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“ Behind closed doors, some Republicans are irked that their leaders are not doing enough explaining: One Republican with direct knowledge of the matter told POLITICO “there’s frustration for not laying out the rationale behind Medicaid cuts.” Not to worry. Here’s Duncan Black: “ . . .    the rich want more money and they want you to die impoverished, you leeches." That should work. Short and direct. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/04/29/congress/medicaid-trump-tax-agenda-guthrie-00314759

Look, tariffs are just consumption taxes. American consumers pay for tariffs on Chinese goods, not the Chinese government, businesses or people.  Trump pretends that exporting countries pay our tariffs. If he really believed that, he’d be happy to see Amazon post how much China is paying to get their goods into our market. But when rumors surfaced that Amazon was going to do that, the Trump outrage machine kicked into high gear: “ Earlier on Tuesdsay, Punchbowl News reported   that Amazon would show tariff-related price increases on goods. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the move "a hostile and political act." Once again, the Trump Administration does what it accuses others of doing. In this case, a taxpayer-funded hostile and political attack on Amazon for transparent reporting of facts. They’re gaslighting, and they’re using your tax dollars to do it. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/white-house-blasts-amazon-for-hostile-and-politic-tariff-move-143310062.h...

As usual, Trump is doing what he accuses others of. In this case, bleating about “waste, fraud and abuse” while removing all the safeguards against waste, fraud and abuse.  “ The Trump White House this month announced   two   new   executive orders radically changing procurement procedures, especially defense procurement procedures, in ways that will unleash waste, fraud and abuse. These orders — which largely flew under the radar — will effectively wipe out spending safeguards with potential effects that are hard to overstate considering that President Trump announced he will expand the defense budget to a breathtaking $1 trillion, and that the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is no counterweight to politically driven spending.   “To summarize, the new executive orders purport not merely to change or improve regulations, but to simply eliminate most of the existing procurement rules developed through years of oversight processes and outside scrutiny. They ef...

Apparently, MAGA means empty shelves and fewer jobs: “Trump’s tariffs on goods from China have disrupted trans-Pacific supply chains. U.S. officials are alarmed by companies’ dwindling inventories of critical raw-earth metals necessary for a range of economic activity; Beijing restricted the metals this month. In the three weeks since the tariffs took effect, ocean-container bookings from China to the U.S. are down by more than 60 percent, said Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, a global shipping company. Cargo carriers that bring Asian goods to the Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s main Pacific gateway, have canceled 20 port calls next month, more than three times as many as last month, according to port data.   “The consequence will be “empty shelves in U.S. stores in a few weeks and covid-like shortages for consumers and for firms using Chinese products as intermediate goods,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist for Apollo Global Management. Fewer goods reaching American...

“On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi   hosted an inaugural meeting of a task force consisting of other members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, to discuss its mission to eradicate alleged “anti-Christian bias” within the federal government.” LOL! This is just propaganda. There is no “anti-Christian bias” in the US. In fact, there is a pro-Christian bias in the US. Christmas is a federal holiday. Good Friday is a holiday in 12 states: Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas. Neither Passover nor any other  Jewish holiday is recognized as official federal or state holidays in the United States .   Washington State officially   recognizes   the   Muslim Holidays   of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha as   state   holidays but they are not federal holidays. Christian churches, just like other faith organizations, are tax-exempt. The DoJ language identifi...

“ Donald Trump has demanded free transit for American commercial and military ships through the Panama and Suez canals, tasking his secretary of state with making progress “immediately”.   “Trump has for months been calling for the United States to take control of the Panama canal but his social media post also shifted focus on to the vital Suez route. “American ships, both military and commercial, should be allowed to travel, free of charge, through the Panama and Suez canals!” Trump posted on Saturday.   “He claimed both routes would “not exist” without the US and said he had asked his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to “immediately take care of” the situation.” The United States had nothing at all to do with the building of the Suez Canal. As for the Panama Canal,  tolls are regulated by the Panama   Canal Authority, an autonomous governing body overseeing the trade route. So is this a symptom of Trump dementia? I don’t think so, but I’m not a physician. Rather, ...

From a comment thread over at pandas thumb.org: "Throughout history, economies have been dominated by malignant narcissists (read sociopaths and psychopaths) for whom the world is never enough. They look upon each other with lust and greed and want what the others like them have. They surround themselves with weak-willed sycophants and a cowed and desperate population of half-starved, cheap labor and talent that produces only for them. They want their image everywhere; on coins, in grand portraits and statues and in great military parades celebrating their birthdays. They want everything from Faberge eggs to the most powerful nuclear weapons. They have things built for themselves, not for civilization."

The Trump USDA is promoting your right to die from Salmonella poisoning. “ The United States Department of Agriculture is withdrawing a rule proposed in August to help prevent food poisoning from poultry contaminated with salmonella.   “The Biden Administration effort, which had been in development for three years, would have required poultry companies to keep levels of salmonella bacteria   under a certain threshold and test for the presence of six strains most associated with illness. If any of those strains were found or standard levels were exceeded, the poultry couldn't be sold and would be subject to recall, the proposal had said.”   *snip*   “The USDA has estimated there are 125,000 salmonella infections from chicken and 43,000 from turkey each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year, most through food, and about 420 deaths.” But since the rule was proposed in the Biden Administra...

Add this to the list of Trump Administration retreats: “The Trump administration has restored the student visa registrations of thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who had minor — and often dismissed — legal infractions.   “The Justice Department announced the wholesale reversal in federal court Friday after weeks of intense scrutiny by courts and dozens of restraining orders issued by judges who deemed the mass termination of students from a federal database — used by universities and the federal government to track foreign students in the U.S. — as flagrantly illegal.” The damage has already been done. The goal wasn’t to deport those students, it was to deter other foreign students from matriculating and elite US universities. These students often pay full tuition, so losing future applicants harms American higher education, a big win for the Trump Administration. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/25/trump-admin-reverses-termination-foreign-student-vis...

Apparently, the latest conspiracy theory is that the measles epidemic in Texas was a bioweapon attack: “ “I’m not going to be careful by calling it a virus,” Willis said in the measles webinar. “I’m going to call it what it is, and that is a bioweapon, and my belief after interviewing these families is that this has been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living.” Setting aside the question of *who* is targeting the measles, I really don’t understand the reasoning. According to RFK Jr., good food (no processed foods, no additives, no artificial colors) is protective, making vaccines unnecessary. So how can measles be a bioweapon against a community whose virtuous lifestyle is protective?  Then there’s the question of why, if vaccines don’t work, nearly everyone who is getting the infections is *unvaccinated*? These clowns need to get their lies straight. https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2025/04/23/anti-vaxxe...

On Harvard: “ The White House (yes, technically the GSA guy and the two lawyers) sent that letter to Harvard, demanding   de facto   control of the university’s hiring, admissions and various elements of its curriculum. Harvard replied with a flat rejection ten days ago. The White House immediately responded by freezing $2.3 billion in grants to Harvard. That was on April 14th. Then, four days later (April 18th), there was that weird article in the Times   in which we learned that the White House said that the original demand letter had been sent by mistake. The White House wasn’t disowning the contents of the letter, or not exactly? They made what might best be described as a kind of low-energy and churlish demand or beg for Harvard to continue negotiating. It’s been reported that the White House made as many as three informal contacts to restart negotiations. Then, three days (April 21st) after that, Harvard sued. I noted yesterday   that a majority of the Universi...

mRNA vaccines have proven to overwhelmingly successful in blunting the COVID-19 pandemic. They are also as safe or safer than any other vaccine. So what’s up with a small group of Republicans (yes, they’re all Republicans) in the Minnesota legislature who want to criminalize mRNA vaccines? “A group of eight Republicans in the Minnesota House have introduced legislation (HF3219) that would designate certain vaccines and medical treatments as “weapons of mass destruction” and make possessing or administering them a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.   “The legislation specifically targets messenger RNA (mRNA) treatments, which include several COVID-19 vaccines. Those vaccines have saved millions of lives and are considered one of the most important medical and public health achievements of the 21st century so far.   “The bill’s language appears to have been drafted by Joseph Sansone, a Florida hypnotist and conspiracy theorist who believes that mRNA tre...

The training for an independent research career in the biomedical sciences entails a significant opportunity cost. It takes an average of about seven years from the bachelors degree to get the PhD, and then there are 2-5 years of postdoctoral training. Indeed, it's common to do two postdocs to get diversified training. Those years could have been spent working at a higher salary, but if you can go on to get a more highly compensated position as a tenure-track professor in academia or a group leader in industry, you can make up the opportunity cost. With DOGE now attempting to gut federal biomedical research grant funding and Trump’s assaults on research universities, the career paths that thousands of trained scientists in the US have invested in are threatened. Of course, when you possess specialized expertise, you can shop your skills to other countries that place a higher value on research than the Trump Administration. It looks like that’s already starting to happen: “ Research...

Elon Musk, as czar of DOGE, has been making deep cuts in federal programs that serve civilians. But what about that budgetary elephant in the room, the military.  There must surely be waste, fraud and abuse in military spending that Musk’s tech bros can ferret out, right? “ After  misleading headlines  suggested that its topline would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed — finding savings in some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in — yes! — other military programs without   any   actual reductions  in the department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7th, Trump announced   that “we’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military . . . $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like i...

The reanimated corpse of Reagan’s Star Wars program walks among us again. As a national security program, it was stupid then and it’s stupid now. It’s back because billionaires have figured out how to repurpose it to shovel more of your tax dollars into their pockets. “ It now emerges that Musk’s SpaceX, Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Ardruil have combined forces to build what Trump is calling ‘Golden Dome’. Needless to say, since Musk basically controls federal contracting he’s essentially giving the contract to himself. ” *snip* “ Musk and Thiel propose making this network of hundreds of surveillance and attack satellites into a subscription service that the Musk/Thiel/Luckey consortium would own and the Pentagon would subscribe to. Not only is this crazy and absurd but it goes without saying that in no normal time would anyone at the Pentagon be okay with the US not owning the hardware at the center of national defense. We’ve seen how this goes with Starlink, where Musk routin...

  RFK Jr has gotten a lot of media coverage posing as a transformative advocate for child health. And yet on a genuine issue of child health . . . crickets. “ M ere hours after birth, most newborns are tested for two things: whether they have signs of hearing loss and whether they have any of a range of rare conditions that could severely impact their health and their lives.   “If they test positive for either, they qualify for a number of interventions that can dramatically improve their prospects over their lifetime.   “But both tests could soon undergo dramatic changes because of drastic cutbacks at federal health agencies that public-health advocates say imperil both programs. These cutbacks could mean that certain states will not test for and respond to conditions that currently set services into motion in every state.”   *snip* “ Newborn hearing screenings are a true public-health success story. Hospitals did not start screening children for hearing loss at bir...

You may have read that the Trump so-called “antisemitism taskforce” recently sent a letter to Harvard effectively demanding management control over the University. Unlike any other university, Harvard publicly refused to comply. Now, the taskforce says the letter was sent by mistake. Sorta. “ The university announced its intentions Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official.   “The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter told the New York Times. The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.   “It is unclear what promp...

The Trump Administration is weaponizing tax-exempt status to punish its political enemies and enforce viewpoint discrimination. It’s illegal, but can it work? “It seems unlikely that these moves would hold up in court. And the organizations are highly likely to sue. But this gets at a critical dimension of these stories. Getting into what might be a multi-year legal case with the federal government which can pour any amount of money into litigation it wants is at least disruptive, expensive and burdensome to a nonprofit. It can easily be fatal. A longtime TPM Reader noted today that the Big Law agreements play a big role here too. Who will represent these groups? As my correspondent reminded me, for every agreementing firm there are countless more firms declining pro bono opportunities and even turning down paid work.    “So will there be lawsuits? Effective ones? I’m fairly sure the answer is yes. But it definitely plays into the equation.    “This is another exampl...

Not just Musk. Now Theil has his hands in your pants.  “ One of the most important stories in some time   came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.   “The overall picture is a standard one: Come in, take over the data and financial archite...

Candidate Trump said if reelected he would end the war in Ukraine before his inauguration because he is respected by Ukraine and Russia’s leaders.   “That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,” the Republican said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. If I win, when I’m president-elect and what I’ll do is I’ll speak to one, I’ll speak to the other, I’ll get them together.”   “I know Zelenskyy very well and I know Putin very well. I have a good relationship and they respect your president, O.K., they respect me, they don’t respect Biden.” So he’s now been president for three months, so the war in Ukraine is over, right? “US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that the US may “move on” from trying to secure a Russia-Ukraine peace deal if there is no progress in the coming days, after months of efforts have failed to bring an end to the fighting.” So they don’t respect Trump. Trump failed, and h...

Here’s Trump’s  senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka: “According to Gorka, who was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, those who “love America” include Trump, his administration and his supporters because they want to “protect” the U.S. Gorka then went on to describe those who “hate America” as anyone who opposes Trump and his administration’s actions by claiming they are “on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”    “Gorka, a former Newsmax host, then dialed up the autocratic tone of his argument to an unsettling level.    “And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka said of critics.   “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”  So dissent is a thought crime. Where have I heard that before? https://www.newsbreak.com/share/3967346481854-trump-adviser-has-bone-chilling-threat-fo...

  RFK Jr claims he will discover the “cause” of autism by September 2025. He will fail, for the simple reason that we already know that autism is a genetic disease.   Poor RFK Jr. His vaccine-autism connection has been a fail, so he’s grasping desperately for something that won’t force him to admit he’s either a dupe or a liar.  “Genetic markers alone are not going to dictate your destiny. You need an environmental toxin,” he said.   “Kennedy said his study is going to look into food additives, mold, water, medicines and ultrasounds as potential causes [of autism].” Autism, like cleft palate, hypertension, schizophrenia and a number of other diseases, is a multifactorial disease with multiple genetic inputs. There’s zero evidence that autism is *caused* by environmental factors or could be prevented by eliminating environmental factors. In fact,  studies suggest that approximately 80% of the risk for autism can be attributed to inherited genes. It is not a ...

Here’s Trump’s  senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka: “According to Gorka, who was born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, those who “love America” include Trump, his administration and his supporters because they want to “protect” the U.S. Gorka then went on to describe those who “hate America” as anyone who opposes Trump and his administration’s actions by claiming they are “on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”    “Gorka, a former Newsmax host, then dialed up the autocratic tone of his argument to an unsettling level.    “And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka said of critics.   “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”  So dissent is a thought crime. Where have I heard that before? https://www.newsbreak.com/share/3967346481854-trump-adviser-has-bone-chilling-threat-fo...

It’s illegal in every state to manipulate odometers to record mileage other than the actual mileage on the car. “ . . .  Tesla’s warranties on vehicles are capped by mileage and are supposed to “cover repairs and replacements necessary to correct defects” in parts that it manufactures or supplies. “However, Tesla allegedly ”knowingly overstates the distances traveled in Tesla vehicles” by manipulating odometers, allowing the company to dodge repair responsibilities tied to warranties.” “Tesla Inc. employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage travelled by Tesla vehicles,” reads the lawsuit. “In so doing, Defendants can, and do, accelerate the rate of depreciation of the value of Tesla vehicles and also the expiration of Tesla vehicle warranties to reduce or avoid responsibility for contractually required repairs as well as increase the purchase of its ex...

The alleged connection between vaccines and autism maps to a since-retracted British publication that faked data purporting to show that vaccines containing the methylmercury-based preservative thimerosal were associated with autism in children. Thimerosal was discontinued in US childhood vaccines in 2001. Since then, the anti-vaxxers have noted that autism diagnoses have increased, which would seem to falsify the vaccine-autism mechanism. But anti-vaxxers, led by RFK Jr, can’t admit that they were fooled. Since they can’t blame thimerosal, they just blame the vaccines themselves. The unqualified Trump-appointed HHS secretary RFK Jr, unable to admit his mistakes, has doubled down. “The CDC report undercuts claims by Kennedy and Trump, instead attributing the recent increase to better screening. The report used 2022 data to examine cohorts of 4-year-old and 8-year-old children in 16 communities. It focused on the prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds, who are more likely to have been d...

When the Trump Administration announced plans to arrest and deport all undocumented people, it seemed implausible. Where would the personnel and resources come from to round up, transport, house and feed over ten million men, women and children who are distributed all across the country? How would the enormous expense of such an operation be reconciled with the need to find trillions of dollars in savings to give tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations? The optics would be a public relations disaster.   Looks like the Trump Administration is scaling back. Trump has announced that undocumented farm and hospitality workers would be overlooked for now. And the Administration has opted for drama over numbers. A couple hundred Venezuelans were deported in chains to an El Salvadorian prison camp. Several documented immigrant scholars were abducted on American streets or in American airports. The goal here appears to be to replace the missing muscle and resources with fear, to get undocu...

The letter to Harvard that accompanied the Trump Administration funding freeze shows once again that whatever the right accuses others of is what they’re doing. In this case, the Administration demands affirmative action hires of MAGA political commissars under the guise of fighting antisemitism and promoting diversity.  “ Among other things, it requires the university to hire a cadre of White House-approved commissars to ensure that MAGA conservatives are equally represented, not only at the university level but at each individual department, teaching and research “unit” — both in hiring and admissions. The White House demands that every department and unit be “audited” by the outside commissar group for “viewpoint diversity.” Each department or unit found not to have sufficient MAGA representation (defined as “viewpoint diversity”) “must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty” to “provide viewpoint diversity.” Same language but with respect to admissions. Any depart...

I grew up in Tennessee, the land of the Scopes trial. The molar concentration of Southern Baptists was high there (and still is). My senior year in high school, the Biology II teacher began the section on evolution by asking whether anyone had issues with teaching evolution science. Nobody stated an objection, so we continued with the science.  There are all sorts of fables in the Bible that fly in the face of science. Of course, the bible was written, not as a record of history but as a set of religious stories to promote a certain strain of monotheism. As I learned a long time ago, science teaches us how, religion teaches us why. As Stephen J. Gould put it, separate magisteria. Same with the Noachian Flood story. As history, it’s risible. “Over the last few years in my evolution class, I bring up some of the claims made about the biological accuracy of the Noah’s Ark narrative. The students were fascinated to learn that some think that Noah brought dinosaurs on the Ark; naturally...

•  Measles cases in the U.S. topped 700 cases—the highest number since 2019—with ongoing outbreaks in Texas, New Mexico, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma; • Pertussis (whooping cough) infections are skyrocketing, with over 7,000 cases so far this year amid declining vaccination rates; • HHS Secretary RFK Jr falsely claimed that measles vaccine protection “wanes very quickly.” Raise your hand if you saw this coming in 2024.

  During his first term, Trump railed about energy-efficient plumbing. He claimed he had to flush his toilet 10-15 times and was forced to stand in the shower five times as long. I have no idea what he’s talking about.  Sounds like what he needs is a plumber.  In the event, the Biden Administration mandated resource-conserving appliances. The result?   “ . . . the standards have been widely embraced, dramatically cutting energy and water consumption, reducing emissions and providing plenty of attractive consumer choices. In 2023,  Consumer Reports  found that “even the simplest and least expensive showerheads can provide a satisfying shower.” Dishwashers   and clothes washers clean better while using less than half as much water and energy as they once did. The transition to LED light bulbs, nearly complete, is estimated to have cut energy bills by $3 billion a year and eliminated the need for about 30 large power plants.    In January, ...