Fake Wizard Goes to Oz

Posing as a magician who can fulfill all desires, con man finally goes to Oz

Nov. 20: TV star to oversee health of tens of millions of Americans … Wrestling executive to oversee education of America’s children … Landmines for Ukraine … Hedge-fund boss faces jail for out-Wall-Streeting Wall Street …

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Campaigning as a magician, Donald Trump went to Dr. Oz on Sept. 14, 2016, and handed Dr. Mehmet Oz a diploma testimonial bullshit letter saying he’s healthy. (Screengrab / CNN video of Dr. Oz video.)

Few phrases irk your easily irked TFN more than someone calling themselves a realist, the equivalent of calling yourself a correctist. How special for you!

But TFN suspects most correctists would agree that Dr. Mehmet Oz is likely to be confirmed by the Republican-majority Senate in his new role overseeing Medicaid and Medicare and the medecimation thereof.

Medicare spends $901 billion a year helping 65 million elderly people. Medicaid spends $734 billion helping 85 million poor and disabled people.

For now.

Oz’s primary qualification for overseeing these massive federal bureaucracies, multiple programs, $1.5 trillion+ in spending, and complicated relationships with 50+ states and other governments to ensure/deny health care for tens of millions of people is that he spent much of his life cutting open chests and making a bag inside move blood around good.

Basically, he’s a very good meat mechanic¹ who even invented some gizmos for use under the hood.

And now Oz will run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS). Not because he’s the best blood-bag mechanic, but because he also talked good on TVs (RePresident-elect Donald Trump literally cited Oz’s daytime Emmies in the announcement).

Oz’s selection is clearly Trump’s bid to diversify his administration. His nominees so far have drawn attention for their unusually high proportion of Scots-Irish-Fox backgrounds. Many have at least some Fox in their DNA. Trump, of course, has an NBC heritage. But Oz would be history’s first syndicated-American nominee.

Fittingly, Trump — who deceived his city and then his kingdom into thinking he could do magic but behind the curtain was a fraud and con man telling people what they wanted to hear — went to Oz to achieve his dreams.

Not to get brains, a heart, or courage. But as Trump put it in his official decree on social media, to “cut waste and fraud.”

Oz’s partners in labeling essential services “waste and fraud” will be the brainless and heartless Tin Man and Scarecrow Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk.

Cutting waste and fraud by cutting the CMMS budgets will actually supercharge waste and fraud. How come? Because the reason there’s so much waste and fraud now is the government doesn’t spend enough money on investigators and regulators to prevent it.

Remember, hiring these people is better than free. The waste/fraud they prevent pays their salaries and more. So you can send $10 million out the door in waste and fraud, or you can spend $200,000 for the salary and benefits of a skilled government bureaucrat and end up with $9.8 million you wouldn’t have had otherwise. (If you were a company, like these jamokes supposedly run, you’d reinvest those proceeds faster than Trump moved on her like a bitch.)

That’s right, the fraud here isn’t drug addicts lying to pharmacists, it’s entire companies created with the sole, express purpose of generating just enough phony paperwork — to look like medical shit is happening somewhere by someone to someone — and then collecting government reimbursements for it.

How much do these business people rob us of this way? One hundred billion dollars a year.

How do they get away with it? Republicans in Congress block the funding to stop them; funding that would pay for itself. How many agents does the CMMS have policing this $1.5 trillion+? Four-hundred and 50.

In fact, the same thing is true at the Internal Revenue Service. Republicans balked at Pres. Joe Biden hiring tons more cops, even though they more than pay for themselves by cutting down on white-collar tax fraud.

So it’s weird that Trump will cut these people, because your credulous TFN was assured that Trump just lurvs cops. But maybe not the ones who go after white-collar criminals. Emphasis not on collar.

That said, just four years ago, Oz was advocating ways to “provide Americans with universal health-care coverage and better health care, especially poor, underserved communities.”

And it doesn’t have to cost shit, if you just take obscene profits off the operating table.

Plus, Oz’s boss will be Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And Trump’s official decree also said that Oz will “take on the illness industrial complex.”

Which means we might, in theory, potentially see the Trump2.0 administration wage war against some segments of the insurance/medical/pharmaceutical industries that Democrats haven’t battled publicly since the Barack Obama administration.

Democrats right now could, in theory, start laying out exactly what that should look like. And instead of beating Oz up in his confirmation hearing they could get him to elaborate on covering everyone and saving money by not privatizing and, in theory, herd MAGA through the health-care Overton Window. Which would be healthy for everyone.

Wrestling Exec to Do the Piledriver on America’s Children

RePresident-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he’s going to nominate a new Education secretary who spent one (1) year on the Connecticut state Board of Education.

The longtime education expert in question is Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive officer who led the Small Business Administration under Trump1.0.

The growth of small businesses stalled almost immediately after she started her 2017-2019 tenure.

And, yes, obviously as Trump nominee she’s accused of something having to do with sexual predation. (h/t)²

A lawsuit filed last month says that she and husband Vince McMahon failed to protect boys as young as 12 who worked as “ring boys” from “open, rampant [sexual] abuse.” Linda McMahon denies it, but on the other hand, they say wrestling is real, too. Plus, look at her boss.

Anyway, obligatory Trump-nominee record of sexual-abuse allegations aside, there’s also the substantive ways in which McMahon is poised to oversee open, rampant abuse of millions of young American brains.

Here’s what National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle had to say:

McMahon's only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students — and 95% of students with disabilities — learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools. 

…he [Trump] and Linda McMahon are back at it with their extreme Project 2025 proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, steal resources for our most vulnerable students, increase class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, take away special education services for disabled students, and put student civil rights protections at risk.

The NEA has some dirt on McMahon that TFN hasn’t seen elsewhere, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter who Trump nominates to ru(i)n the Education Department, because the mission will be the same. So the important thing is not the nominee, but the mission. The right will want to lie about transgender kids, but there is harm facing all kids.

Your research-doing TFN did some research on the Education Department last night and will have a Bonus Story about what’s at stake later today. Because as much as The Fucking News is fucking guilty of dwelling on the personal inadequacies and/or ethical horrors of Trump’s nominees, we won’t get anywhere unless we focus on why our institutions — our glorious bureaucracies! — are so central to the story of America’s success. So, as much as TFN is guilty of nominee-dwelling, we’re trying to be the shepherd and hope you’ll share our post later today.

Biden Blows Up Remainder of Legacy with Landmines

Determined to make RePresident Donald Trump look like a peacemaker by comparison, Pres. Joe Biden is prepared to start sending landmines to Ukraine.

Landmines — also referred to as “antipersonnel mines” because the marketing team thinks that’s less horrifying than “anticiviliansincludingkids mines” — are banned by more than 160 countries. Because they’re landmines.

With Russia accelerating its invasion into Ukraine, and Trump about to reinvade the White House, Biden apparently feels he’s running out of time to turn the tide in Ukraine. Earlier this week he authorized the use of U.S. long-range missiles by Ukraine against Russia in Russia. 

That was followed by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin lowering the bar for when Russia might use nuclear bombs.

Now we’ve got the landmine shipments, which were approved, the Washington Post reports, despite internal dissent at the White House. As with all horrific Biden militarism, however, there is a feel-good side!

The U.S. landmines are specially designed to become inoperative after a matter of weeks, potentially reducing the number of civilians killed months or years later. Awesome!

Crime Watch

WALL STREET Hedge-fund bmillionaire Bill Hwang is going to be sentenced today for his crimes. But is he hero or villain?

Hwang says he doesn’t have the $10 billion that prosecutors are asking in restitution for ripping off his victims.

Hwang’s modest family hedge fund, Archegos, at one point was worth $30 billion. So how’d he do it, and what were his crimes? Hwang did it by exploiting the ever-more-complicated rules that Wall Street has written into the law over the years. (h/t)

His crimes were, therefore, too fucking complicated for me to spend time understanding and explaining to you discerning Newsfuckers, who will rightly not give a shit and/or forget faster than Donald Trump moved on her like a bitch.

But here’s the thing. Hwang used those complicated Wall Street rules to rip off the very Wall Street banks who complexified those rules so that they could rip you off. So, I dunno…fine him $10 billion or nominate him for Securities and Exchange Commission chief?

Actually, the advocacy group Better Markets — because once upon a time financial markets were capable of achieving social good! — is disrupting the fin sector with their finnovative suggestion for how to punish Hwang.

Hwang’s restitution, Better Markets argues, should go not to Wall Street, which “actually facilitated the fraud as they lined their own pockets from their transactions with Hwang.  Perhaps they did so unwittingly … Or perhaps they were willfully blind as they hoped and stood to gain from their dealings with Hwang.”

Instead, Better Markets says, Hwang should make restitution to individual investors. That’s not super satisfying, since those investors are only slightly less rich than the Wall Street “victims.” But it’s the other remedy Better Markets has in mind that really caught TFN’s fucking eye: Real prison time!

Prosecutors are asking 21 years in prison — just like a “real” criminal who steals, say, $20,000 instead of $10 billion — and Better Markets says that’s a fine idea.

Duffy in the Buffy

In a TFN exclusive Bonus Story yesterday, TFN uncovered way too much about Transportation Department nominee former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI).³

Basically, when Duffy was running for office, a clip of him from “Real World: Boston” resurfaced in which Duffy covers his junk but does an otherwise-nude bump and grind for his castmates. Including women who presumably did not request or welcome this.

Well, TFN found it and posted the relevant 20 seconds or so.

If you’re subscribed to TFN’s Bonus Stories (you can check here) you should have it in your email. Paid subscribers can read all of TFN’s content online or on the app. But because TFN would hate to deprive any Newsfuckers of this dubious opportunity, just this once I’m gonna share the secret free gift linky-link.

TCB

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Go get ‘em, kids.

1. Apologies to heart surgeons out there, but in your heart you know it’s true.

2. Look, TFN’s first Bluesky hat-tip!

3. I totally stole this headline from a Newsfucker who commented on the original story. Thank you, Newsfucker!