the pages of elite outlets like the New Republic and the New York Times. Instead, social media and today’s opinion-led media, which helped spread woke ideas off campus in the 2010s, have facilitated a wider backlash that has entered state and federal politics. Op-eds in liberal outlets have criticized diversity training, cancel culture, transgender medicine, DEI administrators and diversity statements.

The Rise of Chronic Disease in America

WSJ reports:

The deadliest scourges in the U.S. were once infectious, with influenza and tuberculosis topping the list at the start of the 20th century. Better sanitation and advances in antibiotics and vaccines muzzled them, transforming Americans’ well-being. Medical innovations and antismoking campaigns then spurred decades of progress against heart disease and cancer.
But chronic diseases, persistent or long-lasting health conditions, are undermining that momentum, contributing to our stalled life expectancy over the past decade that trails behind that of other wealthy nations.
Much of the gap in life expectancy is due to deaths among working-age adults, says Dr. Steven Woolf, a life-expectancy researcher at the Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Americans die earlier and are sicker than people in other high-income countries,” he said. “This has been true for a long time, and the trend is getting worse.”
Drug overdoses from opioids, alcohol, suicide and chronic diseases drive most of those early deaths, researchers said. The U.S. also took a bigger hit from Covid-19, even among younger adults who were at lower risk.
That was in part because Americans were already in worse health and more vulnerable to the virus’s toll. The U.S. obesity rate is nearly double the average of peer nations, disrupting prior decades of progress against heart disease. Around a third of U.S. adults have had multiple chronic conditions, the highest rate among our peers, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
Rates for conditions including hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have held relatively steady in recent decades, and the rising prevalence of diabetes is in part because people are living longer with the disease, researchers say. But the U.S. still has higher rates of these conditions compared with peer nations.