Wyoming’s biggest hospital gets mixed performance review following ownership transition: In 2024, Banner Wyoming Medical Center met the majority of its 17 contractual covenants — such as maintaining essential services and adding new technologies. It fell short in four areas.
No surprise.
Wyomingites may claim to prefer the government to be out of everything, but Casperites liked their county owned hospital.
Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.
New products take backseat amid Trump tariffs
Companies work to overcome staff incivility
This perpetual Golden Share prevents any of the following from occurring without the consent of the President of the United States or his designee:• Relocate U.S. Steel’s headquarters from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.• Redomicile outside the United States• Change the name of the company from U.S. Steel• Reduce, waive, or delay the $14 billion of Near-Term investments into U.S. Steel• Transfer production or jobs outside the United States• Close or idle plants before certain timeframes other than normal course temporary idling for safety, upgrades, etc.• Other protections regarding employee salaries, anti-dumping pricing, raw materials and sourcing outside the U.S., acquisitions, and more.
Man who says he can move TikTok to South Dakota is a bust in Wyoming politics: Reid Rasner lost by 43 points in a U.S. Senate race and has offered few details in support of his multibillion-dollar bid, but has won over the Rushmore State’s governor.
June 26, 2025
Wyoming oil positioned to weather Middle East conflict, analysts say: Nation's soaring oil and natural gas production may buffer energy prices if Israel-Iran conflict disrupts global supplies, some industry officials predict.
U.S. Ballistics plans on opening an artillery projectile plant in Cody.
cont:
The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a Medicaid provider tax overhaul central to President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to the chamber’s procedural rules.
June 28, 2025
The US broke off tariff negotiations with Canada, the US's largest trading partner.
Aluminium costs are pressing beverage manufacturers.
June 29, 2025
The Senate voted to take up The Big Ugly, which doesn't mean that it's passed.
For the sake of the country, it should not pass, but it likely will.
Elon is taking note of the impact, which won't please his former ally.
June 30, 2025
CBO on The Big Ugly, as reported by the CST.
CBO PROJECTS TRUMP BILL WILL RACK UP DEBT
As a doctor in Wyoming for over 20 years, I’ve cared for Medicaid patients my entire career. I understand Medicaid’s importance for the people it is intended to serve. I have also seen its shortcomings.Thanks to Wyoming being good stewards of taxpayer dollars, the Medicaid reforms included in the bill are unlikely to negatively impact our state. Wyoming’s policies are already aligned with a majority of the Medicaid provisions. This includes work requirements for all able-bodied adults enrolled in Medicaid.Medicaid was established to help children, pregnant women, seniors and the disabled. We need to make sure that high-quality care is accessible and reliable to those who qualify for Medicaid. This bill does that.
Dr. John also supported Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for his current position even though he no doubt privately believes Kennedy is a quack. And he hid under his desk for the most part during the recent public lands issue. Reaction to this story brought out a lot of anger by people remembering that, as it should.
Eight Republican Senators are currently holding out against The Big Ugly.
The GOP leadership has been struggling with getting the Big Ugly passed in general, and in meeting King Donald's arbitrary July 4 deadline. Now the monarch has indicated he has sort of a "m'eh" view on the deadline and he doesn't want things cut too deeply, which must be causing Grover Norquist fits.
cont:
The Big Ugly passed the Senate with J.D. Vance casting the tie breaking vote.
Now its back to the House where the House Freedom Caucus has already criticized it due to its increasing the deficit.
The most amusing vote on the Senate side was Lisa Murkowski, who voted for it, but indicated she was agonized by the whole thing. That seems to be Murkowski's theme. If the Senate proposed a vote to run over kittens, she'd vote for it, but note that the whole thing really bothered her.
Murkowski:
My hope is that the House is gonna look at this and recognize that we're not there yet.
Gutless.
July 2, 2025
The US dollar suffered its worst first-half decline in more than 50 years due to tariff concerns.
Lisa Murkowski is taking a lot of flak for selling her vote for changes to the Big Ugly that benefitted certain constituents in Alaska, including whalers, while she acknowledges the Big Ugly is ugly. She seems utterly surprised that she's now the subject of outright deserved contempt.
Murkowski was just playing politics the old fashioned way, trading her vote for something she thinks her constituents needed, while still not liking the bill. It's the way things are done, in normal times, which these are not.
Murkowski is 68 years old, which I'll mention as the Big Hugly contains tax breaks for seniors.
Well of course it does.
Old Boomers Never Die
They control away. . . *
Footnotes:
*From Old Soldiers Never Die.
"Battling Bob" La Follette, Socialist Senator from Wisconsin, died at age 70. He'd been ill since 1923.
The German Reichsgericht, struck down a law confiscating of all the demesne lands of the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to widespread public dissatisfaction.
Last edition:
Hang Thun Hak, 48 year old former radical Socialist Prime Minister of Cambodia was executed by the Khmer Rouge. He'd been in the far left himself and had contacts with the Khmer Rouge, none of which saved him, with execution of left wing radicals actually being common amongst Communist.
The NVA took Phan Thiết.
Van McCoy released The Hustle.
ZZ Top released Fandango!
Last edition:
The far left Socialist government of Portugal, which swept into power by way of a junior officers revolt brought about by disgust with conscription and colonial wars, nationalized most of the nation's industries and commenced land reform.
Karen Ann Quinlan collapsed after drinking several gin and tonics in addition to having already taken the tranquilizers Valium and Darvon.
She's be the subject of major controversy over the battle to take her off of life support, which occured on May 22, 1976. She lived until June 11, 1985.
Last edition:
apparently.
Lummis Wants To Pull $7.5B From Biden’s EV Mandates For Improving Highways
Let's be honest. Socialized highways are socialist. EV mandates aren't.
We like highways, so in our view, socialized highways, which benefit us disproportionally, and which stiff railroads and regular motorists for the benefit of the trucking industry, are okay.
There's really no arguing this at all. Under the MAGA view of the economy, states should pay for their own freaking highways, and certainly an industry, like the trucking industry, should not be subsidized.
But we don't see building highways for the trucking industry as bad or socialist, because we like them. And we only saw a requirement to buy EV cars as bad because the Biden Administration believed in climate science and we don't like that as it hurts our wallets, although now that King Donald likes Tesla and Elon, this is getting confusing.
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does.
Richard D. Wolff.
Portugal and FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) recognized independence for Mozambique, with it to formally occur on June 25, 1975. The negotiations took place in Zambia.
FRELIMO, a far left wing political party that was formally Communist, has governed the country continually since that time. It has evolved into a democratic socialist party.
Last edition:
Yesterday, I made some observations on Denver, and today I'm doing the same on Labor Day, 2024.
Of course, it's immediately notable that I'm making these the day after Labor Day, which was a day I didn't get off. I worked a full day.
I was the only one in the office.
Labor Day dates back to the mid 1800s as an alternative to the more radical observance that takes place in many countries on May 1. Still, nonetheless, early on, and for a long time, there was a fair amount of radicalism associated with it during that period when American labor organizations were on the rise. The day itself being a widely recognized day off is due to organized strikes on the day that started occurring during the 1930s, to the day as sort of a "last day of summer holiday" is fairly new.
Even now, when people think of it, they often think of the day in terms of the sort of burly industrial workers illustrated by Leyendecker and Rockwell in the 20s through the 40s. Otherwise, they sort of blandly associate it with celebrating work in general, which gets to the nature of work in general, something we sort of touched on yesterday with this entry;
Early on, Labor Day was something that acknowledged a sort of worthy heavy work. There are, in spite of what people may think, plenty of Americans that still are engaged in that sort of employment, although its s shadow of the number that once did. Wyoming has a lot of people who do, because of the extractive industries, which are in trouble. Ironically, therefore, its notable that Wyoming is an epicenter of anti union feelings, when generally those engaged in heavy labor are pro union. There's no good explanation for that.
When Labor Day became a big deal it pitted organized labor against capital, with it being acknowledged by both sides that if things went too far one way or another, it would likely result in a massive labor reaction that would veer towards socialism, or worse, communism. Real communism has never been a society wide strong movement in the United States, in spite of the current stupid commentary by those on the political far right side of the aisle accusing anyone they don't like, and any program they don't like, of being communistic. But radical economics did hae influence inside of unions, and communists were a factor in some of them, which was well known. As nobody really wanted what that might mean, compromise gave us the post war economic world of the 50s and 60s, which were sort of a golden age for American economics.
One of the unfortunate byproducts of the Cold War era, however, was the exportation of jobs overseas, which brought us the economic regime we have today, in part. The advance of technology brought us the other part. Today we find the American economy is massively dominated by capital in a way it hasn't been for a century, and its not a good thing at all. The will to do anything about it, or even understand it, seems to be wholly lacking. As a result of that, while an increasing number of Americans slave away at meaningless jobs in cubicles, and the former shopkeeper class now works at Walmart, we have the absolutely bizarre spectacle of two Titans of Capital, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, spewing out populist rhetoric. Populism, of course, always gets co-opted, but the working and middle class falling for rhetoric from the extremely wealthy is not only bizarre, its' downright dumb.
Indeed, in the modern American economy, having your own is increasingly difficult. Entire former occupations that were once local have been totally taken over by large corporations while agriculture has fallen to the rich in terms of land ownership, making entry into either field impossible. Fewer and fewer "my own" occupations exist, and those that do are under siege.
One of those is the law, of course. Lawyers, because of the nature of their work, still tend to own their practices, as to medical professionals of all types. The latter are falling into large corporate entities, however, and the move towards taking down state borders in the practice is causing the consolidation of certain types of practice in the former.
Not that "having your own" in the professions is necessarily a sort of Garden of Eden either, however.
Recently, interestingly, there's been a big movement in which young people are returning to the trades. That strikes me as a good thing, and perhaps the trades are finally getting the due they deserve. Ever since World War Two there's been the concept that absolutely everyone had to achieve white collar employment, which demeaned blue collar employment, and which put a lot of people in occupations and jobs they didn't care for. I suspect the small farm movement reflects that too.
Indeed, on my first day of practicing law as a lawyer over thirty years ago the long time office manager, who must have been having sort of a bad day, made a comment like "you might just end up wishing you had become a farmer". I remember thinking to myself even then that if that had been an option, that's exactly what I would have become. It wasn't, and it never has been for me, in the full time occupation sort of way.
Oh well.
And so we lost the garden to labor in, but we can make things better than they are. And we could do that by taking a much more distributist approach to things. Which seems nowhere near close to happening, a populist uprising notwithstanding.
Just recently the Trumpist have taken up calling Kamala Harris a "Communist".
What horse shit.
Calling right wing politicians "fascists" is an old slander, dating back at least to the 1960s. It's overuse has now lead to the problem that when some of the right are genuinely approaching being fascistic, the slur has lost part of its meaning, compounded by the fact that a lot of the people who use it, even seriously, don't really know what it means.
The US of course fought a fascist power during the Second World War, Italy, and bombed a second arguably fascist power, Romania. Germany, quite frankly, probably doesn't really qualify as fascist during the war, but something else. Vichy France and Francoist Spain had fascist elements, but probably can't really qualify as fascist. That doesn't make any of those powers nifty, but rather it demonstrates the problem of the sloppy use of words.
Since Barack Obama, those on the right have been busy doing it. Obama wasn't a "Marxist", as some on the right like to claim, and Harris isn't a Communist. But now some followers on the Trumpist right seriously believe that Harris is really a Communist.
That is in part because they have no idea what Communism is.
I hear this all the time. The government will propose regulating something, for example, and people will decry that as "Communist". It isn't. It is't Socialism either. Simply favoring government action or espousing "progressive" views isn't either of those things.
And regarding Socialism, there's big elements of Socialism that many people on the right are perfectly fine with. Like state funded highways? Well, you are dirty Socialist, maybe a Communist even.
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.
Richard D. Wolff
Let me know that this isn't a shot at Congressman Hageman.
This is, rather, an observation.
Dave Simpson: Harriet Delivered When No One Else Could (Or Cared)
It's interesting how the far right opposes the government doing stuff, except when it benefits them personally.
No place exhibits this more than Wyoming. We're really fine with the government paying for stuff we used. Highways? The Feds should fund them, doggone it. Why? Well, because they ought to.
The above is a road story. The author notes that he could not get to this spot in his car.
Couldn't get there in a car?
Well, that's probably because if you were from Wyoming, which the author isn't, you'd know that you need to go there in a truck.
Getting the road smoothed out on the government dime is a bit Socialist. . . and very soft and East Coasty.
But then we all like the government to spend if it benefits us, don't we?
Massive state funded shooter's complex anyone?
Plutarco Elias Calles of the Partido Laborista Mexicano won Mexico's presidential election with 84.1% of the vote. Before the emergence of the PRI, which Calles founded, it was the labor party, a democratic socialist party, was the most powerful party in Mexico.
Calles was a left wing figure who had come up as a general in the Mexican War. A controversial figure, he's admired by some for his work on social and institutional changes in Mexico, and an attempt, albeit only partially successful, to reform a military then dominated by revolutionary generals who were a threat to the government itself. His administration, however, attacked the Church which lead to the January 1, 1927 Catholic rebellion known as the Cristero War, arguably the last chapter of the Mexican Revolution, in which 200,000 Mexicans died and would ultimately bring about the reelection of Alvaro Obregón in 1928. He was exiled to the United States in 1936 but returned in 1941 when the PRI was firmly in power. By that time, closer to death, he had become a spiritualist.
The Johnstown Meteor fell to earth in Colorado and interrupted a nearby funeral. It's only one of eleven such events that have been witnessed.
Johnstown is famous today for the Buc-ee's located there.
Last edition:
The Germans suffered heavy naval losses due to an RAF attack on Boulogne.
The HMS Blackwood was fatally damaged by the U-764 off of Brittany.
The Socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was elected to office in Saskatchewan, the first such success in Canada by a socialist party.
Filming of Anchors Away commenced.
Last prior edition:
The American Popular Revolutionary Alliance was founded in Mexico City by Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre as a Latin American left wing political party/alliance of left wing political parties. It still exists.
German miners went on strike in he Ruhar over wages.
Last prior edition:
We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.
In "Red State", which now means more than it used to as the Reds in the Red States are supporting the Russian effort to conquer Ukraine, and hence are aligned with what the old Reds would have wanted, it's not going to mean all that much. I don't expect there to be much in the way of civil observances.
I saw a quote by somebody whose comments I wouldn't normally consider, that being Noam Chomsky, in which he asserted that a certain class of people who are perceived (not necessarily accurately) as something beyond evil, as they're putting all of humanity in jeopardy for a "few dollars" when they already have far more than they need. That is almost certainly unfair. Rather, like so much else in human nature, mobilizing people to act contrary to their habits is just very hard. And some people will resist any concept that those habits are harmful in any fashion.
Perhaps, therefore, a bitter argument is on what people love. People will sacrifice for that, and here such sacrifices as may be needed on various issues are likely temporary ones.
Of course, a lot of that gets back to education, and in this highly polarized time in which we live, which is in part because we're hearing that changes are coming, and we don't like them, and we've been joined by people here locally recently who have a concept of the local formed by too many hours in front of the television and too few in reality. We'll have to tackle that. That'll be tough, right now, but a lot of that just involves speaking the truth.
While it has that beating a horse aspect to it, another thing we can't help but noting, and have before, is that an incredible amount of resistance to things that would help overall society are opposed by those who are lashed to their employments in nearly irrevocable ways. In this fashion, the society that's actually the one most likely to be able to preserver on changed in some fashions are localist and distributist ones. Chomsky may think that what he is noting is somehow uniquely tied to certain large industries, but in reality the entire corporate capitalist one, which of course he is no fan of, as well as socialist ones, which he is, are driven by concepts of absolute scale and growth. That's a systematic culture that's very hard to overcome and on a local scale, when people are confronted with it, they'll rarely acknowledge that their opposition is based on something that's overall contrary to what they otherwise espouse. We see that locally right now, where there are many residents opposed to a local gravel pit, who otherwise no doubt make their livings from the extractive industries.
But I'd note that this hasn't always been the case here. It was much less so before the influx of outsiders who stayed after the most recent booms. And that too gives us some hope, as the people who are of here and from here, like people of and from anywhere they're actually from, will in fact act for the place.
Related threads:
