The Progressive Midwesterner

At yesterday's U.S. Senate debate in Missouri between Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill and Republican challenger Josh Hawley, McCaskill's response to Hawley's claim that he'll protect health care coverage for Missourians contained multiple sentence, but one sentence in particular stood out: If he believes we should protect pre-existing conditions, he should ask tomorrow for the case to be dismissed. Hawley is currently the Attorney General of Missouri, and Hawley is one of numerous Republican state attorneys general who are suing in an attempt to undermine health care coverage protections for those with pre-existing conditions. Hawley, if he wanted to, could withdraw the State of Missouri from the lawsuit, but he hasn't done so. What Hawley and a lot of other Republicans are doing amounts to gaslighting, since they're claiming to support protecting health care coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, while, at the same time, their actions seek to...

Eric Greitens, the former Missouri Governor who resigned from office in disgrace after being caught threatening to blackmail a woman who he had an extramarital affair with, is reportedly considering running for his old job in the 2020 gubernatorial election in Missouri, even if meant running in a Republican primary against incumbent Gov. Mike Parson (R-MO): Former Gov. Greitens has called at least one donor to test the waters re: a 2020 gubernatorial primary. — Jeff Smith (@JeffSmithMO) September 16, 2018 The fact that someone like Greitens is even considering a political comeback proves that Greitens has no sense of shame or decency.

Most election analysts are already predicting that this year's midterm elections are likely to be a very strong election year for the Democratic Party nationally. One region of the country that could amplify an already-likely "blue wave" of Democratic electoral victories is the Inland Midwest, a six state region consisting of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The Inland Midwest region gets its name because all six states are Midwestern states, but none of the six states have a shoreline along any of the Great Lakes. The Inland Midwest is a very Republican-leaning region of the country, as Donald Trump received slightly over 56% of the vote in last year's presidential election in the six-state region . However, at least one statewide race in each of the six states in the Inland Midwest are competitive (including all three U.S. Senate races in the region), and several U.S. House seats in the region are competitive as well. As much of th...

It's no secret that Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway is extremely effective when it comes to protecting Missouri taxpayers. It's also no secret that Galloway's office helped uncover a major rural hospital billing scam in Missouri. In May of this year, Galloway's work uncovering a billing scam at Unionville, Missouri's Putnam County Memorial Hospital earned her national media attention from CBS News . The scam involved the hospital acting as a shell company for, to put it mildly, extremely shady billing practices: (Galloway's) team discovered a management company called Hospital Partners had swooped in weeks before Putnam (County Memorial Hospital) was about to close, promising to turn it around. They made deals with labs around the country to funnel billing for blood tests and drug screens through Putnam, which collects higher reimbursement rates as a rural hospital. Putnam kept about 15 percent; most of the money was wired back to the labs and the man...

Across America, there is a wave of energy for Democratic candidates for public office, and that's no different in the Heartland. Many Midwestern states have seen more Democrats file to run for seats in Congress or state legislative seats in this year's elections than in recent election cycles. In this wave of endorsements from The Progressive Midwesterner, I will endorse multiple candidates who are running as a Democratic candidate in an officially partisan race or are running as a de facto Democratic candidate in an officially non-partisan race. North Dakota Tax Commissioner - Kylie Oversen Kylie Oversen, the chairwoman of the North Dakota Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party (DNL), is running for the statewide elected office of North Dakota Tax Commissioner. The Progressive Midwesterner endorses Kylie's campaign for tax commissioner in North Dakota, and you can learn more about Kylie's campaign here . People like Kylie are the future of the Democratic Party, no...

Multiple media outlets, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOV-TV , are reporting that Eric Robert Greitens (last name pronounced GRAY-t · nz , interpunct denotes central vowel sound similar to "a" in "ago"), the Republican Governor of Missouri, committed an extramarital affair before being elected governor and threatened to blackmail the woman that he had a consensual sexual encounter with: Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens and his wife, Sheena Greitens, issued an extraordinary statement late Wednesday acknowledging that he had an extramarital affair in the past and that the couple “has dealt with this together honestly and privately.” [...] (KMOV-TV) played portions of an audio recording that the then-husband says he made in March 2015, surreptitiously, of his then-wife confessing to a sexual encounter with Greitens days earlier. The Post-Dispatch also has possession of the audio, and the newspaper has interviewed the ex-...