Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption of which will lead to sickness, misery, and death. I’ve called him plainly incompetent, ignorant of how science works, and incapable of leading the agency in which he’s been put in charge.
But what if all of that is wrong and he’s just a grifting charlatan? I have to wonder if that is the case, reading about his public admiration for Mom’s Meals, a company that delivers cheap, ready-made meals for people on Medicaid and Medicare.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
That whole “without additives” is doing a great deal of vague work for Kennedy. Look, as the saying goes, even a broken Kennedy is right twice a day, and his public and vocal crusade against ultra-processed foods is not without merit. He’s called such food “poison” in past weeks and, while he’s being a bit dramatic in saying so, he’s not wrong that American diets are generally trash and contribute to a bunch of health concerns. And, to the point, ultra-processed foods are a big part of the problem.
Which makes it more than a bit jarring to see him pimp this company that makes food which is, you guessed it, ultra-processed.
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
“It is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,” Nestle said. “What’s so sad is that they don’t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.”
Now, to be clear, Mom’s Meals’ food products do not contain the artificial food coloring that Kennedy has also railed against. But that is a far cry from claiming that these meals don’t have any additives and aren’t processed foods. They absolutely are, though I expect Kennedy to play word games as to what “ultra-processed” means. It’s his way.
But the end result of all of this is we can believe one of two realities. Either Kennedy is a combination of so poor a communicator and so incompetent on matters of health to make all of this yet another blunder in his role at HHS…or he’s just completely full of shit and doesn’t actually care about any of this further than what it does for his own grasp on power and/or money.
Either way, well, it’s pretty freaking terrible and a flat-out lie to say this company makes the kind of food Kennedy himself has advocated for all these years.
I’ll start this off by acknowledging that, sure, there are times when it is perfectly reasonable to say, or even shout, “We’re all going to die!” Say you’re on a plane that has just lost all engine power and is hurtling towards the ground, for instance. Or perhaps someone has asked you the question, “Name one thing every human being has in common.” In each of those situations, the phrase is fairly appropriate, and I’m sure there are others.
But if you’re a Republican senator fielding questions from constituents at a town hall event and you are questioned about your support of Medicaid cuts despite the negative outcomes that will result, your response probably shouldn’t be, “Well, we’re all going to die, for heaven’s sake.” And, yet, that is precisely the route that Joni Ernst chose to take.
The exchange began with an attendee complaining to Ernst that the bill would give significant tax breaks to the ultrawealthy while kicking some people off Medicaid and food assistance programs. Ernst said the only people who face getting booted are those who should not be on Medicaid in the first place.
“They are not eligible, so they will be coming off,” Ernst said, which is when she was interrupted by the attendee who yelled, “People are going to die!”
“People are not — well, we all are going to die, so, for heaven’s sakes,” she said, prompting resounding jeers.
This is one of those things that is not technically wrong, but serves mostly as a non sequitur. Sure, we’re all hurtling towards death in some form or another, as Nietzsche pronounced in his philosophy all those years ago. But the general idea of, you know, medicine is to prolong life for as long as possible. Medicaid helps provide healthcare for plenty of people, primarily disadvantaged or poor citizens. The claim that 1.4 million illegal immigrants are on Medicaid is, unsurprisingly, almost entirely made up.
But even so, this kind of callous response to a reasonable concern by the very people Ernst represents is very much a Things Not To Say In Politics 101 sort of thing. Acting so cavalier while essentially acknowledging that support of the bill will result in lives being snuffed out before their time is, well, fucking evil. Even if were the case that some illegal immigrants, or even many of them, were benefitting from Medicaid, those are still people’s lives. To hand-wave their deaths away as though it were nothing is the sort of thing that should result in a psychiatric evaluation, not re-election.
If you were assuming that Ernst must surely have apologized for this by now, you’re right. If you were assuming that the apology was genuine or made things better in any way, hoo-fucking-boy, are you ever wrong.
Now, at great cost to my own desires, I’m going to go ahead and just leave entirely alone the juxtaposition of the Tooth Fairy and Ernst’s god as though a sizable portion of the world saw those two things as fundamentally different. Applaud me, because that took effort.
Instead, I’ll simply point out that it takes an incredible amount of entitlement to fuck up the political messaging as badly as Ernst did, only to turn around and essentially call the audience at her town hall event stupid and childish. So, let me try to clear this up for the senator.
I go to the dentist, even though some day, no matter what, my teeth will fall out. I go to the gym, even though some day, no matter what, my body will decline into a doughy bag of goo. I take my car to the mechanic for regular upkeep, even though some day, no matter what, that car will be fit for the junk yard. And I access my own privileged ability to get medical care, even though some day I’m going to die.
My humble suggestion is that we should have senators representing us who understand these distinctions. It appears that we have at least one example of a senator who does not.
The “Party of Free Speech” is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents’ political advertising — perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying.
Johnson: "Do not believe the lies the Democrat Party has said. We had their ads taken down. They were running ads around the country in swing districts trying to convince people Republicans are going to 'gut Medicaid.' It's just simply not true & that's why their ads & billboards had to come down"
Do not believe the hype. Do not believe the lies the Democrat Party has said. We had their ads taken down. They were running ads around the country in swing districts trying to convince people Republicans are going to ‘gut Medicaid.’ It’s just simply not true & that’s why their ads & billboards had to come down. We sent them a cease-and-desist letter because they were lying.
This isn’t just hypocritical coming from the party that claims to have “brought free speech back” — it’s potentially a serious First Amendment violation. And Johnson seems almost proud of it.
The fact that Johnson is so cavalier about admitting that he helped remove ads from an opposing political party shows the new norm for the GOP: that it does not care about free speech at all, and is willing to censor at will.
The hypocrisy is particularly striking given how Republicans react when their own ads face scrutiny. Just last year, the MAGA world erupted in outrage over “cEnSOrSh!p!” when Google briefly restricted a Trump campaign ad:
That was a private company enforcing its own rules. Here we have government officials, who control all three branches of government, using legal threats to remove constitutionally protected political speech from their opponents.
It turns out that the media did report on this (though not very widely) back in March when it happened. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) sent a threatening cease-and-desist not to the Democrats, but rather to the billboard advertising company they used, Lamar Advertising.
Before we get to the legal threats themselves, let’s be clear: the Democrats’ ads were accurate and not even remotely defamatory. The GOP’s attempt to claim otherwise relies on a semantic dodge that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.
It has come to our attention that your company may imminently be planning to display billboards containing patently false claims in the respective home districts of six Members of Congress: Representatives Gabe Evans (CO-08), Don Bacon (NE-02), Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07), Monica De La Cruz (TX-15), Jen Kiggans (VA-02), and Rob Wittman (VA-01).1 The message House Majority Forward has evidently paid you to display is that each Representative “VOTED TO CUT MEDICAID TO GIVE BILLIONAIRES…TAX CUTS.” To avoid defaming a half-dozen sitting Members of Congress, your company must cease any and all plans to display these billboards to the public.
House Majority Forward’s claims are demonstrably false. A simple review of the concurrent resolution passed by the House of Representatives shows that Medicaid was not mentioned once in the document’s sixty pages.3 Instead, the resolution delegated broad authority to the House Energy and Commerce Committee to reduce the deficit at their own discretion. House Majority Forward’s billboards target Representatives who cast their votes for a topline budget number voted to put money back into taxpayers’ pockets – not to cut funding to Medicaid. Even legacy media outlets confirm:
The NRCC’s evidence that these ads are “demonstrably false”? Two carefully cherry-picked media quotes that actually prove the opposite when put back in context:
FACT:Medicaid “isn’t specifically mentioned in the budget resolution” and the “vote is simply one to begin the reconciliation process.” CBS News.
FACT:Medicaid is “not specified in the budget” and the resolution “calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to identify more than $800 billion in reductions.” Politico.
Those two claims are the sole basis for the NRCC asserting that the ads are “lies.” But, that’s bullshit. Even their links disprove it. The CBS link for that first line also includes this “fact”:
Johnson wouldn’t commit to preserving Medicaid in its entirety as the reconciliation process continues, and the budget resolution instructs the committee overseeing Medicaid to find $800 billion in cuts.
So, uh, yeah, the bill does, in fact, cut Medicaid.
The Politico story is even worse. Note how it’s framed in the quote above with strategic use of quote marks to suggest that the $800 billion reduction is not about Medicaid. But in context in the Politico article, it’s literally noting that President Trump himself expressed concerns that Johnson’s budget would cut Medicaid!
This week, POTUS expressed reservations to some lawmakers about potential cuts to Medicaid, which while not specified in the budget, are expected given that the document calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to identify more than $800 billion in reductions.
The level of sheer chutzpah to claim that that sentence proves that Medicaid won’t be cut, when it very clearly says that even Trump is worried that Johnson’s proposal will cut Medicaid is insane.
Indeed, basically every actual fact check notes that Medicaid is clearly on the chopping block because of the requirement for the $800 billion in cuts, even if it’s not specifically named:
Aguilar has a point that the $880 billion would have to touch Medicaid, unless lawmakers wanted to find the reductions in Medicare — which may be even more politically challenging. Plus, House Republicans already have talked about some options for Medicaid cuts, such as adding work requirements and finding efficiencies in the program.
Scalise is correct in saying the legislation doesn’t include the word “Medicaid.” But, again, there’s little doubt that the program would face spending reductions — and they could be substantial, as we’ll explain.
Even the Congressional Budget Office made it clear that there’s basically no way to cut $880 billion without cutting Medicaid.
So with the facts established — that the ads were accurate and the GOP is lying about lying — let’s look at the actual legal threat. The letter itself has all the hallmarks of a bullshit SLAPP demand, designed to silence and suppress protected speech.
Indeed, the First Amendment would clearly allow political speech suggesting that these Republicans “voted to cut Medicaid.” Not only is that a fair assessment of reality, in the political speech context, it is expected that certain rhetorical claims can be simplified.
And, really, Republicans like Mike Johnson should be the last ones to try to argue that political puffery may be defamatory. Hell, his claim that the Democrats “lied” would be even more defamatory than the claims that the Dems’ billboards were “false.”
Second, though, Johnson is trying to make it out like the Democrats pulled the billboards because they knew they were false, when that’s not the case at all. The ad firm pulled them because it feared the threats from the NRCC… and appeared to be courting the NRCC’s business itself:
“Lamar’s National Sales Campaign Specialist has confirmed that the copy is no longer running,” the vendor letter reads. “While your letter came to Mario Martinez’s attention, Mr. Martinez was not involved in the Advertiser’s campaign. Notwithstanding,Mr. Martinez…is available to assist the NRCC with counter messages or future campaigns.”
Indeed, the organization that put up the billboards separately noted that the billboards still ran… just from a different vendor:
a House Majority Forward spokesperson said the billboards criticizing Bacon and Rep. Gabe Evans, R-CO, are still up, because they are under a different vendor.
So, to summarize, Johnson is lying about the Democrats lying. Their ads are accurate. The ads are certainly not defamatory. On top of that, one single vendor pulled the ads, not the Democrats themselves. And the billboards still ran via a different vendor.
Oh, and this just shows how the hypocritical Republicans are continuing their censorial anti-free speech campaign against anyone who calls them out. Here they’re issuing a blatant SLAPP threat, falsely claiming defamation in a scenario that is clearly not defamatory.
This incident fits a clear pattern: Republicans wielding government power to silence critics while crying “censorship” when faced with private moderation. The legal implications are particularly troubling given last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Vullo, where a unanimous Court made it clear that government officials cannot target intermediaries to punish speech they dislike. Republicans celebrated that ruling when it stopped a Democratic official from pressuring companies working with the NRA.
Now those same Republicans are trying to dodge Vullo by laundering their threats through the NRCC rather than coming directly from elected officials. It’s a transparently weak argument — especially given Johnson’s proud admission of involvement — but it reveals their playbook: use whatever tools available, legal or otherwise, to silence opposition speech while maintaining the fiction of being “free speech warriors.”
The GOP’s eagerness to suppress accurate criticism of their Medicaid cuts shows just how far they’ll go to hide their actual agenda — and just how much they know their actual agenda would be faced with massive criticism. When they say they’re the “party of free speech,” what they really mean is they want consequence-free speech for themselves while retaining the power to silence anyone who calls them out.
Of course, the end result here is a bit of a Streisand Effect. I had missed the GOP’s attempt to censor these ads, and now because Johnson is advertising it, I went back and found the details, including a better understanding of just how accurate those ads are, and how the GOP’s own threat letter points me to news articles noting that Medicaid cuts are absolutely a part of the plan.
I guess it’s good to know there are still surprises left for me in this universe. We have talked about the common absurdity in which video games are blamed for all manner of things. It’s the moral panic of our time. Video games are blamed for violence, for supposed addictions, for violence, for the eventual end to the human race due to men not dating enough, and also for violence. That list isn’t exhaustive, by the way. Plenty of other things are blamed on video games beyond those, but you get the idea.
Rarely, if ever, have I heard that video games are the reason there is so much waste in Medicaid, however. And, yet, that appears to be, at least in part, the exact theory House Speaker Mike Johnson is engaging in to justify the GOP cutting into the Medicaid program despite Dear Leader claiming his adoration for the program.
“No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who’s duly owed—what we’ve talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don’t have able-bodied young men on a program that’s designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They’re draining resources from people,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson last week.
“So if you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money, and you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”
Ah, the old “nerd in Mom’s basement” routine. How droll.
Meanwhile, here are some inconvenient facts. Medicaid is a program to essentially supplement health coverage for those that can’t otherwise afford it. Recent studies indicate that something like two-thirds of the folks on Medicaid are, in fact, already employed. The majority of those that are not are folks who are typically elderly, disabled, or have life circumstances precluding them from fulltime work, such as taking care of unwell family members that have nobody else to rely on.
Are there some in the program that are taking advantage of the system? Undoubtedly. That is surely the case in every sizable system everywhere, government or otherwise. But Johnson’s work requirement will do very little other than to put the sick and elderly in the crosshairs of a government that seems to believe cruelty is the chief mechanism for governance.
But these are, again, inconvenient facts that serve only to stand in the way of Johnson’s desire to hand-wave concerns about cutting this program by invoking the demon that is video games. It’s lazy. It’s cynical.
And it’s another proof that this current government thinks we’re too stupid to know when we’re being lied to.
Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne sent a cease-and-desist order to MoveOn on Thursday, asking the advocacy organization to take down a billboard along Interstate 10 that parodies Louisiana’s “Pick your Passion” tourism slogan. The billboard, which mentions [Governor] Jindal by name, is critical of the governor and legislators’ decision not to expand the state Medicaid program under federal health care reform.
Originally, Dardenne claimed the billboard could confuse people, making them think the state itself had created the signs. But his cease and desist order contained more than just that particular claim, with apparent cases of “confusion” only being limited by the lawmaker’s imagination. Here’s some of MoveOn.org’s response to the C&D.
First, the determinative issue is whether the use of the Mark creates a likelihood of confusion among relevant consumers. Clearly, MoveOn is not using the Mark for the advertisement of any goods or services of its own whatsoever. Your letter contends, however, that there is a “strong likelihood that a reasonable consumer will believe the Lieutenant Governor is the source. . .of the billboards” and is likely to be confused into believing this office is involved in a dispute with the Governor over Medicaid expansion.”
To the contrary, MoveOn’s sponsorship of the billboard is clearly denoted. The advertisement is manifestly a criticism by our client of the position of the Governor on Medicaid expansion. The Lieutenant Governor is not mentioned or referenced in any way in the advertisement. No reasonable Louisiana citizen or visitor could conceivably look at this billboard and conclude that it is about a dispute between two state officials, as opposed to a criticism of the Governor’s policy by an advocacy group.
That’s a pretty extreme stretch by Dardenne. Had he stuck with simple confusion of whether the state itself was behind the billboards, he might have been on more solid ground in terms of reasonableness. But as the response letter notes, Dardenne himself implicitly acknowledged the billboard was a parody. When it came to specifics detailing exactly how MoveOn.org was misleading the public, Dardenne failed to provide any.
You allege that the billboard had “already caused confusion regarding the source of the message” but cite no facts or evidence.
Now that Moveon.org has shot down his C&D, Dardenne is taking the organization to court.
“We have invested millions of dollars in identifying the Louisiana: Pick Your Passion brand with all that is good about Louisiana. No group should be allowed to use the brand for its own purposes, especially if it is for partisan political posturing,” Dardenne said in a statement announcing the suit.
“MoveOn.org has every right to attack Gov. Jindal, the state’s refusal to accept Medicaid or, for that matter, me personally. But they do not have the right to use our protected service mark, which is used solely for the purpose of promoting and marketing Louisiana. We own the mark and its use is under the direction of my office, not the Office of the Governor.”
The filing reiterates Dardenne’s claims that the billboard gives the impression that the Lt. Governor’s office is attacking the governor of the state. It also makes the claim that because Governor Jindal is not the “author” of the claimed marks, the billboard is not a protected parody.
Louisiana and federal jurisprudence has provided that a parody is defined as an artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author. For the purposes of copyright and trademark law, the nub of the definitions, and the heart of any parodist’s claim to quote from existing material, is the use of some elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author’s works. Plaintiff avers that infringement of the Service Marks by MoveOn.org does not constitute parody under the fair-use doctrine because the subject of the parody, Governor Bobby Jindal, is not the author of the Service Marks, as is required.
While Dardenne’s claim is technically correct (in regards to commenting on the “author’s” work), in terms of confusion, there’s very little separating a state’s slogan and its government (as a whole, rather than a division of wholly separated offices according to Dardenne’s hair splitting). Dardenne’s claiming that because his office (the Lt. Governor’s) designed the state’s word mark and slogan, it is no longer a protectable parody. This argument utitlizes imperceptible (to outsiders) differences in an attempt to remove the parody protections that would appear to cover MoveOn’s work.
Whether or not the court agrees with Dardenne’s arguments remains to be seen, but the underlying feeling that this is solely a politically-motivated move (with all of its First Amendment implications) is palpable. MoveOn.org is a left-leaning organization, while Gov. Jindal and his lieutenant are both Republicans. Simply utilizing trademark law to shut down criticism is always a bad idea. Allowing political motivations to override common sense is even worse. As the article notes, MoveOn.org has deployed similar campaigns in Texas and Florida, but no state rep has been foolhardy enough to attack speech by brandishing the state’s trademarks as weapons.
In the long run, even if Dardenne wins, he (and the state) still lose. This legal attack has only raised the visibility of MoveOn’s critical campaign. And the cries of “censorship” that would follow a successful lawsuit will only make the office of the governor look worse.
