Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

Trump speaks to press before boarding Air Force 1

President Donald Trump’s immigration policies have faced major challenges, with his approval ratings plummeting. Quinnipiac polling has shown that only 21% strongly support his immigration strategies, revealing a growing disconnect with American views on the issue. Support for strict deportation policies has waned nationwide, reflected in a Quinnipiac poll showing 62% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s immigration approach.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/underwater-fox-news-analyst-repor
ts-trump-s-approval/ss-AA1J4uzD?ocid=msedgntp&pc=EDBBAN&cvid=20a5f789ee354c9a9af5d8d482f8207a&ei=53

Hey Gilligan, do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

T

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Tuesday, July 22, 2025 10:20 PM

They already have. I don't even know what you're talking about because I didn't read a single word past your question because whatever it is you're posting today is something you're going to forget about by Monday and never bring up again.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 6:58 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They already have. I don't even know what you're talking about because I didn't read a single word past your question because whatever it is you're posting today is something you're going to forget about by Monday and never bring up again.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix, Trumptards only learn from experience, such as dying from smoking. (Written warnings that tobacco causes cancer will not change their behavior, but death will.)

Or being fired. (Telling them in writing about their incompetence doesn't change Trumptard work behavior. They change only when fired.)

Or being divorced. (Telling them that adultery will end their marriage doesn't cause a Trumptard to stop cheating on their wife. Only divorce stops the cheating.)

All the Trumptards I know are animals who only learn from suffering the consequences. These semi-human Trumptards can't learn any other way.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 6:58 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Hellscapes of Their Minds
ICE says it’s going to “flood” New York. Good luck with that

By Paul Krugman | Jul 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-hellscapes-of-their-minds

On Monday Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s border czar, declared that New York City isn’t cooperating sufficiently with ICE’s efforts to round up immigrants, so ICE is going to “flood the zone” with agents. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see how this could end very, very badly.

Suppose, for example, that masked, armed ICE agents were to descend in large numbers on a thronged street like Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, seizing people they imagine might be dangerous illegals. How would the agents make that judgment? According to Homan, they’d do it in part based on “physical appearance” — although he’s tried, unconvincingly, to walk that back.

But if that’s how ICE agents see things, basically everyone on Roosevelt Avenue will look to them like a criminal alien. So the risk of angry, possibly violent confrontations — in particular of ICE agents running amok because they perceive themselves as being under threat — will be high.

And what if there are, as I expect there would be, large demonstrations against ICE’s actions? How many people will end up being tear-gassed?

Why run the risk of all these consequences? The constant refrain from Trump administration officials is that big cities with large immigrant populations are drowning in a wave of immigrant crime. So Queens, where almost half the population is foreign born and around 10 percent are undocumented, must be a terrifying urban hellscape. It must be one of those places where, as Trump puts it,

you can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread you get shot you get mugged you get raped you get whatever

Or here’s how the Republican National Committee puts it:

But Queens is nothing like that. Last year there were 56 murders in the borough, which has more than 2 million residents. That’s down from 312 murders in 1990, when the borough had a lot fewer immigrants. Queens’s murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants is also well below the national average. And I have a lot of friends in Queens. Although New York does have rats (and always did) I haven’t seen any feces, and my friends aren’t afraid to walk across the street.

New York City as a whole has a very low rate of violent deaths by national standards, partly because of its low murder rate, but also because many of its residents take public transit, which is much safer than driving:

Source: Scientific American

Actually, if you’re worried about a public safety crisis in the United States, you should worry both about guns and about the rising number of vehicle fatalities, which are much higher in America than in other rich countries:

Source: New York Times

Again, however, that’s not how Trump’s people see it. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has been waging a nonstop campaign against New York’s highly successful congestion pricing scheme, which has led both to faster travel and to a reduction in car crashes. According to him, liberals force people into the subway, and the subway's not safe.

I guess I’m one of those people forced into the subway. I mean, I could take a taxi to the office or drive myself (but where would I park?), but the subway — which feels pretty safe to me — is both much cheaper and faster. Tyranny!

Back to flooding the zone with ICE agents: Do Trump and his people really believe the untrue claims they make about urban crime and the role of immigrants? Or are they basically a cover story for racism? My guess is that this is a false dichotomy. Racism is surely the underlying factor. But people are often very good at believing false stories that justify their actions — even, or actually especially, when their actions are cruel and destructive.

My guess is that an attempt by ICE to put New York under siege will mostly fall flat. Yet there will, as I said, be a serious risk of violent confrontations. Even if there aren’t, we know based on experience elsewhere that many innocent people — legal residents and even citizens with the wrong “physical appearance” — would be caught up in the dragnets. And some crucial workers might stay home out of justified fear of ICE arrests.

But Trump and co. might see the prospect of inflicting damage on New York City as a benefit, not a cost. And in any case they’re probably — probably — more interested in the theater of an immigrant crackdown than in actually rounding up large numbers of people. After all, a confrontation in New York might distract the public from the Epstein story.

So I’m hoping that Homan’s tough talk won’t translate into a lot of action — in part because there’s a good chance that the whole thing would quickly become a farce. But I’m worried.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 7:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

It was after another blowout argument with his wife that Lee Hammock first googled narcissist.

Their fights were frequent and explosive. He hated his warehouse job. He thought he was meant for more. He was fit, good-looking, and still in his 30s; maybe he should be an actor, he said. When she interjected that most actors don’t earn much, Hammock became indignant.

“You think I’m pathetic,” he retorted. “You think I’m one of these just average-ass people.” Conversations about his goals implicitly involved an assessment of his prospects, which was agitating. In another argument, he blamed his lack of career focus on the workload created by their infant son. Before storming out, she called him a narcissist.

Alone in their North Carolina home, he scrolled through his phone, hunting for a bit of information to refute her. But search results showed criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, a condition marked by unreasonably high self-importance, pathological need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. These resonated with Hammock, hard.

“It explained so much for me, the entirety of my life,” he says. He sensed there was something abnormal about his sensitivity to criticism, the inadequacy of his emotional reaction to others, and his ever-present discontent about jobs and social status.

Do you want to know why the lives of Trump and his Trumptards are dramatic? Read more at https://slate.com/technology/2025/07/narcissistic-personality-disorder
-definition-tiktok-youtube-influencers-npd.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 7:56 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's insane war on renewable energy
America needs energy abundance, not polarization and culture war

By Matthew Yglesias | Jul 23, 2025

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-insane-war-on-renewable-energy

I’ve often had occasion to write that environmentalists are overrating the prospects of 100 percent renewable energy as a strategy for addressing climate change.

Essentially, they are relying on a badly flawed “levelized cost of energy” metric, which says the marginal cost of adding one megawatt of wind or solar to a fossil-dominated grid is cheap, to conclude that an all-renewable grid would be cheap. This is wrong. Developing an all-renewable grid that could reliably power a temperate country through the winter would be much more expensive than a simple LCOE metric suggests. This is one of the reasons why new technology — affordable nuclear, advanced geothermal, or scalable carbon capture — is so important.

But Donald Trump is running the show now, and he’s making the opposite error.

He’s not trying to create a zero-emission grid or reduce fossil fuel use in any way. But he’s not only rolling back tax credits for wind and solar production, he’s doing everything he can think of to raise new regulatory barriers to renewable deployment. He also keeps asserting that China doesn’t use renewable technologies, suggesting that the mere existence of wind and solar power is harmful.

TRUMP: And we are putting up wind. It does not work, aside from ruining our fields and valleys and killing all the birds. Being very weak and expensive, all made in China. I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that?
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1941251628386148485

This is totally false. Not only does China have many wind farms, they generate more wind electricity than the United States does despite a much less favorable geography. And they generate a lot more solar electricity than the United States.

The reason China generates so much renewable electricity is that while constructing an all-renewables grid is a lot more expensive than environmentalists want to concede, it’s absolutely true that incrementally adding renewable energy to the grid is cheap. That’s why China has dramatically increased the amount of renewables it deployed in the context of a dramatic increase in the overall amount of electricity the country generates.

This is what a pure “energy dominance” policy looks like: massive buildout of wind and solar and batteries, because wind turbines and solar panels and batteries are all getting cheaper, with the shortcomings of an all-renewables grid addressed by simply not building an all-renewables grid.

It looks like China’s carbon dioxide emissions are finally leveling off. But while China was building out these renewables, they were also burning more fossil fuels. This is obviously not a strategy for achieving the environmental movement’s goals. But if you’re Donald Trump and you don’t want to achieve rapid decarbonization, there is still genuinely no problem with opening the floodgates to renewable deployment.

All Trump will accomplish by throttling renewables is making costs higher and the air dirtier than if he just let Americans use technologies that really are quite cheap at the current margin. He’s letting culture war prejudice, special interest politics, and polarization get in the way of his stated goals of lower costs and energy dominance.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 8:14 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

About That Japan Deal
Arithmetic has a well-known globalist bias

By Paul Krugman | Jul 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/about-that-japan-deal

The Trump administration has triumphantly announced a trade deal with Japan.

There are three main things you should take away from this deal:

1. It will increase, not reduce, the U.S. trade deficit

2. It will accelerate America’s descent into crony capitalism

3. U.S. consumers are still facing a major price shock

The deal, as reported, involves imposing a tariff of “only” 15 percent on imports from Japan, mainly in return for a promise by the Japanese government to invest $550 billion in the United States. It appears that Japan will create a sovereign wealth fund for that purpose, and that Trump will have a say in how it invests.

So, first, the impact on the trade deficit. As I and others have repeatedly pointed out, there’s some basic arithmetic linking international investment and the trade balance. A few technical details aside,

U.S. trade deficit = Net foreign investment in the United States

This isn’t a theory, it’s just accounting. So if the deal leads to more investment in the U.S., it must, necessarily, lead to a bigger trade deficit.

How, exactly, would that work? The most likely channel is that capital inflow from Japan will lead to a stronger dollar than we would have had otherwise, making U.S. goods less competitive across the board.

It has been clear for a while that Trump and co. don’t understand or believe in balance of payments accounting, that they want both a smaller trade deficit and more foreign investment in America. Now their basic lack of understanding is embodied in a specific deal.

Second, as I said, it appears that Trump will get to influence how Japan invests. We’re already well on the way toward an economy in which success in business depends not on how good your product is but on your political influence (and also an economy in which Trump tells Coca-Cola what ingredients it should use.) This is another step on that road.

Finally, a 15 percent tariff is still really, really high — much higher than the 1.6 percent tariff Japanese non-agricultural exports faced before Trump began his trade war.

Will Japanese exporters, rather than U.S. consumers, end up paying that tariff? Some people have looked at the relatively muted effect of tariffs on consumer prices so far and suggested that maybe Trump was right about that. But they’re looking at the wrong data.

If foreigners were eating the tariffs, we’d expect to see a large decline in the prices America is paying for imports. And the BLS does, in fact, measure import prices; its index specifically does not include tariffs.

So let’s compare the increase in average tariffs from a year ago with the change in nonfuel import prices:

Source: Yale Budget Lab, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Have import prices fallen by enough to offset the tariff hikes? No, they’ve gone up slightly.

So why aren’t we seeing big increases in consumer prices yet? Basically because for the moment U.S. businesses are absorbing much of the cost rather than passing it on to consumers. They’ve been able to do that partly because many companies rushed to bring imports in before the tariffs hit, and are still selling out of that inventory. They’ve been willing to do that because they don’t want to alienate customers and lose market share, and have been hoping that the tariffs will mostly go away.

But if Japan still faces a 15 percent tariff after making a deal, that hope will soon fade. Inflation is coming.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 8:38 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They already have. I don't even know what you're talking about because I didn't read a single word past your question because whatever it is you're posting today is something you're going to forget about by Monday and never bring up again.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
6ix, Trumptards only learn from experience, such as dying from smoking. (Written warnings that tobacco causes cancer will not change their behavior, but death will.)

Or being fired. (Telling them in writing about their incompetence doesn't change Trumptard work behavior. They change only when fired.)

Or being divorced. (Telling them that adultery will end their marriage doesn't cause a Trumptard to stop cheating on their wife. Only divorce stops the cheating.)

All the Trumptards I know are animals who only learn from suffering the consequences. These semi-human Trumptards can't learn any other way.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Say hi to Kevin Drum for me.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 9:51 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
About That Japan Deal
Arithmetic has a well-known globalist bias

By Paul Krugman | Jul 23, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/about-that-japan-deal

The Trump administration has triumphantly announced a trade deal with Japan.

There are three main things you should take away from this deal:

1. It will increase, not reduce, the U.S. trade deficit

2. It will accelerate America’s descent into crony capitalism

3. U.S. consumers are still facing a major price shock

The deal, as reported, involves imposing a tariff of “only” 15 percent on imports from Japan, mainly in return for a promise by the Japanese government to invest $550 billion in the United States. It appears that Japan will create a sovereign wealth fund for that purpose, and that Trump will have a say in how it invests.

So, first, the impact on the trade deficit. As I and others have repeatedly pointed out, there’s some basic arithmetic linking international investment and the trade balance. A few technical details aside,

U.S. trade deficit = Net foreign investment in the United States

This isn’t a theory, it’s just accounting. So if the deal leads to more investment in the U.S., it must, necessarily, lead to a bigger trade deficit.

How, exactly, would that work? The most likely channel is that capital inflow from Japan will lead to a stronger dollar than we would have had otherwise, making U.S. goods less competitive across the board.

It has been clear for a while that Trump and co. don’t understand or believe in balance of payments accounting, that they want both a smaller trade deficit and more foreign investment in America. Now their basic lack of understanding is embodied in a specific deal.

Second, as I said, it appears that Trump will get to influence how Japan invests. We’re already well on the way toward an economy in which success in business depends not on how good your product is but on your political influence (and also an economy in which Trump tells Coca-Cola what ingredients it should use.) This is another step on that road.

Finally, a 15 percent tariff is still really, really high — much higher than the 1.6 percent tariff Japanese non-agricultural exports faced before Trump began his trade war.

Will Japanese exporters, rather than U.S. consumers, end up paying that tariff? Some people have looked at the relatively muted effect of tariffs on consumer prices so far and suggested that maybe Trump was right about that. But they’re looking at the wrong data.

If foreigners were eating the tariffs, we’d expect to see a large decline in the prices America is paying for imports. And the BLS does, in fact, measure import prices; its index specifically does not include tariffs.

So let’s compare the increase in average tariffs from a year ago with the change in nonfuel import prices:

Source: Yale Budget Lab, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Have import prices fallen by enough to offset the tariff hikes? No, they’ve gone up slightly.

So why aren’t we seeing big increases in consumer prices yet? Basically because for the moment U.S. businesses are absorbing much of the cost rather than passing it on to consumers. They’ve been able to do that partly because many companies rushed to bring imports in before the tariffs hit, and are still selling out of that inventory. They’ve been willing to do that because they don’t want to alienate customers and lose market share, and have been hoping that the tariffs will mostly go away.

But if Japan still faces a 15 percent tariff after making a deal, that hope will soon fade. Inflation is coming.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Did the US get what it wants?

There were reports that the US had called on Japan to increase military spending.

But Tokyo's tariff envoy has clarified that the deal does not include anything on defence spending.

Ryosei Akazawa added that steel and aluminium tariffs would remain at 50%.

These both may be wins for Japan, since it exports more vehicles to the US than it does steel and aluminium.

The pressure is also on the US to get as many of these deals over the line before its self-imposed tariff August deadline.

Alongside negotiations with the US, countries might start looking for more reliable partners elsewhere.

On the same day as Washington and Toyko announced their agreement, Japan and Europe pledged to "work more closely together to counter economic coercion and to address unfair trade practices," according European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The European Union is yet to agree a trade deal with the US.

"We believe in global competitiveness and it should benefit everyone," said Ms von der Leyen.

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 3:46 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Finally, common sense

Quote:
US Olympics Committee Bans Men From Women's Sports, Says It's Aligning With Presidential Order

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Wednesday, July 23, 2025 9:13 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Finally, common sense

Quote:
US Olympics Committee Bans Men From Women's Sports, Says It's Aligning With Presidential Order

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

One more reason why we voted in Trump.

No more men legally beating the life out of women on the world stage sounds like common sense to me.

Let's take that final step now and everybody go back to calling a man a man and a woman a woman.

Trust me. It's really not that hard. Even the heavily brainwashed among us here did it every day of their lives until 5 or 10 years ago too.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 3:07 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Finally!

Quote:
Tulsi Refers Obama For Criminal Charges After Debunking Top 'Russia Hoax Lies'

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tulsi-about-drop-more-evidence-aga
inst-barack-obama

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

On Tuesday, the Trump administration launched its most direct and aggressive confrontation with the judiciary so far: The Justice Department rejected a federal court’s authority to name a new U.S. attorney to New Jersey to replace Alina Habba, the president’s interim appointee. In replacing Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, the court was acting under an express grant of power provided by Congress—one explicitly permitted by the Constitution and sanctioned by history reaching back to 1789. Nonetheless, the administration responded by firing Habba’s constitutionally appointed replacement from the U.S. attorney’s office, then slandered the court as a corrupt body of “rogue judges” allegedly “colluding” with Democrats to “override the authority of the Chief Executive.”

Her antics in office made Habba the rare Trump nominee who could not secure confirmation in the Senate. And as an unconfirmed interim U.S. attorney, her tenure expired after 120 days under the federal statute governing this position. That law says that after 120 days are up, the attorney general may name someone else as new interim U.S. attorney — or the federal district court “may appoint” a U.S. attorney who serves “until the vacancy is filled.” Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to line up another loyalist to replace Habba; instead, she and Habba lobbied the judges on New Jersey’s U.S. District Court to reappoint her. That effort flopped, and the court instead named Habba’s first assistant, Desiree Leigh Grace, to replace her. Grace is an experienced and respected prosecutor.

Within hours, Bondi announced that Grace had been fired from the U.S. attorney’s office.

As is so often the case, this crisis is largely one of Trump’s own making. The president appointed Habba as interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey despite her utter lack of qualifications and her mottled record as a lawyer. Habba won the appointment by serving as Trump’s personal lawyer in civil cases, including sexual harassment lawsuits. She has no prosecutorial experience, and was sanctioned by a federal judge in 2023 for filing a “completely frivolous” lawsuit against Hillary Clinton on Trump’s behalf. (She’s also facing an ongoing ethics investigation for her questionable work on a sexual harassment case involving a Trump employee.) As interim U.S. attorney, Habba destroyed morale among prosecutors through unprofessional behavior and partisan misconduct. Among other acts, she disbanded the office’s storied Civil Rights Division and filed absurd criminal charges against two Democratic politicians, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver. (A federal judge harshly criticized the Baraka indictment, which has since been dropped; the mayor is now suing Habba for malicious prosecution.)

Much more at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-deal-pam-bondi-new-j
ersey-alina-habba.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 8:16 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

One more reason why we voted in Trump.

“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read,” says Trump

By Robert Tait | Tue 22 Jul 2025 19.47 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/22/obama-breaks-silence-t
rump

Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.

“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”

He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.

“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”

Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.

“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 8:41 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Finally!

Quote:
Tulsi Refers Obama For Criminal Charges After Debunking Top 'Russia Hoax Lies'

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tulsi-about-drop-more-evidence-aga
inst-barack-obama

1st Session
SENATE
(U)REPOR T
OF THE
REPORT
116-XX
SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
UNITED STATES SENATE
ON
RUSSIAN ACTIVE MEASURE;S CAMPAIGNS AND INTERFERENCE
IN THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION
' VOLUME 2: RUSSIA'S USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
WITH ADDITIONAL VIEWS

"Masquerading as Americans, these operatives used targeted advertisements,
intentionally falsified news articles, self-generated content, and social media platform tools to
interact with and attempt to deceive tens of millions of social media users in the United States.
This campaign sought to polarize Americans on the basis of societal, ideological, and racial
differences, provoked real world events, and was part of a foreign government's covert support
of Russia's favored candidate in the U.S. presidential election."

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-d
efault-files-documents-report-volume2.pdf

Should we believe a Senate Intelligence report led by Republicans headed by Marco Rubio or believe comrade signyms continued denial of the truth.

As I’ve said for years, she is a Polish Russian Collaborator who once again supports Putins’ agenda over America. Trump is desperate to change the subject away from Epstein. All this is going to do is remind Americans of what the report found and further shit on Trumps lies.

Signym, you're a fucking moron. Go back to Russia and live a life of squalor with the rest of your brethren.

T

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 8:45 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Electricity Prices Are Soaring Under Donald Trump

Jul 24, 2025 at 5:01 AM EDT

Why It Matters

Trump said that his administration would "cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months."

What People Are Saying

President Donald Trump, in a Newsweek opinion piece published October 1, 2024: "We will cut energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months—not just for businesses but for all Americans and their families, and we will quickly double our electricity capacity, which we need to do to compete with China and other countries on Artificial Intelligence. With the lowest energy prices on earth, we will attract energy-hungry industries from all over the planet and millions of blue-collar jobs."

What Happens Next

January 2026 will mark the first anniversary of Trump's second term as president. Whether energy and electricity prices fall dramatically by then remains to be seen.

https://www.newsweek.com/electricity-prices-soaring-under-donald-trump
-2103072

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 10:17 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Dismantling of American Health Care

By Adam Gaffney, David U. Himmelstein, and Steffie Woolhandler | July 8, 2025

We must resist Trump’s war on medical access and knowledge today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/07/08/the-dismantling-of-american-
health-care/

1.

On July 4 President Donald Trump signed into law a piece of legislation that amounts to a declaration of war on the working-class and the sick. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” will slice more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade, stripping health coverage from more than 11 million lower-income Americans by 2034 and sending tens of thousands to an early grave—all in exchange for tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy. Despite Trump’s promises to the contrary, the law will also cut nearly $500 billion from Medicare over the same period by making the deficit surge past a point at which the Office of Management and Budget “is required to order a sequestration to eliminate the overage.”

This assault on the nation’s major public insurance programs is only the latest front in an ongoing right-wing campaign against health. On April 1 Trump’s hammer fell on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the sprawling agency that encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among other health-focused agencies. Having already forced out 10,000 HHS personnel earlier in his term, the Trump administration terminated 10,000 more on dubious legal grounds, devastating entire teams focused on major public health problems like tobacco control and occupational health. Altogether 25 percent of HHS’s workforce was dismissed. Since then a minority of the fired employees have been reinstated in the face of political pressure—but the depth and capriciousness of these chaotic cuts is without precedent. Disease surveillance, outbreak investigation, vaccine uptake, violence prevention, infection control, food safety, and opioid overdose prevention will likely suffer.

Meanwhile the nation’s biomedical research enterprise—in large part conducted by publicly financed scientists employed at universities—has been facing a sustained attack. NIH research grants that address important but now illicit health issues—like HIV/AIDS, racial health inequities, vaccine hesitancy, and LGBTQ health—have been wiped out in recent months. Not all of the cuts stem from specific bêtes noires: the administration has broadly decimated funding by canceling more than $1.8 billion in existing NIH grants in less than a month and a half (although some have been temporarily reinstated by court orders), reducing the issuance of new grant awards by 28 percent, and attempting to slash the “overhead” payments that cover universities’ costs for space and utilities via a now-stayed order that would have reduced grants from multiple federal agencies, including the NIH. This is on top of the funding blockades that the administration has imposed on many elite universities to bring them to heel—including all of the Ivies except Dartmouth and Yale.

The three fronts of this assault—on tax-funded medical coverage, public health, and medical research—have overlapping aims. The campaign to slash Medicaid—relied on by the poor since its establishment in 1965—follows a long neoliberal tradition of prescribing austerity for the working class and largesse for the rich. Trump and his allies seem to view public health, for its part, as waste that can be excised (DOGE-style) to fund tax cuts, as a source of regulatory excess that constrains profit-making, and as a locus of “woke” ideology and inconvenient facts. The assault on medical research is driven by similar concerns, with the added benefit of dominating rival centers of power like universities and the professions.

Yet such economic and ideological motivations do not explain the full measure of the administration’s agenda. It rests, too, on a Dark Ages disdain for science, part and parcel of Trump’s claim to be the arbiter of facts and truth. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the notorious antivaccine advocate appointed by Trump to lead HHS, who has previously engaged in AIDS denialism and spread conspiracy theories about chemtrails and 5G—touted cod liver oil to treat the measles epidemic that ripped through Texas and has since spread to other states. Casey Means, Trump’s most recent appointee for surgeon general, a position that requires “specialized training or significant experience in public health programs,” dropped out of her residency training to embrace a career in “functional medicine,” starting a business venture marketing supplements and other wellness products; recently she gave credence to a discredited link between vaccines and autism. And Trump’s choice to head the CMS, the former heart surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz, was condemned in 2015 by his colleagues at Columbia University for expressing “disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine” on his TV program, where he also promoted the privatized Medicare plans he now regulates.

These shock troops of pseudoscience have already done harm. On June 9, in an extraordinary move, RFK Jr. cited flimsy conflict-of-interest charges (such as their prior participation in industry-funded research) to dismiss the entire panel of scientific experts who constitute the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which helps establish vaccine schedules for both adults and children. Many of the replacement appointees seem distinguished mainly by their distrust of vaccines and their apparent willingness to further undermine vaccine uptake among the American public. The new committee members include Robert Malone, a scientist who rocketed to fame during the Covid-19 pandemic by circulating misinformation on right-wing media; James Pagano, an obscure emergency room doctor whose thin Internet footprint includes an Islamophobic tweet and a blog post in which he expresses skepticsm of climate change; and Vicky Pebsworth, a nurse with a public health policy Ph.D. who is also the volunteer director of research for an anti-vaccine organization.

It might be tempting to respond to this war on health by calling for nothing more than a return to the status quo ante. That would be a mistake. For one thing, propagandists for RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement have drawn some of their strength by denouncing a shadowy health establishment, including powerful drug firms that are rightly criticized for abusive pricing practices. Sympathy for MAHA also stems from legitimate concerns about corporations’ malign effects on air, water, food, and drug safety—even if those concerns are voiced by bad-faith actors working to dismantle the very regulatory programs that protect us from such threats, like the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, which, if judged by deaths averted, are perhaps the most important pieces of public health legislation in US history.

More fundamentally, undue commercial influence, grave regulatory failings, and underfunding all afflicted the public health system long before Trump. Our medical research infrastructure likewise had preexisting flaws: it should not only be reestablished but also funded more sustainably and efficiently, and its products made available to all rather than monetized by industry. Similarly, Medicaid and other public health care programs must be fiercely protected; at the same time, they too need reform to address their many shortcomings, including inefficiencies born of privatization and fragmentation.

Admittedly, few if any of these reforms seem attainable in the near future, now that the federal government is busy dismantling what benefits the system did provide. But we still need a positive vision of how to improve the country’s health system, both to prepare for whenever the window for political change reopens and to help galvanize that shift now. We must resist Trump’s agenda today, even as we prepare to rebuild something better tomorrow.

2.

The first theater of Trump’s war on health—dismantling or hobbling federal public health agencies—is already inflicting harms that will accumulate over time as existing programs, environmental regulations, and agencies wither. Among the agencies decimated by the April 1 cuts at HHS was the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, responsible for addressing lead poisoning, asthma control, radiation exposure, natural disasters, and other environmental hazards. In April, when Milwaukee requested the CDC’s help to investigate unsafe lead levels in its schools, it was rebuffed: there was literally no one to send.

That division was abruptly restored last month, when HHS reinstated nearly 20 percent of the employees fired on April 1, but other teams have been less fortunate. Some two thirds of the staff of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health were cut, including the team responsible for issuing national guidelines on contraceptives for women with serious medical conditions. The CDC’s Injury Center and its Division of Violence Prevention, which monitor and help prevent firearm violence and other injuries, were also greatly reduced in April. Most of the staff at the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) were fired, notwithstanding tobacco’s unequaled contributions to chronic disease—ostensibly RFK Jr.’s chief concern. One of the OSH’s former heads described the attack as “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century.”

Alex Wroblewski/AFP

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifying about the Department of Health and Human Services’s budget before a Senate subcommittee, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2025

Meanwhile the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)—a scientific agency established in 1970 during an era when Americans were regularly injured, poisoned, or killed on the job—was almost totally destroyed; 90 percent of its workforce was eliminated overnight. “Without warning, our research and ongoing studies were halted. We have not been allowed back to finish experiments, complete analyses, or collect data for publication,” a fired NIOSH worker recounted in Scientific American. The cut was so abrupt that some staffers were forced to euthanize their lab animals. A NIOSH program that investigates firefighter deaths was gutted. The destruction of another program has already put workers’ health at risk: in April the Mine Safety and Health Administration, citing the NIOSH “restructuring” and shortfalls in monitoring and protective equipment, delayed implementing a federal regulation meant to protect coal miners from deadly silica dust. In the face of a lawsuit and Congressional pressure, roughly a third of the fired NIOSH employees have been rehired, but the agency remains a shadow of its former self.

Health surveillance programs critical for assessing and addressing potential dangers are also under threat. Since 1971 the National Survey of Drug Use and Health has provided critical data on substance use; the team that runs it was eliminated in April. Workers responsible for the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (which collects data on pregnancy care and complications), the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (which tracks deaths and injuries), and AtlasPlus (a portal providing data on HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases) were also fired. The fates of these surveys are unclear. And the Agency for Health Research Quality, which conducts a survey that is the main source of data on Americans’ health care use and costs—data that we have used in many studies—is being dismantled.

Meanwhile “the FDA as we’ve known it is finished,” its former commissioner wrote in early April, after about a fifth of its workforce was laid off. Taking little heed of RFK Jr.’s anti-pharma rhetoric, the new commissioner, Marty Makary, has already vowed to speed up the approval of new drugs—which would, in practice, mean loosening the agency’s already lax approval standards. Such statements have, according to The Wall Street Journal, sent “a bullish signal to biotech.” The exception—for obvious reasons—is vaccines. They may, in contrast, face novel obstacles, including from RFK Jr.’s ACIP panel, which is now starting to re-review vaccines that have long been approved.

The administration is taking apart all this health infrastructure even as it embarks on an unprecedented assault on our environmental protections, as Jonathan Mingle has described in these pages. On March 12 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced what it called the “biggest deregulatory action in US history,” including thirty-one measures that will degrade air and water quality and endanger population health nationwide. For its part, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” will pull the rug out from under clean energy production, pushing the nation toward greater fossil fuel consumption and pollution emissions.

Much remains uncertain about what will survive the April bloodletting at HHS: just last week a federal court ruled the mass firings there illegal, with unclear immediate implications. Yet it already seems evident that public health agencies across the federal government—which may have saved more lives than all the country’s doctors and hospitals combined, and which were underfunded even before Trump took office—will never be the same. And even darker clouds are on the horizon: Trump’s budget proposal for the 2026 financial year calls for a $32 billion cut to HHS, about a quarter of its current budget, excluding the Medicare and Medicaid payments it administers. If the administration gets its way, the CDC’s budget will be slashed by more than half, the NIH’s by 40 percent, and the EPA’s, too, by more than half.

*

This funding squeeze is without historical parallel. Yet it also bears stressing that public health agencies have long been underfunded and neglected. Unlike medical care—which almost everyone periodically encounters when they go to a doctor or an emergency room—the equally essential work of public health is often invisible. Americans’ life expectancy soared by more than twenty years in the first half of the twentieth century, mainly owing to public health measures like safe drinking water, rather than to improvements in medical care. In more recent decades public health measures, like those that decreased air pollution and smoking, have been responsible for about half of life expectancy gains.

Despite these achievements, public health has long been the neglected stepchild of the US health system. It has received only a meager portion of the country’s total spending on health, including medical services and drugs. Public health activities accounted for only 3.1 percent of total health expenditures in 2024—$467 of the $15,264 spent per person on health care that year.1 That figure reflects the short-term bump in public health spending precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic; funding was set to recede even before the Trump blitzkrieg. By 2032 public health’s share of total health spending is projected to fall to 2.4 percent—the lowest proportion since the early 1980s.

A graph comparing total spending on public health initiatives to total health spending since 1929. Data on health spending from before 1960 comes from the Compendium of National Health Expenditures Data; from 1960 onward it derives from historical (1960–2023) or projected (2024–2033) National Health Expenditures Accounts. Per capita figures were calculated using population data from the US Census; dollar amounts are inflation-adjusted using the historical CPI-U from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

In other words, today’s austerity is both unprecedented and an acceleration of a longer-term boom-and-bust cycle in public health funding. Interest and resources surge in response to crises and then fade, leaving us vulnerable to the next ones. Faltering federal public health spending along with the Reagan administration’s cuts to medical safety net programs in the early 1980s left the nation ill-prepared for the AIDS epidemic and resurgent tuberculosis. As we entered the Covid-19 pandemic, public health had been starved for years: over the course of the 2010s the CDC’s budget was reduced by 10 percent, adjusted for inflation, and in May 2018 the first Trump administration eliminated the White House’s pandemic preparedness office.

Similar dynamics have played out at state and local levels. Between 2008 and 2016 state and local public health agencies shed 50,000 staff positions. These agencies carry out much of the day-to-day work of public health, conducting disease surveillance and outbreak investigations in their communities, monitoring hazards like lead and fentanyl, educating the public about health risks, regulating and credentialing medical providers, inspecting restaurants, running state laboratories that provide tests unavailable in the commercial sector, procuring and managing supplies like vaccines, and more.

The problem is not just inadequate funding but tenuous, fragmented, and grant-dependent revenue streams. As the Institute of Medicine—today called the National Academy of Medicine—declared more than a decade ago, “the US public health financing structure is broken.” While doctors and hospitals bill for their efforts (and can reasonably trust that someone will pay), funding for most public health agencies is precarious. Today state and local health department agencies depend on CDC grants for about half their budgets. (The Trump administration has sought to withhold $11 billion in such federal support, although that move faces resistance in the courts.) This funding gets allocated largely through time-limited federal grants for which state and local health agency staff need to apply—a process that further strains their ever-expanding workloads. Many such grants, meanwhile, can only be spent on specific programs or diseases. And there is no guarantee that money goes to the communities that need it most.

Merely restoring public health funding as it existed before Trump, then, is not enough. When the Republican onslaught abates, grant-based funding for core public health activities should be replaced by bolstered, stable, and permanent funding streams, as public health experts have long advocated, to ensure that these agencies can deliver the full spectrum of public health services. Federal public health agencies, including the CDC and NIOSH, should not just be reestablished but expanded: addressing growing health threats like climate change and bird flu will require nothing less than ramping up the federal public health infrastructure. A companion agenda is necessary to both restore and advance biomedical research.

3.

“New impetus must be given to [scientific] research . . . [which] can come promptly only from the Government,” wrote Vannevar Bush, FDR’s director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in a landmark 1945 report that set the course for the postwar American scientific achievement. Bush called for a federal “National Research Foundation” that would generously fund scientific research projects at nonprofit institutes and universities and train the next generation of scientists through scholarships and fellowships.

Two research bodies realized that vision: the NIH—which predated the war—and a new institution called the National Science Foundation (NSF). Noncommercial health research soared in the postwar decades, rising from $67 million (in 2024 dollars) in 1940 to nearly $17 billion by the late 1960s. Growth slowed in the late 1960s and 1970s but rose sharply again thereafter until the mid-2000s.

A graph showing the increase in spending on health research since 1929. Data from before 1960 is from the Compendium of National Health Expenditures Data; from 1960 onward, it derives from the 2023 National Health Expenditures Accounts. Figures are inflation-adjusted using the historical CPI-U from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This investment had monumental effects. The US became a global leader in biomedical research, with the NIH funding the basic science that underlies much of the inestimable therapeutic advances of the postwar era. In recent decades NIH science helped drive the discovery of cures for hepatitis C, life-saving treatments for HIV, pivotal new cancer therapies, the basic science underlying GLP-1 agonists (such as Ozempic), and the Covid-19 vaccines, to name only a few examples. NIH funding contributed to every new drug that was approved in the country between 2010 and 2016.

With the Trump Administration hacking away at the NIH and NSF, it makes sense to emphasize such achievements. But they shouldn’t obscure the many defects in the system. Since the mid-2000s federal funding for research has become more erratic and unstable, driven by shifting political winds. Rapid expansions of research funding have been followed by sudden contractions—another boom-and-bust cycle that has sometimes left expensive laboratory space empty and highly trained individuals unable to find employment as scientists in the US.

Funding has also too often prioritized the development of expensive new therapeutic commodities, like drugs and devices, over more studies of potential social and public health interventions, such as reducing salt in the food supply to mitigate the hundreds of thousands of hypertension-related deaths annually, or implementing housing-first programs for homeless substance users. Moreover, new therapeutics that emerge from public research typically become the property of private companies: since the passage of the 1979 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed companies to patent taxpayer-financed discoveries, the monetary rewards of publicly financed biomedical research accrue largely to drug firms. Those firms pay little or nothing for the “intellectual property” developed on the NIH’s dime, but charge plenty for the products they derive from it. (Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine is a prime example of this profiteering.)

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

A researcher at the Centers for Disease Control isolating Salmonella from a specimen, 1963

Alternative models could allow the public to retain ownership of the discoveries they help fund. The NIH itself could, if allowed, sponsor the final steps—most notably clinical trials—needed to turn basic research into products, rather than almost always ceding that task to drug firms, along with the profits those products generate. The resulting drugs could then be left unpatented, allowing low-cost generics to enter the market as soon as they gained FDA approval, as we and others have previously proposed. That would save patients billions. The government—which foots the bill for 59 percent of prescription drug purchases—would stand to save even more.

The FDA similarly needs reform. It has come to depend too heavily on drug firms for funding, and accommodates their interests too readily. Since 1992, when George H.W. Bush signed the Prescription Drug User Fee Act into law, drug firms have paid the FDA in exchange for faster reviews. Those payments now account for 75 percent of the agency’s drug division budget. RFK Jr. has criticized user fees—but Trump’s budget proposal, tellingly, would leave them undisturbed even while cutting the FDA’s public funding.

The result is that drug firms have partially captured the regulatory process, as evidenced by the approval of too many drugs with weak evidence of efficacy. (The FDA’s 2021 approval of Aduhelm, an ineffective and probably dangerous Alzheimer’s drug, was a particularly egregious example.) In recent decades “accelerated approval” pathways have also proliferated, allowing drugs to be approved on the basis of weaker standards of evidence.

Makary’s FDA looks set to accelerate this trend. “Companies aligned with US national priorities,” he has announced, will receive “National Priority Vouchers” that would shorten review times to a mere one or two months. Makary has already rolled out an AI platform across the FDA, telling employees (in an e-mail obtained by STAT) that they could use it to “expedite clinical protocol review and reduce the overall time to complete scientific review.” (Like other chatbots, STAT found, the tool produces output rife with errors.) The reality is that the FDA already has shorter review times than do comparable agencies in most other countries, and evidence suggests that rushed reviews lead to the approval of more unsafe drugs. Rebuilding the FDA should involve both making all its funding fully public and enforcing more robust safety and efficacy standards.

*

The fact that many scientists whose grants have been terminated find themselves in desperate straits points to another problem in the current method of research funding. Increasingly the salaries of university scientists have been funded by “soft money” support in the form of (mostly federal) grants, rather than being paid directly by universities. To continue working, they need to fundraise.

This status quo, as the economist Paula Stephan argued in a 2015 article, departs notably from Vannevar Bush’s vision.2 Initially grants only covered faculty members’ summer salaries, when the academic year was not in session; trainees were supported through dedicated fellowships. In the following decades, however, universities pushed to use research grants to cover the salaries of scientists and trainees year-round. By 1960 the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee warned about the implications of this trend. In a passage Stephan quotes, it called for “avoiding situations in which a professor becomes partly or wholly responsible for raising his [or her] own salary,” noting that “if federal funds should fail, a most unsatisfactory sort of ‘second-class citizenry’ is created.”

And yet today many scientists find themselves in this position—responsible for raising their entire salaries and at risk of unemployment “if federal funds should fail.” The results have been both “an unsustainable hypercompetitive system” for federal grants, as one group of scholars put it, and a grant-writing enterprise that wastes countless dollars and hours of scientists’ time—a “form of brain drain” that detracts from “curiosity-driven research,” as the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues have noted.3 This diversion of time and money means scientific roads not explored, missed opportunities for important advances, and ultimately fewer treatments for patients.

A more rational system would pay scientists salaries like other professionals. Grants would fund specialized equipment, reagents, or additional personnel needed for a particular study. Universities’ infrastructure for research might be funded by a dedicated funding stream, not by add-ons to each grant. And the fruits of scientific labor, paid for by the public, would be a public good available for the use and benefit of all.

4.

Having wreaked havoc on public health and scientific research, the Trump administration opened a third front of its assault on health: tax-funded health care coverage. The Medicaid program was passed into law during the Civil Rights era simultaneously with Medicare. Unlike Medicare—a federal program that covers virtually all elderly Americans—Medicaid was means-tested. Traditionally it also covered only certain categories of the poor—for instance, those eligible for cash welfare. It also borrowed the federalist structure of a slightly earlier program called Medical Assistance for the Aged, which—at the insistence of the conservative Southern Democrats behind it—had fallen largely under the control of state governments; under Medicaid states similarly had significant latitude in who they covered, and what they would pay for. (Many states have, for example, imposed limits on the number of prescription drugs Medicaid beneficiaries can receive.) Yet over time a series of expansions culminating in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) brought more than 70 million low-income Americans into the program; in states that implemented the ACA’s Medicaid Expansion, Medicaid is now available to all individuals with incomes below 138 percent of the poverty level.

Congressional Republicans took aim at the ACA Medicaid expansion early in Trump’s first term, but the attack faltered in the face both of divisions within the GOP ranks and of rage from the public, which contributed to Republican losses in the 2018 midterms. Now, eight years later, they have succeeded at pushing through catastrophic Medicaid cuts. Unlike in 2017, however, Republicans have not promoted their handiwork as a grand effort to “repeal Obamacare.” Instead, as the bill moved through Congress they cannily downplayed its impacts, perversely claiming that cutting some $1 trillion in Medicaid funding over a decade would somehow “protect” the program for deserving beneficiaries by shedding alleged freeloaders.

But in truth the size of the Medicaid cuts in the bill Trump signed into law are comparable in magnitude to those in the ACA repeal bill. These cuts, along with the law’s changes to Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, will result in an estimated 11.8 million Americans losing health coverage, with 5 million more becoming uninsured because Congress failed to extend Biden-era improvements to the ACA. As we recently reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Medicaid cuts alone would cause more than 1.9 million Americans to lose access to their physicians, over 1.3 million to go without needed medications, almost 400,000 to forego needed mammograms, and more than 1.2 million to accrue medical debt. All this would result in more than 16,500 medically preventable deaths each year.4 The cuts would also financially squeeze, and possibly shutter, many safety-net hospitals and clinics that rely on Medicaid revenues to stay afloat.

As with public health and medical research, these deadly cuts must be fiercely fought. But here too we must acknowledge the structural flaws that make Medicaid both vulnerable to attack and inadequate for its beneficiaries. Like much of the rest of US health care, there is indeed “waste, fraud, and abuse” in our public health insurance programs—but not the kind Republicans suggest. Over the decades both Medicare and Medicaid have been progressively privatized: today about three quarters of Medicaid beneficiaries and more than half of Medicare beneficiaries are covered by private managed-care insurers, whose overhead far exceeds those of the publicly administered programs. In a forthcoming analysis, we project that this Medicaid privatization will result in the waste of $500 billion over the coming decade. Similarly, each year taxpayers make enormous overpayments to private Medicare Advantage insurers like UnitedHealthcare, Humana, and CVS/Aetna—$84 billion this year alone, according to Congress’s official Medicare advisory commission. Those overpayments will, we estimate, add $1.4 trillion to Medicare’s costs over the next decade.

The Republicans’ cuts would do nothing about this wasteful privatization. Simply put, their bill would realize savings by throwing millions of people off Medicaid and the ACA. Indeed, in an analysis published on July 2, we estimated that it will cost nearly $5 billion for states to establish the new bureaucracy they’ll need to monitor whether nondisabled adults on Medicaid are meeting the bill’s new work requirement; much of that money will flow to corporate consultants.

Bill Tompkins/Getty Images

Protesters in New York City marching against cuts to Medicaid, December 12, 1992

Medicaid has other flaws beyond administrative inefficiency. Many doctors, and even some hospitals, refuse to accept it, shutting Medicaid patients out of care; many people who should remain eligible for coverage are disenrolled because they fail to fulfill red-tape eligibility requirements; others lose coverage because a small income bump boosts them over the eligibility threshold. The solution here is more ambitious. Single-tier national health insurance—also known as Medicare-for-All—would provide universal top-class coverage and end the medical segregation of the poor (and, inter alia, of people of color, who disproportionately depend on Medicaid). And from a political perspective, health care programs with users across the economic spectrum—like Medicare or universal systems in Europe and Canada—have proven more resilient to attacks than those relied upon only by the poorest. Perhaps the best way to rebuild Medicaid, in other words, would be to replace it with something better: a universal system.

*

It seems difficult at present to resist Trump’s regressive anti-health juggernaut, much less to envision something better for tomorrow. But the medical community, which still wields considerable power and influence, appears to be reaching a boiling point. Colleagues fear seeing their coworkers and patients deported; academic freedom is threatened; medical decision-making is constrained by political fiat and managed care restrictions; research funding has disappeared; public health protections have been eviscerated; access to vaccinations has been curtailed; and charlatanism is displacing science at the highest level. Health professionals, having watched Congress slash the public insurance programs on which their patients and institutions rely, are soon to witness the needless suffering and death that will predictably follow. All these assaults are also breeding disaffection among voters. As many polls indicate, health is perhaps Trump’s weakest suit with the general public; most Americans favor more funding for science and public health, as well as universal coverage.

We find ourselves living under a federal government unconcerned with the well-being of its people. The administration’s assault on health—coupled with Republicans’ planned surge in spending for the military and deportations—indicates that it cares far less about preserving the lives of Americans than about controlling, surveilling, and policing them. All of us ought to fight to minimize harm from these depredations. In the process, we should channel the dismay they inspire not just into restoring the nation’s health institutions as they were, but into reimagining them so that, at last, they truly serve the public good.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 2:46 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A scholar of democratic breakdown explains how we know authoritarian rule is now upon us

By Greg Sargent | July 23, 2025

https://newrepublic.com/article/198250/transcript-trump-fury-obama-unn
erves-experts-were-trouble

Trump is testing both the Republican Party but also, in an important respect, testing his underlings. If he just preposterously invents pretexts for prosecuting opponents, will his underlings go along? Well, here it sure looks like Tulsi Gabbard, one of those underlings, is very much going along. I don’t know what DOJ will do, but if we understand what Trump is doing as a test, the absurdity of the claim, the absurdity of the pretext tests whether the underlings will carry out lawless actions based on them, correct?

Enos: Yeah, that is correct. And in many ways, that’s one of the most concerning things about what is going on in this second Trump regime: the fact that he has gutted the independence of the bureaucracy. Now, one of the first checks that went away—and this, in many ways, went away during the first four years of Trump...was that his party failed to oppose him and slowly the people that did oppose him left and they fell into line. And the Republican Party became totally subservient to Donald Trump. What was still the case, though, in the first Trump administration, as it should be in a functioning democracy, is that you had an independent bureaucracy that would not carry out illegal orders. They would not do things that they have sworn an oath to the Constitution not to do, and they had civil service protections and other things that make them independent of these political persecutions. But for all the different reasons that we’ve seen unfold in the last six months, that has gone away.

And he was able to stock things like the Department of Justice—and this is very concerning when you think about it for the rule of law—with people that seem to be more loyalist than anything else. So when he puts out these orders that a person that believes in democracy would say, I will not carry out, he is testing to see if people will carry him out. This, again, is part of the problem: He’s putting these things out there and see if people will oppose them. And he’s shown a very open willingness to fire people that he considers insufficiently loyal. That increases the probability that whoever’s left after everybody has been fired, people like Tulsi Gabbard and all these other folks that we have running these places now and the people under them, will carry out orders even if they are illegal and damaging to democracy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 3:39 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Finally!

Quote:
Tulsi Refers Obama For Criminal Charges After Debunking Top 'Russia Hoax Lies'

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/tulsi-about-drop-more-evidence-aga
inst-barack-obama

THGR: Should we believe a Senate Intelligence report led by Republicans headed by Marco Rubio

No, you should never "believe" ANYTHING, you stupid fool.
You seem to think that I might believe Rubio bc he's Republican, over Pelosi bc she's Democrat?
Son, I'll give almost anyone a listen, but I listen for EVIDENCE, not accusation.
And when I find someone is hopelessly biased, I stop listening.

The Senate Intelligence Committee only works with whatever the "intelligence" agencies give them. I know, bc I wrote to Pelosi when SHE was head of the committee, just prior to the 2nd Iraq invasion. She sent me this smarmy letter saying "well, I know things that you don't know" when in reality she was just fed a load of crap about nonexistant WMD.

Documents are showing that our "intelligence" agencies (primarily the CIA) concoted an equally large load of crap about "Russian interference". Anything based on that is ... a load of crap.

Quote:
or believe comrade signyms continued denial of the truth.
As I’ve said

wrongly

Quote:
for years, she is a Polish Russian Collaborator who once again supports Putins’ agenda over America.

Yeah, sure. With your record of mistakes, why should anyone take you seriously? WHAT am I supporting? Am I advocating that Russia overthrow the USA? BE SPECIFIC, AND BE CAREFUL.

Quote:
Trump is desperate to change the subject away from Epstein.

Yep,seems to be so

Quote:
All this is going to do is remind Americans of what the report

The baseless one about Trump and Russia?
Yanno, you've got Russia on the brain, and every time you bring up something stupid like TRUMPRUSSUACOLLUSION! or QANON! you discredit your post.

Quote:
Signym, you're a fucking moron. Go back to Russia and live a life of squalor with the rest of your brethren.

When you resort to fabrication, I know you're desperate.

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 4:22 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The Senate Intelligence Committee only works with whatever the "intelligence" agencies give them. I know, bc I wrote to Pelosi when SHE was head of the committee, just prior to the 2nd Iraq invasion. She sent me this smarmy letter saying "well, I know things that you don't know" when in reality she was just fed a load of crap about nonexistant WMD.

Signym, I searched for that Pelosi letter to her constituency about Iraq.

Signym, you did NOT receive a letter supporting the Iraq War and the existence of mythical WMDs from Pelosi. (I'm postulating that because Pelosi did not loudly claim she had absolute proof there were no WMDs in Iraq, Signym turned that into meaning Pelosi wrote a letter to Signym claiming she had secret proof available only to Pelosi that there were WMDs in Iraq.)

Is it true that Nancy Pelosi opposed the Iraq War?

Yes, it is.

House Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) issued the following statement this afternoon about the new Congressional resolution authorizing military force against Iraq:

"The decision of whether to send our brave men and women in uniform to war is the most solemn and serious choice we face as Members of Congress. Before putting our young people in harm’s way, we must be certain there is no other recourse.

"Because I do not believe we have exhausted all diplomatic remedies, I cannot support the Administration’s resolution regarding the use of force in Iraq. I am also extremely concerned about the impact of such action on our war against terrorism.

"A number of my colleagues are working on an alternative that I hope I can support. An acceptable alternative would require the United States to seek a multilateral diplomatic initiative before authorizing the use of force.

"As the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, I have seen no evidence or intelligence that suggests that Iraq indeed poses an imminent threat to our nation. If the Administration has that information, they have not shared it with the Congress.

"If we invade Iraq, we will show our military power. If we can eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction without invading, we will show our strength."

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-Nancy-Pelosi-opposed-the-Iraq-Wa
r

-----------------

Pelosi calls Iraq war a ‘grotesque mistake’

Sept. 25, 2004, 10:18 AM CDT / Source: The Associated Press

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6095868

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Saturday called the war in Iraq a “grotesque mistake” that has not made the United States safer.

------------------

Nancy Pelosi, a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, communicated her views on the conflict to her constituents through various channels, including letters, press releases, and public statements.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pelosi+letter+to+her+constituency+abou
t+iraq

Here's a summary of her stance and actions regarding the Iraq War:

• Early Opposition: Pelosi consistently opposed the Iraq War from its initial stages. In 2002, she voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq, stating that unilateral use of force without exhausting diplomatic remedies would harm the war on terrorism.

• Criticism of the War's Conduct: As the war progressed, Pelosi repeatedly criticized the Bush administration's handling of the conflict, labeling it a "grotesque mistake" that diminished America's reputation and didn't make the country safer.

• Advocacy for Troop Withdrawal: Pelosi advocated for a responsible redeployment of troops from Iraq and opposed the troop surge. She argued that more troops would only endanger more Americans and stretch the military without strategic gain.

• Focus on a Political Solution: Pelosi emphasized the need for a political solution in Iraq, stating that there was no purely military solution.

• Support for Domestic Priorities: Pelosi tied war funding to domestic priorities, including veterans' benefits and addressing economic challenges, arguing that funds spent on the war were needed at home.

• Support for Withdrawal Deadlines: Pelosi supported legislation that set deadlines for troop withdrawal from Iraq.

For a detailed look at her specific communications, you might consult archives of her press releases, which often included statements and letters related to the war. For example:

• January 5, 2007: Pelosi joined other Democrats in sending a letter to President Bush, expressing concerns about a proposed troop increase in Iraq and emphasizing the need for a political solution.

• May 6, 2008: Pelosi issued a statement on the supplemental funding bill for Iraq and Afghanistan, outlining Democratic priorities for both war funding and domestic spending.

• March 19, 2013: Pelosi issued a statement on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, acknowledging the sacrifices made and expressing hope for a future of peace and stability in the region.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 5:09 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

The Senate Intelligence Committee only works with whatever the "intelligence" agencies give them. I know, bc I wrote to Pelosi when SHE was head of the committee, just prior to the 2nd Iraq invasion. She sent me this smarmy letter saying "well, I know things that you don't know" when in reality she was just fed a load of crap about nonexistant WMD.
Signym, I searched for that Pelosi letter to her constituency about Iraq.

Signym, you did NOT receive a letter supporting the Iraq War and the existence of mythical WMDs from Pelosi. (I'm postulating that because Pelosi did not loudly claim she had absolute proof there were no WMDs in Iraq, Signym turned that into meaning Pelosi wrote a letter to Signym claiming she had secret proof available only to Pelosi that there were WMDs in Iraq.)

First of all, I misspoke. It was FEINSTEIN that I wrote to. SHE was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committe.

Second, it was a RESPONSE letter, not an unsolicited letter to Californians in general or to registered California Democrats. You'll never find it online. She was responding to me, after I had urged her to vote "no" on the authorization of use of force. Yes, it was a form letter cobbled together by a staffer, but not widely available.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 5:42 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

GOOD.

Let's see this translated to policy. Reduce number of H-1B visas.

Quote:
"Bullsh*t": Vance Slams Microsoft For Firing Americans While Applying For H-1B Visas

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/bullsht-vance-slams-microsoft-firi
ng-americans-while-applying-h-1b-visas

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

"Constant monitoring of behavior, emotion, and identity breeds conformity, judgment, and fear."

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 6:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

One more reason why we voted in Trump.
“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read,” says Trump

By Robert Tait | Tue 22 Jul 2025 19.47 EDT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/22/obama-breaks-silence-t
rump

Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.

“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”

He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was seditious, that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.

“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”

Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.

“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Good.

Nail him to a fucking cross.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:02 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

First of all, I misspoke. It was FEINSTEIN that I wrote to. SHE was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committe.

Second, it was a RESPONSE letter, not an unsolicited letter to Californians in general or to registered California Democrats. You'll never find it online. She was responding to me, after I had urged her to vote "no" on the authorization of use of force. Yes, it was a form letter cobbled together by a staffer, but not widely available.

Signym, find that letter and read it again. Your memory is tricking you: UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter has stated that Feinstein in summer 2002 acknowledged to him that she knew the Bush administration had not provided any convincing intelligence to back up its claims about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Dianne_Feinstein#
Iraq

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:03 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Good.

Nail him to a fucking cross.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

Did it cross your mind that Trump is a lying sack of shit? Especially about Obama?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:04 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Lesotho makes Trump’s polo shirts. He could destroy their garment industry.

Lesotho faces one of the highest tariff threats lodged by the Trump administration. No one in the tiny African nation can figure out why.

By Majirata Latela, Ryan Lenora Brown | July 24, 2025, 3:45 p.m. ET

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2025/0724/tariffs-trump-garment
s-lesotho

Long before Donald Trump mocked Lesotho as a country “nobody has ever heard of,” and before his administration threatened a 50% tariff on its exports, some in this tiny southern African nation already knew the American president’s name for a different reason.

“Trump Golf,” read the label that workers at Precious Garments ironed into the necks of polo shirts made in the factory. “Made in Lesotho.”

Such shirts sell on TrumpStore.com for about $75, about half the monthly wage of the workers who have sewn them. Still, in one of the world’s least developed countries, those in the factory’s largely female workforce considered themselves fortunate to have jobs at all. https://www.trumpstore.com/collections/mpolos/

Now, their futures hang in the balance. On Aug. 1, new U.S. tariff rates will go into effect for dozens of countries, including Lesotho, whose economy leans heavily on clothing exports to the United States. But already, the threat of large duties is unraveling the industry here. Spooked buyers have canceled orders. Factories are slashing production. In early July, the government of Lesotho (pronounced “Le-SOO’-too”) announced a two-year “state of disaster.”

“I don’t have any plan for survival if the factory closes,” says Malehlohonolo Makhetha, a seamstress at Precious Garments, her voice cracking in frustration. “We are a small country that already lacks money, and now this.”

Unbalanced effects

Lesotho’s troubles with the U.S. began in early March, when President Trump declared to Congress that he would put an end to wasteful foreign aid spending, including “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” The audience howled with laughter.
Google map to Lesotho: https://maps.app.goo.gl/YpafdG2PLm8G9ffS8

Then, in early April, President Trump slapped the country with a 50% tariff on its exports to the U.S., the single highest rate imposed on any country in the world at the time.

That tariff – currently paused for 90 days – was intended to balance out high tariffs imposed by Lesotho on the U.S., the Trump administration claimed, as well as a vast trade surplus. But the effects were hardly felt equally.

In 2023, the U.S. sold $7.3 million in goods to Lesotho, a mountainous country of 2.3 million people and 2 million sheep tucked inside the borders of South Africa. Those products, which included dump trucks, vaccines, and used rubber tires, amounted to approximately one 4,000th of 1% percent of all U.S. exports that year.

Lesotho, on the other hand, sent some $228 million worth of goods to the U.S. – mostly clothing – totaling around 25% of all its exports.

The 50% tariff surprised many here in part because the enormous trade imbalance President Trump complains of was actually by American design. In 2000, the U.S. brought Lesotho into the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a trade agreement that allowed it to import certain goods tariff-free to the U.S.

A quiet revolution

Immediately, Lesotho’s small textile industry took off. Cavernous factories sprung up in the scruffy industrial suburbs of the capital, Maseru. Workers flocked from across the country to sew Levi’s jeans and Reebok T-shirts.

The vast majority were women. And as the garment industry ballooned into the country’s largest private employer, Lesotho became a nation of female breadwinners, a quiet gender revolution built on skinny jeans – and polo shirts.

“I love what I do,” says Ms. Makhetha, the Precious Garments seamstress. And she is proud of the life it has made possible for those she loves. Her husband earns erratically as a street vendor, so Ms. Makhetha’s monthly salary of 3,000 maloti (about $170) supports a constellation of family members, including her child, her brother-in-law’s two children, and her mother.

In recent weeks, however, she and others in the factory have been put on “short time,” meaning their hours – and wages – were slashed in half. Precious Garments, which is one of the country’s largest clothing factories, told local trade unions that it has not received any new orders since the tariff announcement in April.

Mamatseliso Thobileng, who has worked in the factory for 17 years, is blunt about what that means.

“We’re already poor,” she says. “This will only make the poor poorer.”

A domino effect

On a recent afternoon, chimneys outside Precious Garments belched black smoke, smearing the vista of mountains in the distance. Vendors just outside the gates tempted workers on their breaks with fried dough balls and grilled chicken feet.

Meanwhile, dented, wheezing minibuses idled nearby to ferry them home to the cinder-block rooms that have sprung up like weeds on the city’s fringes to house factory workers. All of these businesses exist to sop up the money coming into Lesotho through workers’ salaries, explains Thabo Qhesi, CEO of the Private Sector Foundation of Lesotho, a policy advocacy group.

“If the garment sector collapses, these other sectors collapse, too,” he says. “There will be a multiplier effect on the entire economy.”

Although there is no comprehensive data on how the garment industry has already been affected, the country has seen many orders from U.S. buyers put on hold, reduced, or canceled outright, according to Malikhabiso Majara, secretary general of the Lesotho Textile Exporters Association.

As Lesotho awaits the final announcement of its U.S. tariff rate on Aug. 1, it remains unclear to many here what the U.S. stands to gain from imposing high duties on its exports.

Ms. Makhetha has always been proud of the fact that the clothes she sews travel the world, and that they are worn by Americans. Now, she sees how fragile that connection is.

“I am only here hoping Trump changes his mind,” she says.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, July 24, 2025 7:34 PM